I'd like to find my first football coach and KILL the bastard!!

Every morning for the past ten years or so, the same thought hits me as stumble out of bed. Yes...literally stumble.
"I'd like to find my first football coach and KILL the bastard!!"
At fifteen years old, Coach Leonard Shealy spotted me playing football in the park and pulled me off to the sidelines in the middle of a pickup game.
"Hoss, you've got all the tools to be great football player. Come to practice next Monday and we'll get you started."
He "got me started" allright. He got me started breaking or dislocating damn near every appendage on my body. I went on to play football all through high school, almost in college till I totally blew out BOTH knees. Like a moron, a couple of years later when I thought my knees were completely healed, I played two more years on a minor league pro football team. A taxi squad for the Washington Redskins for very little money. Bad move...more injuries.
The truth is that I played football for the same reason I learned to play guitar and sing....CHICKS!
Later on I began to wish I hadn't taken up football OR women. They'll both eventually kill you if you ain't real careful! I suppose you could say that I've taken my share of hard knocks from both but at least the women didn't leave me stumbling around on surgically repaired knees, bad ankles and arthritis. Broke yes but not BROKEN.
It's funny though, I still dream almost nightly of scoring touchdowns, making tackles and feeling like a Greek god. The truly amazing thing is that, even when I look at pictures of myself back then or read the old newspaper clippings, there is almost no sense that that was even ME! Memories wane but pain SURVIVES.
On that subject...
One of my old football buddies, Fred L. lives a block away from my Dad. I haven't seen him in over twenty five years. My Dad met him at a neighborhood meeing and Fred told my father a story about me. My Dad recounted the story to me one day, months after the meeting.
Fred claimed that I had scored two field goals to win a game, drank a twelve pack of beer afterwards, caught a drunk's sucker punch in mid air just inches before he broke Fred's nose which put an end to a fight before it could get started AND went home with the best looking babe in town....all in one night.
My Dad said, "Fred said you were really something else."
I told my Dad that the winning field goals really did happen but I ended up in the emergency room before the game was over with a hyper extended right knee after being clipped by a ruthless s.o.b. after getting off a HUGE punt which ended any hope of a comeback by the opposing team. Oh yeah....I missed a crucial tackle late in the fourth quarter which would have made my two field goals an afterthought. My Dad said, "Yep, that's what I remeber too."
That's it. No glory. No guts. No super human feats. Just a blown out knee, an old weathered newspaper clipping and a years of aches and pains.
Football SUCKS.....Lord help me...I can't wait until the Gamecocks start playing again in the fall!!!
I'm a damned hypocrit...a pathetic, limping hypocrit.