Four Touchdowns in a Single Game

We’re at Polk High School on a typical Thursday night in November of 1966.

There’s a strong wind gusting from the southeast, but there are no clouds in the sky. Tonight’s Chicago All-City Championship game is about to kick off between Polk High and Andrew Johnson High.

After a rough first half of the game, Polk High is down by three touchdowns. It really looks like the game is over and there’s nothing left to try, so the coach is just about ready to give up. One eager eighteen-year old gridiron warrior is about to step up and take the mantle of leading his team to the comeback of a century.

This is Al Bundy, the fullback who had had an excellent year so far, but what happens next will put the rest of the year to shame by comparison.

After taking charge by calling his own plays, Bundy scores a touchdown, now bringing the game within two scores—still a huge margin given the limited time, but there seems to be momentum building in the crowd. After Andrew Johnson turns the ball over, Bundy is handed the ball once again and drives up the field, scoring one more touchdown. Suddenly, this is a one-touchdown game.

Polk High does its defensive job once again, and Bundy once again gets his hands on the ball, still leading from the front (and still calling his own plays). Now instead of wallowing in sorrow, the head coach is cheering him on. So is the entire stadium now, as Bundy scores his third touchdown of the game, tying the score!

With the entire team feeling this momentum, and with the score now tied, Polk High once again does an admirable job on defense. Polk gets the ball back on the 25 yard line, with just a few seconds left in the game. If it’s tied, it’ll go into overtime.

Bundy gets his hands on the ball, and fakes to the left, then to the right. He jukes and jives past the legendary “Spare Tire” Dixon, and then runs 75 yards up the field, scoring a record-setting four touchdowns in a single game.

If you grew up during the 80s, you may have heard this story a few times. If not, you might consider streaming a few episodes of Married… with Children some time.

The show is a product of its time, full of Daisy-Dukes wearing Christina Applegate and misogyny—but there is also some very clever social commentary going on. The show itself parodies everything it simultaneously glorifies, and I think it helped to shape my adolescent mind in at least one notable way.

I’ve written about this lesson already, albeit in a different context:

Like most Gen Xers entering puberty during the mid- to late-80s, I watched a lot of Married… with Children. This irreverent show presented a cautionary tale about a man named Al Bundy (incidentally, played by a real-life BJJ black belt) who simply can’t stop reliving his glory days.

He even tells a story in several different episodes about a high school football memory where Al saved the day, becoming the hero, and scoring four touchdowns in a single game.

Al doesn’t evolve from the person he was back in high school, and he doesn’t learn any lessons from studying his past. That’s because he remembers his past as he wants to.

I really, really didn’t want to become Al Bundy when I grew up. I resolved never to get lost in my own past, and instead to focus primarily on the present and future.

This served me well for most of my life, or at least I was pretty sure it did, anyway. I told stories about my life and experiences, but I was always thinking about what to do next.

Then, it hit me: I am the lens through which I view the world, and my lens is shaped through my own experiences. Those experiences aren’t the whole story—just my own perception of (and memory of) events. That’s why I write so much personal and biographical stuff these days—not to relive my glory days, but to study whether there was actually any real glory in some of my previous actions.

Scoring four touchdowns in a single game is awesome—way better than any of my own personal high school sports accomplishments, but that doesn’t mean that I never looked back with some degree of pride and nostalgia anyway. Still, there’s a healthy amount of this, and it’s certainly a lot smaller than what Bundy exhibits on the show.

I think the thing I want to say to you today is: hang in there. I’m not always going to talk about myself, but I have to do this for a while, and with some frequency. I’ll still write about all the things I’m curious about, too—etymology, physics, punk, and of course the 1980s and 1990s.

So much of these topics seem to weave into my personal life, and I seem to be able to weave my life into these posts/pieces/articles. Thanks for coming to my me talk today.