The forgotten scrimmage

This is the way I remember it. For reasons that will become obvious I might have missed quite a few things. Feel free to comment or correct me. There might even be film of this somewhere. I'm not sure I'd want to watch it.

When the Gothenburg Giants split up after the 1990 season I was one of the guys who followed Coach Voge to form the Alelyckan Sundevils. I'll not bother with the details of that here, suffice to say that in February 1991 there were maybe a dozen players that had played 20 snaps or more of Football in their lives. So as our first game, we took on the Swedish National Team.

It was the first national team ever picked for Sweden and they were having a mini-camp in Gothenburg, ahead of their game against Holland. The way I recall it, there was only one local player on that team, young inside linebacker Olle Larsson, who was still playing with the Giants. I had nurtured some hopes of making the squad as a cornerback or free safety but I didn't perform very well during the trials in Halmstad. When Coach announced that we were playing the national team, I remember asking him what the hell for, we had had maybe ten practises by that time and it was obvious we were going to get slaughtered. He replied something along the lines of how all the opponents in the second division would seem easy by comparison. Well, he got that part right.

It was also decided that it wouldn't be an actual game, instead something called a scrimmage, where their offense would run ten plays against our defense and vice versa. Twice. The ball would be spotted in the same spot regardless of the result of the previous play. So there's no actual score from this game, no note in the history books.

The game would start at Valhalla sometime late in the evening. It was dark and also colder than a welldiggers ass, minus 18 degrees centigrade if I remember correctly. I arrived about an hour ahead of kickoff, prepared to play Free Safety, when I was approached by Coach who said our quarterback, Micke Henriksson, had decided not to come. And that I would play quarterback in his place. I had never taken a snap from center in my life. I hadn't even played a single down on the offensive side of the ball, ever.

– Uh, I don't know the playbook.

– That's fine, we don't have one. You can just draw the plays up in the huddle.

It quickly became clear that if I didn't play, there would be no game. So I said OK.

I don't remember what play I called in the first huddle. Probably a fullback dive. It didn't matter. The second the center, Pertti, had snapped the ball, I was lying on my back, my face full of linebacker. The Alelyckan offensive line, assigned to protect my skinny ass (I was 6 feet 1, 160 pounds) had two experienced players, the other three hadn't played much, if anything. And now they were up against the best the country had to offer where everyone was competing for a starting position in the real game. The second play I managed to turn my body 180 degrees before I got hit by three linemen in the back. So this time I ended up face down on the turf. And when I say “turf” I really mean a half-inch thick frozen plastic carpet on top of concrete.

And on it went. After five, maybe six (I hilariously even called a pass play in there somewhere) plays which all ended with me at the bottom of a four-guy pile I remember there was a timeout in which it was explained that if I got injured, the scrimmage would be completely canceled. The Swedish defense was urged to just pull me down instead of going for full-speed collisions. That call, and the restraint from the defense that followed, indubitably saved me from a lengthy hospital visit. So, thanks guys.

I honestly don't remember much more about those first ten plays, except that we never, not once, crossed the line of scrimmage. We never got the ball out of the backfield.

So when I got helped off by Pertti the center we were talking about practicing snaps and getting the line to play a lot tighter. But as soon as I got to the sidelines I was told to get back in and play safety. So I ran back in and just stood at the back. I remember I couldn't get my body to move or my head to focus on what the offense was doing. I don't think I had a single tackle. I had just spent every single atom of energy on avoiding to get hit and now I was supposed to look for opportunities for full-speed collisions. That didn't compute. Since we had most of our experienced guys on defense, and the Swedish offense wasn't very good, I think we did pretty well, but I might remember incorrectly. Then there was a short half-time break were only fools and rookies took off their helmets. I was neither, so I didn't have to tear my ears off to get the helmet back on. That's what playing football in winter means. You keep your helmet on outside.

And then there I was, back in the huddle, drawing plays I just made up on the turf. We said we wanted to get a first down, that the o-line needed to play really tight and that we would go hard. First play was a run where the halfback (Håkan D) got taught the hard way not to run upright. It's one of the harder hits I ever saw. But he got up afterwards and stayed in the game.

Since we had almost exclusively run the ball I decided it was time to try a play-action. Well, we had tried to run the ball. We still hadn't crossed the line of scrimmage. Now, a play-action play is a pass play that looks exactly like a run play. You get the defense to come forward and disregard your receivers which leaves them open to receive a pass and hey, presto, you got a touchdown. Or so the theory goes. The quarterback needs to fake handing off the ball to a running back and then hit his receiver with a forward pass.

So I did. I faked the handoff which bought me a second to spot my tight end, Mario, on some kind of Go-route, and I zipped (ha ha, probably not) the ball into his hands before I got buried. He got hit hard but managed to hold on to it. We had just gotten our first first down against the national team. Of course, had it been a real game, we would have had about a hundred negative yards at this time. But we didn't care. We celebrated as if we'd won a Bowl game in the huddle.

We ran two more run plays with predictable results. Nothing there. I decided that I hadn't been hit for a while so I called another play-action play, where I would do a bootleg and run with the ball myself. I still don't understand how I got the courage to run this. It involved leaving the defensive end behind me unblocked and hoping that I could sell the fake handoff so well that he would leave me alone. If he spotted the ball he had a free shot at my back.

Man, I still remember the look in his eyes when I ran past him. I had completely sold the fake, and almost stopped after the hand-off, with the ball held casually against my thigh in a manner that would make any coach cry. But it made the ball impossible to see if you were, say, a defensive end right behind me. At any moment I was expected to get hit hard in the back. And then I just ran around him as fast as I could. Suddenly there was space, a lot of space, in front of me and I got past the cornerback and I could for the first time that night see the end zone.

One of the safeties got me before I could get very far. It was enough for a first down, maybe 12 yards. Maybe more. After that, they hit me every play. We didn't get a yard. I refused to play safety when it was over. I know that probably no one else even remembers this night and that I had some decent games afterward, but I still think getting those two first downs under those circumstances is the best damn thing I ever did as a football player.