Five things I learned from Thanksgiving family football

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Thanksgiving for me is about the Big Fs – family, football and family football. The first two loves are rather obvious at this time of year. The last one, perhaps, is less so.

It’s natural to reflect on the love of family at Thanksgiving. If you’re lucky, many of those you love are gathered around you, for home is, as Robert Frost said, “the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Thanksgiving gatherings across America hopefully are more convivial than that, more “want to” than “have to”. Still, it’s nice to know there’s a haven where you’re always welcome. That haven is home, the place where unconditional love radiates like warmth from a hearth. I’m blessed this year to spend the holiday with three generations of my family.

It’s also a time to appreciate football, particularly the NFL, for great games are scheduled for Thanksgiving Day. The first game – Bears versus Lions – harkens back to matchups from my parents’ generation, and will bring joy to my Chicagoan mom and dad.

The second one – Redskins versus Cowboys – makes me a child again, if only for an afternoon. Growing up around Washington, the Dallas game was the one that mattered most. And the last game  - Falcons versus Saints - is for my kids who, as Carolina Panthers fans, wish somehow both Atlanta and New Orleans could lose.

NFL matchups aside, there’s another reason I love football. It’s the quintessential American sport, the game of inches that’s won in the trenches. I believe it’s written in the DNA of our revolutionary spirit to love a sport that celebrates fierce goal-line stands rather than sublime offside traps. Watching football on television is great, but the game’s pull is never stronger than when you’re playing it.

This is why Thanksgiving finds me reflecting on the family football games of my youth, the ones we played to work up an appetite before the holiday feast. It’s in those backyard battles that I learned life lessons that still guide me today.

One thing to note about these family football games – they were tackle. This may seem strange now, but there was a certain wisdom to it. Learning to fall – taking the little nicks – prepares you for life’s bigger nicks which surely come. Tackle football teaches grit, and reminds that nothing in life is worth doing that doesn’t take a little out of you.

Life often puts you on your back, but as Vince Lombardi said, “it’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up.” Remembering that in hard times makes all the difference in the world.

First lesson: If you’re not struggling, you’re not growing. The good life is one of constant growth – in knowledge, in virtue, in love – and that comes from facing, and learning from, adversity.

Then there was scoring touchdowns, which of course was a good thing. In these games when your team got scored on, it was your side rather than your opponent who walked to the other end of the field to receive kickoff. The rule was known as “Losers Walk”. It might sound uncaring today, but there was logic behind it, for the arrangement was intrinsically fair.

Why make the scoring team walk? Every parent knows you reward what you want to see more of, and punish what you want to see less of, from your children. As in parenting, so in life. The opposite of a participation trophy mindset, it didn’t blur the line between winning and losing. It sharpened it.

Second lesson: There’s no shame in losing when you’ve given all you have but, as U.S. Navy SEALs like to say, it pays to be a winner.

A quick word about winning. It beats losing, but there’s a right way to do it. My dad was raised in the “act like you’ve been there before” touchdown celebration era, so he didn’t much care to see us kids spike the football, even in backyard games. As a coach himself when a younger man, he knew all too well that one player scores but everyone contributes when a play goes well. A small point to impress upon us kids, perhaps, but dad knew that little things led to big things. Respect your teammates, your opponent and the game itself – no individual showboating.

Third lesson: Success is sweeter than failure, but better to lose the right way than win the wrong way.

Having no chain crew to measure yardage, the rule was two pass completions for a first down. There’s nothing flashy about a two-yard catch that earns you a fresh set of downs. The unsexy route never makes anyone’s highlight reel, but sometimes – indeed, often– life is simply moving the chains, just showing up and doing the work. Most of us do our paid labors without fanfare, day after day and year after year, not for glory of self but love of others.

That is what gives work – any work – dignity, not what you do, but for whom you do it. That’s the coolest part of all: The higher the purpose, the more dignified the work. Sure, there are occasional one-handed catches, but life is mostly what happens in the trenches, what you do when nobody is watching.

Fourth lesson: Virtue, not virtue-signaling, changes the world for the better.

More neighborhood kids played in the earlier game we put on, but the traditional family matchup right before the feast was my older sister and I versus my younger brother and my dad. This pitted the biggest and the smallest against my sister and me. Mom filmed the gridiron action.

Dad ran the same play one time every year. He drew it up to be like that one hole in miniature golf that was designed for a hole-in-one every time. This was the charity hole where all you have to do is putt it hard enough and gravity does the rest. Dad’s “hole-in-one” play was the power sweep, where he’d hand off the football to my younger brother Jack.

All Jack had to do was follow dad’s blocking down the sideline and he’d score. But here’s the funny thing. Year after year, Jack couldn’t wait. He’d run out ahead of his lead blocker – where dad couldn’t protect him - and together my sister and I would drop him like a sack of hammers.

The trick in life is knowing when to follow your blockers and when to run to daylight. Often it pays to play it safe, and maybe Jack would have been better off following the convoy all the way into the end zone. Still, I can’t help think my kid brother has been successful in life – an abiding Faith, a loving family and a wonderful career – not in spite of that restlessness, but because of it.

Sure, he took some licks early on for his choices. But even as a kid Jack knew sometimes you have to get out in the flat and chase what you’re after, and nobody can run that for you. What he’s achieved in life he’d surely have missed had he always stayed behind his blockers.

Fifth lesson: Everyone knows the Ben Franklin “nothing ventured, nothing gained” adage, but I prefer Lewis Grizzard: “if you ain’t the lead dog, the scenery never changes.”

A final Thanksgiving thought, inspired by all this talk of football’s blocking and protection schemes. We live in a dangerous world, our corner of it made substantially less so by the brave men and women who serve in the U.S. Armed Forces. These protectors, many deployed far away from their own families this Thanksgiving, never take a down off as they guard our homeland. I am thankful for the selfless sacrifice and warrior spirit of these American patriots, this Thanksgiving Day and every day.

May Thanksgiving find you with a heart full of gratitude for the gifts in your life. And may your holiday be full of all the Big Fs – family, football and family football!