Seattle at Denver - Funny Things Happen
Written by twhigham, Wednesday December 09 2009
Funny things happen when temperatures drop below freezing.
Water freezes at 32-degrees Fahrenheit.
Rubber, one of the most versatile shock absorbent materials in the world, loses its elasticity. It doesn’t bounce, it skips like a rock. Ask anyone who’s played hockey and taken a shot to the chompers. Frozen rubber hurts.
An athletic field can become as hard as an ice skating rink. What would normally be soft dirt and spongy grass becomes frozen tundra covered with the tips of a thousand forks that pierce and abrade unprotected skin. Frozen turf doesn’t give. It gives back.
In humans, capillaries near the surface of the epidermal layer contract, redirecting blood flow towards the core of the body to protect vital organs. In medical terms, this is called vasoconstriction, and in extremely cold temperatures excessive vasoconstriction will lead to pale skin, flushed cheeks, and numbness. The valleys of the human fingerprint can split open from trauma. Water within cells can freeze, causing frostbite.
On October 9, 2009, twenty-eight young women stepped onto the field at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park in Denver to play professional tackle football, each wearing nothing but a thin 2-piece uniform, helmet, and shoulder pads. With the wind chill, it was 12-degrees Fahrenheit. Snow fell during the match.
Katie Ryckman is built like a race car; a strong engine mounted on a lightweight chassis. A wife and a mother, you’d never think that this slender woman with model-good looks would suit up in pads and a helmet and take shots on the football field and score touchdowns. She does, and she does it well.
That night, in temperatures well below freezing, she scored three of her team’s four touchdowns, and dropped what would’ve been another scoring pass at the end of the game because she had lost most of the feeling in her hands. In the end, it didn’t matter. Her team won anyway and she was named MVP by the league.
It would be easy to give her another award to add to the MVP title the LFL bestowed on her. But I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m going to focus on another player who best epitomized the conditions the women were playing in that night, all of whom showed the spirit of sport.
My nominee wasn’t the fastest player on her team, nor was she the strongest or most skilled. She didn’t score a touchdown. She didn’t sack the quarterback. She didn’t make a game-saving tackle.
It’s easy to quit when you think you’re not a difference-maker; that your impact on the score will be minimal. It’s even easier to quit when you’re playing in bra and briefs and you’ve lost all feeling on the surface of your body and your knees hurt and your muscles ache and your team is 0-and-2 coming in to a game against one of the strongest opponents in the league.
But sometimes you have to push. Sometimes the most important thing comes not from what you do, but from what you enable others to do. And the only way to get to that point is to push and keep pushing. When you’re playing in abysmal conditions in a uniform that’s not suitable for the climate, you have to look within yourself to find the strength you need to get the job done. Sport demands it.
In freezing temperatures, rubber loses its elasticity; including the rubber elastic that holds uniforms in place. The bending over that comes with the game of football caused her uniform to shift. She played nearly the entire game with her briefs scrunched up into her bottom like a sumo wrestler’s loincloth; her cheeks decidedly pink from the chill of the snow-kissed air. She didn’t care. She was playing football. She was anchoring the line so that her quarterback would be protected; so that her running back, Shannon Martin, the Denver Dream’s star, could move the ball down the field and keep her team’s hopes for victory alive. She was doing, to enable someone else to do more.
I’m not going to name names because in the light of day, sitting in a comfortable chair looking at photographs they found on the Internet, some people might laugh at the silly girl running around the field with her underwear up her crack. They wouldn’t understand the conditions under which she was playing that night, or even why she would want to play at all. She deserves her modesty.
To that anonymous player on the Denver Dream, this article is for you. Welcome to the All-Whigham team.
Long live sport.
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I have to say it takes a lot to play sports in all weathers and these athletes of the LFL have got that and then some. Long live the LFL !!