Gridiron Dad.(THE STRAGGLER)(football gear)

THE kit presented some puzzles. There were seven white plastic pads of several different shapes. From vague recollections of seeing football players on TV I knew that the knees and thighs are padded. Exploring the interior of the pants, I found suggestive pockets sewn in. Some careful matching of pad shapes to pocket shapes got the pants fixed up, two pads down each leg. There were still three pads to account for, though: one a sort of tall trapezoid with two slots in it, and a pair of bigger pads with a squat gingerbread-man shape.

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The lad had already donned crotch protector and girdle. The protector was familiar to me, being pretty much identical to the item known to cricketers as the "box." Danny had pulled on the girdle over it, not noticing that the girdle, too, had interior pockets for pads. So there was the eleven-year-old in protector and girdle, Dad holding a pair of padded-up pants, and three more pads scattered homeless on the floor. All I could think of was to have him put the pants on, then jam the remaining pads down between boy and pants wherever seemed appropriate. This didn't really work, the pants being extraordinarily tight. I got the trapezoid in to protect his tail bone, and left the gingerbread men for future research.

The helmet was straightforward, except that a rubberish mouthpiece had first to be fitted to the boy's teeth, then attached to the helmet. The fitting involved some operations with boiling water (to soften it) and cold water (to harden it). The method of attachment to the helmet was not explained by the mouthpiece's packaging, but I figured it out at last. A final checklist--shoulder pads, chin guard, Dad-size T-shirt (team shirts with printed names were not yet ready), cleats, water bottle--and we were off to my son's first football practice.

Football is a mysterious thing to those of us not raised in these United States. I have attended just one football game in my life. It was a college game, and furthermore was in the South, where, if you try out the cliche about college ball being a religion down there, people tell you, without smiling, that it is much more serious than that. What a spectacle that game was! The colors; the chants; the erotic prancing of the cheerleaders; the masked and padded players, their size grotesquely exaggerated, like Polynesian warriors; the guttural war cries; the fenced-off areas of the stands with strange and distinctive populations--one contained nothing but young men in blazers. I felt like an anthropologist watching the Ghost Dance of the Sioux. If a foreigner should tell you that a nation as young as this one has had no time to develop a unique culture, take him to a college football game.

And now my own son was to be schooled in these mysteries! Beginning, I might hope, with the mysteries of the surplus pads. I tackled--I mean, I asked--the team coach about this. There are pockets inside the girdle, he explained. Ah. But why were the pants so tight? "Why, to hold the pads in, of course." Right. And then the coach, which is to say Coach, was off to deal with his charges.

Deal with them he did. I must say, the ferocity of the coaches took me ...