Down Set Hike

I was talking to my dad about how happy I was that my son made it through football season with only a cut that required five stitches. Last year was a broken arm. Years before he's had painful sprains, tendon tears, etc. It's a brutal sport but my son loves playing it -- he loves all sports.

My dad is a football coach and played the sport himself. As I was telling him about how happy I was about the stitches under son's chin, he started talking about how he played before there were face masks. They started adding them to helmets when Dad was a freshman at Michigan State. The first day he wore one, another player hit him just right, ripped off the face mask and broke his nose -- a nose that had been broken a number of times before, because of playing without a face mask. As Dad sat in the hospital with blood from end to end, the coach stopped by and asked how he was doing. Dad said he was fine. The coach said, "Okay, then we'll see you tomorrow at practice."

You can imagine, but by the end of the conversation I was even happier about the stitches as well as the addition of face masks.