Jacob is my first grandson.  I've gotten four more since Jacob, and three granddaughters, too.  About 4 years went by before the second came along, and during those years my wife and I got very attached to Jacob.  We visited him (and his parents) frequently when we lived in separate cities, we babysat, we took him on trips, he gave us our grandparent names, "Poppie" and "Georgie."  He was home-schooled for his first two grades, so we were proud to see that he was advanced academically when he entered an institutional setting and has remained an honor student throughout the rest of elementary school, middle school and high school.  He was inducted into the National Honor Society as a junior.

But, he has inherited his parents' aptitude for sports and their fiercely competitive character.  We watched with pride his feats as a second baseman on the 2005 Alabama State IA Champion baseball team (P.S.:  They beat Shoals Christian from Muscle Shoals down in Montgomery), and were overjoyed to hear that he was named American Christian Academy's Mr. Basketball 2005-06 as a sophomore--as much for his spirit and leadership as for his athletic prowess.  Jacob is a very special person in his grandparents' lives.  Although the roster says he's 5' 10" and 155 lbs., he's really more like 145 lbs., so, to our horror, we heard that he was going to go out for football this year.  You see, his closest friends have played sports together since the earliest little leagues, and he would never NOT be involved in the sports they were in--and now that included football.

Surprisingly, he did unusually well.  He won a starting role as a wide receiver by the time the season opened.  He vied with the senior football stars on his team for pass receptions and scoring.  He has never dropped a pass thrown to him.  In their first 5 games, Jacob was the photo illustration in the newspaper articles written about the ACA games three times.  We clipped all these accolades out of the paper and laminated them for his mom's scrapbook.  We bought ACA tee shirts and vowed to be in the stands for home games and away.

In Pickins County, they must feed the boys Vigoro.  When we got settled into the visitors' stands in Reform, Alabama, this past Friday night, we looked out onto the field to see the home team, our opponent, and we thought we were in Bryant-Denny Stadium looking at a college team.  Number 84 and Number 73 have to be 6' 4" or 6' 5" and over 250 lbs--No. 73 must have been pushing 300 lbs.  No one on the team had "a belly," and the short ones were incredibly stocky.

The first time Jacob touched the ball was early in the second quarter when ACA was in the red zone about to score.  With 6 yards to go, he received a pass in the left flat and dashed toward the goal--1 yard.  The first contact was a loose tackle around his knees and he struggled to get loose.  That's when both No. 84 and No. 73 hit him from the other side.  He didn't get up.  It was a clean tackle.  Those goliaths did what they were supposed to do.  There was nothing "illegal" or "unnecessary" about their tackle.  The kid, Jacob, was about to score, and it was their duty to do exactly what they did--stop him.  Unfortunately, when you fix the lower leg by pressure on one side and then apply about a thousand pounds of pressure on the upper leg from the opposite side, something's got to give.  In this case it was the anterior cruciate ligament of the left knee.

I held my breath, hoping that he would roll over and hop up, but the trainers for Alabama Sports Medicine were already dashing out onto the field, followed by Jacob's father, a Sports Medicine physician who is the team physician for ACA as well as for the University of Alabama's intercollegiate athletic teams.  I can't honestly say that I prayed, but I knew that Georgia, a long-term prayer warrior, was standing beside me praying.  I remember saying to myself "I wish. . . ." and "I hope . . . . ."

The scenario sickened both Georgia and me, and when Jacob's mom came back up into the stands and said, "It's his ACL," Georgia suddenly could not stand to be in that place.

Well, I've had some time to think about this over the weekend.  At first I questioned the wisdom of a coach using a small player in the face of such behemoths on the other team.  That didn't make much sense, though, since others on ACA's team are as small as Jacob.  Then, I say, the coach shouldn't have had the quarterback pass to him at all.  Again, that didn't make sense because if you don't plan to use a player who has been a reliable receiver and has never lost yardage before, what is he doing in the game at all?  Then, I think, why didn't they set up the play to go to a receiver standing on the goal line or in the end zone where grinding out the 5-6 yards wouldn't have put the smaller player at risk for such an injury?  And, of course, the answer is the play was designed the way it was played out for a reason, and the area of the goal line was where the linebackers came from when they tackled the receiver.  We've even asked, "Why don't they have some system (like in boxing and wrestling) that segregates the giants from the mortals--i.e., heavyweights play heavyweights and middle weights play middleweights.  Of course, that one is simple.  It's just not done that way, and, besides, each team is scouring the student body for their own giants or is out recruiting them to come to their own school district.  And when they do get them, there is no way they will tell them to "take it easy on the little guys!"

So, what is the answer?  I don't know that there is an answer.  We can't protect our children (or grandchildren) from everything bad that can happen to them.  It's tragic enough that we have to screen for weapons at schools of learning, and, being realistic, we know that even such screening won't prevent all violence to our kids.  In competitive sports there are risks of injury.  It is good that some schools and parents are providing equipment and athletic gear that will provide some protection, especially against those really tragic injuries (spinal cord and brain injury), but some injuries just can't be engineered out of the sport.  The strength training that will help protect joints survive trauma is good up to a point, but it, too, adds some risks such as unsupervised overdoing of the training or, worse, providing incentive to take potentially harmful drugs illegally.  I personally think that parental intervention and denying their child the opportunity to go out for certain sports will be almost as harmful to the child's development as would be injury.

The answer has got to have something to do with the kid understanding realistically what the risks of playing a sport really are.  The feeling of invincibility is very powerful in teens, and the likelihood of injury is, to them, a very abstract concept that they will not personalize.  But they have got to understand that, if not from their parents, from their coach--who is probably a higher authority than parents at that point in their career.  Tryouts would be the best time for the coaches to insert this wisdom into their young would-be charges.  Peers or even sports idols might also be persuasive, and, maybe, instructive in getting the physically marginal players to think hard about what they need to be willing to do to succeed and to minimize their risks of injury.

So, what has this experience taught me, and what good can come out of the situation?  First of all, Jake's going to be fine.  Unlike me and my torn ACL that can't be operated on because of the arthritis that also involves my left knee, his injury is in a healthy knee, and Dr. Andrews is going to make it good as new on Tuesday.  Instead of football practice, he will be going to physical therapy, but he's going to come out of this with a good knee.  Maybe the experience will get him to focus on that other talent he has (academics), and maybe not--at least to the exclusion of all sports.  We fully expect to see him out on the baseball diamond next spring and possibly the basketball court his senior year.  We're not hoping for that but we'll wait and see.  He's learning to weigh his options and make informed decisions.

And, I guess that is what I can learn.  My little grandson is growing up.  The lessons he is learning may be painful, but I can give him credit for the intelligence he was born with and let him continue to learn and to grow.  I can learn to let him learn and grow--with the support and advice he gets from his parents--and from his grandfather only if he asks for it.  The pain experienced by his grandmother and me in the stands when he was hurt was excruciating, but we need to be confident that he is learning and growing.

QUESTION

What do you think, former football Bulldogs?  Some of you have experience playing varsity high school football at Jacob's size.  This roster is from one of the game programs that Joyce Horton Johnson sent me.  These weights are for the Junior year, same as Jacob, the 1954 season.  Jim Holland was 138 pounds. Buck Locke, Ronald Gene Pace and Jimmy Todd were 140 pounds each.  Tillman Gargis, Bob Proctor, Blackhawk Martin, Wallace Driskell were all at or below the weight that they published in the ACA roster for Jacob.  How did you do it without injury?  What advice do you have for today's athletes? What advice do you have for today's grandfathers of athletes?