Catching a football at 118 MPH
Summary:
My dad has worked in the National Football League for various teams in their operations and travel departments for almost 40 years. Naturally, he has some good stories. You'll find in Tell Me a Story a series of stories from the National Football League in the 1980s and 90s involving a new high-powered football cannon, a prank by legendary quarterback John Elway, and other good moments. As told and written about by members of my family, recounting to my friends Sam Miller and Tim Gerken over audio broadcast. Enjoy!Transcript:
Sam: What's that book you got over there?
[00:00:36] Tom: Oh, this is a new book here by my uncle Tom. Tom Harpole. He wrote a book. He's a fascinating guy. He was a writer for 20 30 years for Sports Illustrated, Smithsonian Air and Space.
Yeah. All kinds of fascinating magazines.
[00:00:50] Tim: He's got a hell of a mustache.
[00:00:51] Tom: Hell of a mustache. He's a hell of a guy. He, you know, he lived in, he's been all around the world. He lived in, uh, Alaska, Montana. He went to Russia for a while. Ireland, lived in Ireland. Adventure man, done a lot of dangerous stunts and wrote stories about, you know, fascinating people that are in crazy industries like logging, you know, some life or death type... skydivers, army people, you know, just intense human beings. So, he's a fascinating guy, Chronicles of a Fraught Life.
But you mind if I share a story by, by him?
Okay, cool. It's about my dad as well in it this story, right?, But it does have my dad in it. Which is exciting. So it takes place in Denver.
The story is entitled 90 PSI, previously published in Sports Illustrated, September 8, 1985.
Authors note: this is the essay Sports Illustrated fact checked and published, which led to my decision to write for a living.
Alright, here we go.
I own a Denver Broncos trophy buckle and bragging rights to a record that has stood since 1983, and at the time of this writing remains an NFL record. The inscription on that silver buckle reads 90 PSI, and is sterling evidence of what is probably the most arcane record hanging around the periphery of the game: catching a football plummeting at about 140 miles an hour to the ground.
It's time the story is told.
As a logger, or more specifically, a timber faller, I used to spend most of the year with my hands curled around a 36 pound chainsaw with a 32 inch bar on it. I'd been packing such saws on those steep, snow blanketed Montana Rockies through three months of early winter, when I decided to hang up the hard hat and head to Denver with my wife and kids for a Christmas holiday.
Most of my eight brothers and sisters would be there, including my brother Bill, who worked as the equipment manager for the Broncos in those days. As we drove south through Wyoming, we listened to the 1983 AFC wildcard game in Seattle. It dampened that Christmas Eve ride to hear Denver going down 31 to 7.
The next afternoon, when we got to Grandma's, Bill was already back from Seattle, sitting in the living room, looking ambivalent about the sudden end of the season. But he was his old, same, taciturn self, shrugging off defeat and just enjoying all the wee cousins watching them play with their new toys and games.
Christmas night after supper, the conversation around the table got Bill cornered, with the rest of us trying to coax bits of Bronco locker room gossip. It's hard to think of his dealings with those athletes as humdrum, but he rarely had much to say about what his days were like. However, that night he began describing a football cannon that the Broncos were using for punt and kickoff return practice.
The machine used compress air to shoot footballs. 10 per square inch PSI would launch that ball 60 to 70 yards in a fair imitation of a good kick.
But boys will be boys, and somebody got the idea to let the compressor run up to the 90 PSI red line, and point the barrel straight up to see what would happen.
Bill said the ball nearly disappeared before it came back down.
Then somebody decided to try to catch the ball when it came screaming back to Earth.
"Funniest thing I've ever seen at work," he said.
"Guys that made millions of dollars catching footballs were unable to handle this leather meteorite. It'd hit them in the hands and just blow their arms apart," Bill laughed.
When Rich Carlis, the plucky barefoot kicker, tried to catch one, it hit him on the helmet, knocked him down, bounced, and landed on the roof of a warehouse across the street.
Bill said the ball had to be doing at least 300 miles an hour.
"Baloney, Bill," I said.
I told him that every falling object has a terminal velocity when the weight of the falling object equals the air pressure against it.
And that by quick mental calculation, I reckon the velocity for a football was less than 160 miles an hour.
Then before I had to start backing up my theory with more dubious math, I said. "I could catch it."
The derision in his chortle was as lumpy as the turkey gravy.
"I could catch it, Bill." I repeated and threw in some amateur psychology again, hoping to move away from improvising math.
"Those big prima donnas are psyching themselves out just because they've never seen a football coming at them that fast. Even with Elway throwing it at them," I said, when's that kid going to learn a little touch?" I added imploringly. "Anyways, I have the advantage of not knowing the difference. I could do it if I got five chances to catch the ball."
"Tom, I'd bet you any amount of money. It can't be done. You can't do it. 50 bucks, no, 500 bucks."
He was a little steamed by my naivete and perhaps at the suggestion that his guys weren't quite invincible.
"I won't take your money," I replied, "but I'd sure like to have a go. Five tries?"
"You're on. Come out tomorrow morning at 10."
Bill has a way of looking at you that he's cultivated in locker rooms full of enormous men who must be browbeaten once in a while. I tried not to wither like a chastised linebacker and wondered if maybe the terminal velocity of a football might very well be 300 miles per hour.
The next day the temperature hung at about zero and there were a few inches of new snow.
Nice weather to work in if you're logging, but this was level ground. Bill set the cannon up on the edge of the practice field nearest the clubhouse.
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.
He got that compressor going at the edge of the pure, flat, snow- blanketed expanse.
