Plastic Football Helmet League
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by user Manny Stiles
You played with yourself. You know you did it too (maybe, STILL ARE!!!), away in a the corner of a dark room. You have one desk lamp on the tabletop... and there they are!!! Gleaming proudly at their Commissioner, League General Manager and Chief Statistician... YOU and (your witty league name here) plastic football helmet league!
You know... plastic football helmets. When I was a kid, back when you could get something cool and/or deadly for a quarter from a vending machine (nowadays vending machines have ATM swipers on them) they had NFL plastic football helmets with detachable facemasks, they were AWESOME! (Collect all 28 NFL Franchises (stadiums not included)!!!)
You'd get a bunch of 'em, try to collect all the teams once you get your favorite team... then when you get down to the stragglers; the remaining teams of the 28 you didn't have yet. Like the Broncos!!! "#26 Mom!!! #26 Mom!! The Broncos!!!" SHUT the %&$ UP! Already!!! she'd scream at you in the foyer of the grocery store... "New England Patriots!!! #27!" you whisper delightfully and nearly inaudibly "yesss"... ... by this time, you needed the Buffalo Bills (the old white helmet) but you had seven Denver Broncos lids and eleven of the New England Patriots (the old white ones with the anally-inspired and positioned guy on it... and they looked like the Bills a little... 'til you opened the plastic bubble!!!) - So naturally you have sixtysome helmets and you use the single best representation of each of the teams to show current division standings (with the help of a homemade Bills of course)... that's fun for a while, but where's the JOY of the game? ...the hitting, the "Smash Mouth Football"???!?
The power of football was in your hands. You'd SMASH the helmets together and smash 'em together and smash 'em together until only ONE CHAMPION WAS LEFT!!! A little plastic football helmet smashing contest WORLD CHAMPION remained in your prescence!!! How amazing!
This was clearly something your plastic baseball helmets were incapable of... hmmm....
Then you'd rip off the facemasks, scramble up the pile and re-apply them in a fashion of your choosing - "What kind of commissioner ARE YOU???"
If you're like me, you had two divisions of 30-40 teams and only the top sixteen teams in the divisions went to the (your witty league name here)'s playoffs!
Teams at the bottom of the divisions lost their plastic face mask and had to "draft" new face masks. The weird thing about those helmets; some facemasks SUCKED on every helmet but one and other helmets just seemed to be real good, no matter which face mask you used! Either way, because of my draft I had a lot of teams with funky colored facemasks. Like a Redskins helmet (which had the best stripe, of course) with a green Jets facemask (remember when the Jets had green helmets?), or the green flecked Jets helmet with the Buccaneers orange facemask, Eeew! But they WORKED! Sometimes TOO well! Yet, the same facemask made the Oakland Raiders helmet REALLY weak!
If you smashed 'em together and they both popped one side, you'd make 'em "facemask-wrestle" wouldn't you?? And the winners moved on into history and lore... the losers were mocked and ridiculed - repeatedly.
You'd take all your 10 extra New England helmets and instead of applying the stickers you took some of the model paint you didn't huff and made your own logo designs; Go Tonawanda Kardex!!. (The old Baltimore Colts without the horseshoe made great - even though I hate them - Penn State helmets) You made your own, I'm sure. I had many homemade and fabricated USFL teams...
So I know many of you played this game... I'm sure I'll share this game with my kids someday (I still have all my favorites in a box!)
Save money on therapy... Share some of your league stories!!!
If someone wants to do a story on "Electronic Earthquake football" - you know what I mean; I'd enjoy reading it...
- resources
- my freeking memory
- ebay
