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A Number and a Dream By Zach Province
n football, hearing your number called by teammates, coaches, fans and even opponents is endearing. Sure, they all know your name, but there is just something special about hearing “Nice throw, 18”. Maybe it’s because it’s a little reminder that you’re a part of something bigger than yourself: a team of men you get to call brothers on the gridiron, all fighting towards one goal. Perhaps it’s what that number means to you personally. I wear 18 for every team on which I play because of the man that helped me fall in love with football and all of its chess-like strategies: Peyton Manning. I was maybe seven or eight, watching SportsCenter, when a couple of the anchors started mocking his audible-at-the-line style and commenting about how he just wasn’t good enough to “win the big one.” Looking back on it now, it seems ridiculous to consider the great Peyton Manning to be an “underdog,” but that’s exactly what he appeared to be to little ole me.
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It’s the reason I instantly bonded with him. I, too, had always felt like the underdog. I grew up in a family of athletes. My dad was a star football player and thrower for track and field, collecting many medals in his time, my mom grew up with a slew of brothers with whom she’d play backyard football and eventually become quite the basketball star, and my two brothers, close in age, are athletically gifted. We were constantly outside, playing a sport of some kind. My dad taught us the proper way to throw a spiral, and I was hooked. I would lay on the living room floor, right below the high point of the ceiling, and throw that ball up over and over, trying to get as close as possible to touching the ceiling with a perfect spiral. When the rest of the family was busy, I would come up with ways to play football solo. I would either throw the ball onto the roof and have it roll back to me, find a couple of park benches a good distance apart and throw back and forth attempting to hit them, or, much to the amusement of my neighbors, I’m sure, I would play an entire game in the front yard by myself that included snapping the ball, throwing, and tackling myself.