There were a few players in parkas, guys cleaning out lockers, who were walking between the parking lot and the locker room.
A few guys said they were waiting for some latecomers to go duck hunting. They hung around watching Bill set the football cannon up and said, "Let's see where they tend to come down," he suggested.
When he shot the first ball up and I watched it disappear into the Denver smog, it set me back some...
it's whistling descent hit the snow and blew out a three foot diameter bear spot as though a cherry bomb had been set off and bounced thirty yards back toward us.
It had... Burst!
The football had burst a seam leaving what resembled a Labrador scrotum, herniating through the split in the seam.
But it was the altitude of the ball that had reached that left me bemused. I've cut thousands of trees down after walking around them, looking up to see which way they lean.
Then they hit the ground and after I'm done limbing them up and measuring and bucking the saw logs, I know within a few feet how tall they were.
As a sideline, I climb 300- foot radio towers to replace burnt out beacons on top. I can judge heights pretty well, especially heights that have some correlation to human activity.
But that ball disappearing into the dirty air and ripping back down toward the ground was unlike anything I could relate to. It was like seeing something drop from an airplane, and I, I guessed it fell 7 to 800 feet.
Bill shot a couple more footballs up so I could get into the general area where they were rocketing down.
I could see them shifting through different wind strata as they returned to Earth.
Then one came near enough for me to try and catch it, and it hurt my left thumb. But I could see how a few more tries would teach me enough to get the job done.
It was like the first time I rode a bull at the Jackpot Rodeo in Helmville, Montana.
Crazy, but exciting and fun, and I wanted to keep trying until I got it right.
The second ball I tried to catch tore the fingernail off my left index finger and bent the whole works up.
Bill saw the blood coming out and shut off the compressor, which hissed, "Psssssssss," as it bled off its holding tank.
"This is crazy. We're done," he said.
"It looks worse than it is. Deal's a deal, Bill. I get three more tries."
I was pretty jacked up. There was an audience of guys who tried and failed to do this, and the implicit challenge was all I could think about.
While the compressor pumped itself back up, so did I.
I locked my hands together and tucked my elbows against my ribs and concentrated on all the strength that I'd accumulated in those years of logging chainsaws around the steeps.
When that next ball came down, I was moving my feet better, to keep under it as it tumbled down out of the smog and became more vivid and grew in size.
It lodged in the cradle that my arms and chest formed.
It felt like an 80 pound bale of hay dropped from the hayloft when it hit me and blasted the air out of me.
But I held on to it.
It knocked me over backwards and my hat landed several feet away.
No one doubted that it was a clean catch.
The lumpin crowd of jocks in downcoats hooted, their applause muted by gloved hands.
In this life, I spend mostly working around trees. I have never elicited applause. I felt very happy.
Every once in a while, you have to be your own hero. Whether it's being the best snow shoveler on the block, or knowing you're raising your kids as polite as can be, or just having a sense of yourself as still being playful and a little crazy. I explained that to Bill and thanked him for setting the deal up.
I reached in my pocket for my gloves and found that I couldn't even grasp them with my left hand.
Steve Antonopoulos, the prematurely bald wizard trainer for the Broncos, looked at my hand and murmured something and had me stick my hand in ice water for 15 minutes. Cryotherapy, he called it. There's a loaded word for you.
He manipulated my fingers slightly and said I'd better get the heck to a doctor. Besides tearing my fingernail off, he told me, he was pretty sure I had broken bones in my left thumb and index finger.
Bill was sorry and a little angry that what had started out to be fun had turned painful. But we talked about all the times we'd seen athletes play with injuries only to realize they were hurt much later. The human body can take a lot.
About a month later, Bill was at a meeting in Cleveland for all the equipment managers in the NFL. It was a huge trade show, where he goes to buy everything the team needs for the next season. The average NFL team, for instance, consumes a semi trailer load of adhesive tape every year.
At the closing banquet, each equipment manager was called upon to give an impromptu address. Sing a song, tell a joke, whatever.
Bill asked the assembled team representatives how many had the football cannon. Everyone raised their hand. They all had one.
He asked, "Well, have you ever pointed it straight up at 90 PSI?"
They admitted they all had. He asked if anyone had ever caught the ball.
No one had, nor did anyone offer an opinion that it was even possible. And in fact, every team's coaches had banned such idiocy.
So Bill told him that his brother, this logger from Montana, had made the catch. He realized then that my catch, in its own obscure fashion... was an NFL record.
"Whenever a Bronco establishes a new NFL record, they receive a trophy buckle," he wrote on the back of his business card that he'd stuck in the heavy little box, the buckle came in.
That was about the time I got the cast off. I interpreted this terrific gift and the trenchant message as brotherly love, which sweetened the whole thing.
I lost a couple months work while that cast was on . That silver buckle cost me about 4, 000 in lost wages. But I sure like to tell this story.
--
And that is the story 90 PSI.
[00:12:41] Sam: That's fantastic.
[00:12:42] Tom: Written by my uncle. What a good story, huh? The NFL in the 1980s.
[00:12:47] Sam: Did you know about that? No, no. My dad had never told me about it.
But I stumbled upon the article when I was young, maybe like 15, on Google. And I was like, Tom Harple, that's my uncle. Yeah. And then I read the article and I was like, this is a damn good story. Yeah. You know, and then, and then 10 years later, probably he released this anthology of about 20 short stories like that from his life. So.
[00:13:10] Tim: Coming down like a mortar. Yeah.
[00:13:13] Tom: Like a piece of cement.