“Playing Sockball”

Out To Pastoral

by John Idol

HILLSBOROUGH, NC—(Weekly Hubris)—6/28/10—If you go looking for the meaning of sockball in Webster’s, you won’t find the word. It’s a nonce word created by my brothers and me circa 1948 to describe a sport, patterned after football, and played with a stuffed sock in the front yard of our pastoral home in Deep Gap, North Carolina, a place in the Blue Ridge where money went for essentials and not for sporting gear.

I played my first football game, in a phys-ed class at Appalachian High School in Boone, and learned its basics. I liked the game so much that I coaxed my brothers Jim and Bill and two neighborhood friends, Brook and Kent Greer,_,into giving it a try as well. But how to play it without a ball?

Quickly, we solved our problem when we raided Mom’s ragbag and found old socks and T-shirts. One of Dad’s socks became the skin, and smaller socks and a T-shirt or two the innards. The result was something like a lumpy sausage, but it served. Gripping and throwing it presented a challenge, for it was too soft for a firm grip and wobbly in flight, Yet it had its advantage: it didn’t bounce off a receiver’s hand or chest. This advantage was offset by the ease of interception, for it could be snared by one hand.

In a running play, it worked far better than a football, since it was almost fumble-proof. Hand-offs went paw to paw with little chance of fumbling. A one-finger grasp worked as well as a five-finger one. The major drawback came when we tried to kick it, innards spreading in ugly lumps across the yard after a stiff blow.

Our team comprised three players to a side: a center, an end, and a back on offense; and a lineman and two safeties on defense. Calls in the offensive huddle were simple: Back to end: “Run down-field and then cut to the sideline. I’ll hit you on your cut.” Back to center: “As soon as you hike the ball, block one of the rushers and then head down-field. I’ll toss the ball to you.”

The strategy on defense keyed on having a lineman to rush the passer and two safeties cover receivers. Not many passes ever reached receivers because the flight of the lumpy sausage practically guaranteed interceptions.

The sockball was in lame duck mode in flight and could be plucked out of the air by the single finger of a safety.

The lack of an air attack turned our games into defensive struggles. With few blockers to protect him, a running back could be quickly and easily tagged. Still, a swivel-hipped move sometimes resulted in a six-pointer. For obvious reasons, there were no PAT’s.

Our gridiron, the front yard of our house, measured roughly 40 by 40 feet: one sideline formed by our house, the other by two apple trees. The end-zone on the lower side was a five-foot strip of grass lying before a barbed-wire fence; on the upper, a row of white pines serving as a windbreak for our home. A player brushing against the barbed-wire risked a serious cut. Somehow, we managed to avoid everything but a minor scratch.

The opposite end-zone presented a different problem. Crashing into pine limbs often left sticky smears of resin on our hands and clothing, but the thing bothering us most was the knack of pine limbs for enveloping our sockball and embracing it tightly among needles. The pines made All-American interceptors! We soon saw that the chance of making a pass work on that side of the field was a 15-foot space left free of pines in Dad’s buffer. It was to this open space that most of the passes went.

Despite all the challenges of playing on a small field with a stuffed sock, we experienced the joy of victory and the gloom of defeat. Our game seemed a bit more authentic when, during hog-killing time, we took over a pig’s bladder, blew it up, and used it as a ball. It proved an unworthy substitute for the real thing and even inferior to our stuffed sock. It would not spiral down-field, insisting, instead, on floating or cracking under pressure. Pigskin it wasn’t, nor was it meant to be, for, at best, it had only a few hours to live before it popped.

Obviously something better had to be found if our football games were to move away from sockball and bladderball. The answer lay, of course, in getting our hands on a real football. How to get the money when we had no allowances and were expected to use all of our meager earnings to help pay for shoes and clothing?

Brother Jim found an answer. He took on a job as a kind of handyman for a neighbor and secretly started a football fund. Weeks of work and much self-denial left him with the four dollars he’d need to buy a regulation football.

He waited until Mom planned one of her infrequent trips to Boone and asked to go along. He found and purchased a ball and returned home to retire the sockball. As much as we had enjoyed playing with it, we weren’t sorry to see it return to Mom’s ragbag.

For now we could play with the real thing. But not on the front-yard gridiron. We needed a bigger field, and found it in the space between the apple trees in our front yard and US Highway 421. The length was fine, just at 100 yards, but the width, only 20 yards, forced us to play a crimped game. On the lower side of the field, spread alongside the driveway, stood a row of Mom’s prized dahlias. On the upper side, a patch of corn ranged along the entire length of the field.

Doing damage to either dahlias or corn was a cause for a major penalty, a spanking or extra work.

Sideline passes disappeared from our game plans, and going deep was the solution. Now, with no barbed-wire to worry about and no pine trees to intercept passes, we could play full-out, beefing up our running game to augment the aerial assault. Happy as we were to be playing with a regulation ball, we still looked back to sockball as the game where we learned the fundamentals of football and the need and importance of teamwork.

We now look with wonder at all the heavy gear that kids of this prosperous time have on hand when they play. Wouldn’t sockball, we wonder, teach them to appreciate how fun doesn’t have to die when economic depression inevitably comes along?