I once played in a Bowl Game. Yes, this is true. I played for Hofstra College in The Cement Bowl in West Chester Pennsylvania.
You probably don’t believe me—now that I’m old and falling apart—that I ever put on cleats, pads and helmet and risked life and limb for the glory of my school. And you would be right not to believe it; I didn’t play on the football team, I played in the Hofstra College marching band. Second trombone was my position and I played it for four years, from my freshman through my senior year. I joined the marching band because I liked playing the trombone and because it was the only way to get out of ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Program), which was compulsory for all males attending the college.
Over those four years, wearing a blue blazer with a gold Hofstra coat of arms (whatever the hell that was) and white buck shoes, we marched up and down many fields of battle, forming a flying “H” for Hofstra and playing the old Hofstra fight song (whatever the hell that was.) On Thanksgiving we marched down (or up) the field in the form of a turkey (I think I was in the beak—or maybe I was part of the stuffing).
When we weren’t marching, we sat in the stands at field level and played all sorts of rousing songs to urge the team on. Most of us were also in the concert band (an extremely good concert band) and the whole marching band thing was a more or less a joke to us, but—it did get us out of the brainless ROTC program. And that seemed ever more important as Vietnam grew and grew into the ultimate psychotic football game…
On Dec. 8th, nineteen-sixty-two, we boarded a bus for West Chester Pennsylvania to play in The Cement Bowl. I’m gonna take a wild guess and say it was called The Cement Bowl because the biggest industry and employer in West Chester was the cement business—I know it wasn’t orange groves.
The sky was a heavy cement gray, a dismal prospect entirely.
It was freezing that day—couldn’t have more than twenty degrees. Some band members hadn’t shown up at all and most of the rest complained bitterly as soon as we exited the bus and discovered we had to play the entire game sitting on bare metal benches… Since it was so incredibly cold and there was snow coming down, there was hardly anybody in the stands.
Maybe football wasn’t such a big deal in this town, or maybe people were home watching another college game on TV…
The worst part of this fiasco was squeezing music out of anything made of metal. The keys on trumpets started to freeze and the slides on the trombones barely moved. Usually, we wiped the slide with oil and sprayed water on it from time to time to keep it sliding, but on that day the water instantly froze so none of this worked. The whole brass section wound up playing within a range of about two notes…
The band director, who was also the leader of the concert band, took great pride in his bands and his response to our complaints (including our lips having a tendency to freeze stuck to the mouthpieces of the brass instruments) was that we were a bunch of “lily-livered pansies”… I think at least part of his description was prescient—at least for me; I have turned out to be more lily-livered than lion-hearted in my life. As for being a pansy—well, I see myself more as a tulip…
Eventually, the ordeal (as most ordeals will) ended… We boarded the bus back to Hofstra. The bus was warm and several of the older band members had brought ardent spirits… Soon, warmth and jollity prevailed. The Band director, who had forbidden alcohol consumption when we were sitting in the stands freezing our asses off, sat in the front of bus, disgusted by this display of undignified, unprofessional behavior. We all ignored him…
So it remains an historical fact. I did once play in a bowl game and, both as a man and an American, I’m damn proud to say I did.
Mike Feder is a (now retired) long-time radio host/personality with WBAI-FM in New York City and Sirius XM radio. He has been a New York City welfare worker, a New York City and New York State probation officer, the owner of a used and old bookstore, a paralegal, a book abridger, and a performer/writer of autobiographical stories. (Books: New York Son, The Talking Cure, a Life on Air and, A Long Swim Upstream). http://federfiles.com/ He is married, has two grown children and lives (relatively calmly) on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.