Heads up, part II (#1297)

Yesterday's post was about me lifting my head just in time to get my top front teeth knocked out in a rock fight as a young boy. Today my post is about how I broke my leg while playing football in the street. I was 16 and had just made my high school basketball team. It was Christmas break and some of the neighbor kids and I were playing football in the street like we normally did. It was getting late and we needed to finish our game quickly. My team was down two touchdowns and since we had the ball and were far from the goal line, I decided to go out for the bomb. In other words I lined up as a receiver and had one of my teammates throw me a long pass. It was working great right up until I had just pulled the long pass onto my fingertips, what I had not noticed was that a car had parked down by our goal line where previously there had not been one. I was focused and concentrating on running a good route and shaking free from my defender and then looking up and back while running full steam into the immovable obstruction. Needless to say, I did not budge the car from it's solitary parking spot, instead just as I left my feet to haul into my hands the long pass, I experienced the sudden rush of incoherency followed by a dull thud. I lay across the hood of our neighbor's station wagon, clutching the ball and then began to slide off the vehicle down the front of it's grill onto my back into the street. My teammate picked the ball off my chest and ran the final five yards past the goal line securing the score, but for me, I was left to semi-consciously gather myself up and begin to walk until the pain was too excruciating. At the hospital I found out that I had cracked my left femur all the way through but luckily the fracture did not dislocate. I spent the next three days in the hospital and finally just did get out to observe the final hours of 1971, before the new year rang in.