MY SHORT FOOTBALL CAREER
Nobody is tall in my family. I was 5-feet-2 in ninth grade. But I played on the football team! I rode the bench; the coach wouldn’t put me in. He thought I’d get killed. He had me drill with a similar five-foot guy, who also never saw action.
My parents wanted me to play tennis. Figures.
I suited up for the Benedictine game. The head coach wanted “a lot of presence,” as he put it, so he brought the entire 9th-through-12th-grade team to the game– frosh (including me), JV, and varsity. This was 2002, when Benedictine had Ray Williams, who went on to win the “Mr. Football” award for best high school player in Ohio. He signed with West Virginia University.

Ray Williams
Our coach warned us all year about Williams. About 80 of us got on the school bus for Benedictine. We were a presence. And then in the very first play, Williams ran with it and we knew we were toast.
Williams wound up an accessory to a murder, so he never played at West Virginia. He played some at Toledo, but I think he screwed that up, too. And then he played a bit at Shaw University in North Carolina. I wonder what happened to him. There’s a documentary about him, Mr. Football, but it apparently has never played anywhere.
All I know is Ray Williams was an absolute beast at Benedictine. I watched him absolutely crush for 40 carries a night. Everyone knew who was getting the ball, every snap, but no one could stop the kid.
For the record, I’m now 5-feet-9, in my thirties and playing tennis.
(fiction)
1 comment
Frankly, you don’t look so hot a guy in his ‘30s….
You probably would have been killed, and then eventually someone else would have to be the CEO of Yiddishe Cup….
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