Playing Football With Crazy Albert

Thinking of football today reminds me of a guy in the neighborhood named Albert Eye. Albert was, as they say, a 'mentally challenged' fellow that lived with his grandparents. There were all sorts of rumors as to why he was a bit slow, with the prevailing one being that when he was a child his mother had overdosed him on some kind of medication. Whatever the case, Albert had his strange ways including settting up plastic soldiers in his yard and having battles with the two armies by throwing dirtballs and things at the plastic figures. This wouldn't have been unusual for those times but Albert was about 20 or so when he was doing this.



Every so often we would get together and play tackle football up at Holy Cross Church yard. Every once in a while Albert would tag along with his next door neighborhood Stu and would get drafted by one of the sides whenever we were a man short. Albert was a strong young man, and had one arm that was useless and would hang by his side in a twisted position. His other arm however was like the arm of Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime.

The thing about Albert was he didn't really understand the rules. Whenever they would hand him the ball, he would run and several of us would pile on him and tackle him, but he would get up and start running again. We had to keep telling him to stop, that the play was over.

There was a particular pattern to games involving Albert. While we would start off playing a normal game of tackle football, before long we would be shoving Albert into the Holly bushes, and tackling him even when he didn't have the ball. Before long, Albert would sort of figure out what was going on, and get angry and would challenge someone to a different kind of game. Fortunately, his neighbor Stu was there to calm him down and take him home with him.

The thing I remember about Albert is that he didn't hold a grudge. This was probably because like a goldfish he had a memory span of about 3 seconds. Whatever the case, we were glad that Albert didn't remember the football games when we would run into him alone.