Opinion: Dirty jobs, football, and gratefulness
The year is 2005. My dad is hanging up racing – dirt late model racing, to be exact – after 20 years in the sport, racing part-time. This is his last year. My uncle retired from the sport the previous year. We’re at the home track – Brownstown – and it’s mid-June. The humid air of a Midwestern summer fills the evening sky.
A win seems to elude us. We have been awfully close. We certainly deserve one.
I pause what I’m doing. Sweat rolls down my face. I look out to the track, where lower-class support divisions are racing, and take a deep breath. A dusty cloud seems to envelop the entire place, highlighted by the bright lights.
At the time, I was 15 years old. I’m the tire guy on a crew of four people (driver included). I have been since I was a kid, probably around the age of 10. Being the tire guy is a dirty job that would probably be considered by some to be a violation of child labor laws, yet I loved it. When you’re the tire guy, you have to sipe and groove the tires during the week, grind or buff them on the night of the race, and clean them on wash day. My dad is starting somewhere mid-pack in the feature. I’m getting his wheels ready for the A-main.
The grinding process involves taking a saucer-shaped, handheld disk and running it up and down on the tire’s surface to clean off the dirt and restore grip. All four wheels have to be cleaned before going on the track. When I finish a section of the rubber, I turn it over by hand. Today, they have a device where you can hit a pedal and it will spin the wheel for you. I often wonder how much time that would’ve saved me. My forearms and hands are black from the rubber and dirt. I’m also sweating from head to toe. When I go home and take a shower, I’ll double-wash. It will also take a half-dozen Q-tips to get all the dirt out of my ears. My snot will be black for a couple of days.
What I hated the most about being the tire guy, though, was washing them on Sunday. Since my dad taught school, Sunday was the only chance to wash. My mom, brother and I would get home from church and the car would be up on jack stands with my dad and one of his former students washing. There, behind the car, would be the six to eight tires, ready for my scrubbing.
I think those days built the work ethic that I see in myself today. I mean, good gosh: I get paid to watch football for a living. Compared to the work I was doing in middle and high school, football is a piece of cake.
I’ve had other weird, random odd jobs along the way. I was a landscaper in my early-to-mid 20s. I mowed every acre of grass west of Scheumann Stadium at Ball State while working for the team for free and dumped truckloads of mulch everywhere. When I became part-time for a current competitor, I was a landscaper for a private company. One day we went out to this house on a special landscaping project and somehow the three of us managed to interact with something that gave us an itchy rash all up and down our arms and legs. It wasn’t poison ivy because there wasn’t any poison ivy around, but whatever it was, it was terrible. It was literally from my ankles almost to my nuts. I remember, the next day, holding a weed-whacker, and staring up at the sky and asking God to get me out of this affair. Thankfully, he did.
A lot of people in football are very entitled. I know the look when I see one. Their body language – the way they walk, talk, carry themselves – just screams entitlement. They think football owes them the world.
Let me be frank with you: football owes you nothing. And people who believe it owes them more should come from my background, because they’d be a whole lot more grateful for it. Every day in football is a blessing beyond belief. You’re part of a very small percentage of the world that gets paid to do this.
Be grateful. And never take it for granted.