Letter from AFM

When I played high school football, which was well before some of our younger readers were born, the Saturday afternoon games (we had no lights) were played in front of perhaps 500 fans. We were a large suburban school in a pretty big market, but this was, after all, upstate New York – never considered a hotbed of high school football. We were lucky to get our game score included in the local paper. We never lifted weights, which is obvious from the old yearbook photos. As I recall, we won about half of our games. None of us went on to play college ball. At the time, our relative lack of success and notoriety really didn’t matter to us. We played the game because we loved being football players. While we didn’t particularly appreciate getting only small rations of water during “double sessions” in the oppressive August heat, just about everything else that