CINEMA SEEN - "Hiking My Way Through Life"
By William Margold

     I fell in love with seeing the world upside down 50 years ago.
     Right around my 16th birthday (October 2, 1959) I was taught how to hike a football in order to play on the flag football team that Vista Del Mar (a home for kids who needed slightly more supervision that their own families could provide) was fielding to participate in a Culver City league, and my life changed for the brotherhood bonding better as well as for the broken bones and torn tendons worse...forever.
     Of course, since I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed the repeated presence of a guy’s hands on my ass...I was spared that pressure as my centering career was always that of alignments that required me to hike the football back quite a number of yards with precise accuracy at maximum speed. And because I couldn’t afford to break my glasses repeatedly, I invariably hiked the ball to the blur that was my quarterback.
     My duties after hiking the ball were to simply get in the way of whoever (or whatever) tried to rush my QB. Lacking a considerable amount of coordination, but being gangly (and/or clumsy) enough to simply get in the way, I managed to frustrate quite a number of defensive linemen. They in turn would take out their anger on me, and I quickly became used to various degrees of pain. But it was all part of the game. And quite frankly---while my hands make the sounds of broken watches when I close them quickly, a few ribs in the middle of the left side of my chest have ached for over 30 years, and my left knee has had little or no interest in joining the rest of my body since it was brutalized in 1982---if I didn’t slowly stagger off the field at the end of every contest, I felt that I hadn’t really done my job.
     All of this recollecting was ignited by watching HARVARD BEATS YALE 29-29...by far the best film about football ever made...particularly for anyone who has ever "cleated up" and forsaking their physical health, has ventured onto the gridiron competitively. Kevin Rafferty’s demanding documentary (available through www.kino.com) is a tremendously touching time capsule that transports the viewer back to a Saturday afternoon in the fall of 1968 at a time when America’s history books was being ripped apart by assassinations, and there was a great restlessness by a generation that was in the process of trying to become adults by retaining their youthful outlooks so that they wouldn’t wind up like their own parents.
     By now...faithful readers of my column have come to realize that what has transpired here for 37 years (as The Hollywood Press morphed into THE LAXPRESS) is my life story thinly disguised as movie reviews. And herein, since this column coincides with the celebration (or at least recognition of my 66th birthday on October 2), I cannot resist overdosing on my self-servitude as, if certain life and death factors had played out differently, there’s a very, Very, VERY good chance that I might have wound up playing in the game that Rafferty so gloriously captures through the vivid memories of those who played in it. You see...my father, Nathan Ross Margold (a highly respected member of the legal community during the first half of the 20th Century) was a Harvard graduate, and I’m sure that I would have "legacy’d" into the hallowed halls. Of course, by 1968 I would have been 25 years old, but I also might have been perfectly suited to play, if after graduating from high school in 1960, the Marines had allowed me to join their ranks for at least a four-year stint. But my father died in 1947, and my formative years, until I wound up in Vista Del Mar in 1956 (fresh from over three months in Los Angeles’ Central Juvenile Hall) masterminded by my mother (a lady who I respected but never had a chance to love), became a myriad of military school and private educational establishments (haphazardly mix mastered with a number of public institutions), wherein I learned just enough to get by, but was never really driven toward learning how to get along. And I suspect that’s what The Marines sensed when they turned me down in 1960.
     So I didn’t wind up at Harvard. But I did manage to get through college. And in fact, I graduated from Cal State Northridge in June 1968.
     A few years later, I became aware of various local flag football leagues, and that quickly rekindled my centering ways, and throughout the next decade---because I was "very good at my job"---I wound up snapping my way through as many as four games a week.
     But finally I realized that my damaged left knee made me more vulnerable than valuable, and I trudged away from the game, while I could still at least trudge.
     Many, Many, MANY years later, Jim Holliday cast me in the role of a retired football player/lumbering college janitor in one of his always amusing as well as arousing adult films...and challenged me to hike a football right at the camera. I grunted and groaned as I assumed the position. Indeed, with a belly and considerable brittleness, bending over wasn’t as easy as it used to be. But then...it was a sunny Saturday afternoon all over again. And, although I was on a sterile sound stage, damn if I couldn’t smell the grass as it mingled with drops of my sweat. And when Holliday yelled "Action"...I rocketed off a perfect spiral that, as I intended, just grazed the top of the camera, but almost took the cameraman’s head off in the process.
     As I intended!
     end
     NOTE: Originally published in LA Xpress, October 1, 2009 issue.

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