Guts, fun, and camaraderie. That’s what gets them down in the mud, and out in the snow. That’s what sport is truly about. Those who want to experience America’s most popular contact sport in its purest form might try taking a turn off South Mill Road, down Slayback Drive, and strolling into Chamberlain Park any Sunday morning at 10 a.m.
Here you will witness living, hollering, gray-haired proof that age does not relegate you off the gridiron and onto the couch. The two teams, suited up in red and blue jerseys, don’t have names, cheerleaders, or even sideline spectators. And they don’t care. These local boys in the Over-40 Football “League” just want to play — as they have played every Sunday for the last 21 years.
They gather on the park’s Alan Slepman Football Field, named in memory the league’s founder, who died tragically in 2003, just before reaching his 50th birthday.
“We mix the teams up every week,” says Andy Lupo, who is the chairman of the West Windsor Parking Authority and active in the Little League. On a recent Sunday Lupo had just rushed back from a business trip — he is president of UniCredit Markets Inc. — in Munich. As league “commissioner,” he has divided up the attending players into two teams the previous eve, and each man arrives toting his red or blue jersey. (The players’ names printed on the back are the closest thing you will find to vanity in this crew.)
“We mix the teams up every week and get people playing in a new group each time,” says Lupo, who played football at Bayonne High School and club ball at Scranton University. He modestly refers to himself as a mediocre quarterback and starts another man in that slot for the Blues.
Slowly the men drive into the park, although a few, like Anthony Costa, 54, a senior vice president at Paradigm Capital in New York, has been riding his bike to games for the last 11 years.
At 10:15 a.m., after all the handshakes, jibes, and donning of gloves (the only protection), the men take to the field for a nonstop game that lasts until noon, with no quarter. Reds kick off to Blues, and tall, hefty Abrey Light makes the catch. Light, the 54-year-old executive vice president of OmniCom Systems, a software company in Monmouth Junction, starts to run, and is soon “tackled” by a two-handed touch.
The Blues take possession, and Jim Dennehy, a 15-year league veteran, drops back as quarterback and scans the field for receivers. Dennehy grew up playing street ball in Manhattan. When not looking for a wide receiver, Dennehy divides his time between surf fishing and telecommunication sales.
Before the Blue QB looms the six-foot-plus Gary Woodhull waving his arms. Poised on the scrimmage line, he shifts around impatiently until the six-second buzzer hanging around his neck rings, signaling his chance to charge Dennehy. Tall, amiable, and swift, Woodhull, a project manager with IBM in Piscataway, is the team’s official hunter who expertly downs game with both bow and shotgun. With teammates and friends willing to pluck and clean, Woodhull generously shares his pheasants, quail, and geese. (I first met Woodhull one snowy winter day several years ago, when I was cross country skiing down an abandoned road near the Plainsboro Preserve, and he emerged from the woods and offered me two sumptuous mallards.)
At the end of the play, Woodhull hands off the timer to Red teammate, Rob Leiggi, who has just turned 60 and is the technical sales manager for KSB TeleSound, an audiovisual and telecommunications design contracting company in Trenton. “We only have the one charger, and we rotate them in each play,” says Lupo. “It gives everyone a chance at the slot.” There is no real blocking in the traditional sense. The team maxim is “we all have to work on Monday.” And, as many players have experienced, wives are not in any way forgiving of injuries. Thus the rules are set to maximize the fun and minimize the debilitating, slow-healing crunches.
But this is no pansy version of gridiron play. As the Reds take the ball, quarterback Rick Wasserman, president of FGW Partners, a consulting firm in Pennington, drops back. He might run, but most times he opts for a pass. Play after play, offensive players race to get clear. Defense pounds hard among them, hands high, trying to snag down the pass. Wasserman tags Steve Brazel, a dentist in a group practice in Manalapan, who cuts away from two Blues and makes an impressive run.
The Blues have one extra man, so each play they rotate one player out onto the sidelines. Like Ron Warner, they all come off the field huffing and glad for the brief respite. Warner, 53, vice president of sales for Parisa USA, an apparel company in New York, played ball in high school. He currently trains at Gold’s Gym, and heaves a sigh when he says, “You are really workin’ out on that field — every play, all out.”
When New York Times reporter Michael Winerip came to watch the boys play on a sleety Sunday this past January, he agreed. His January 28, 2010, story reflected his own amazement at the players’ ages, their many injuries, and how they still kept going hard at it 30 weeks a year.
The sweat and hustle are definitely part of it. But there is something more going on out here on Slepman Field. This is a 21-year tradition of football played from September though June, every Sunday, with all of the faithful showing up religiously. Lyle Girandola, 50, vice president of publishing finance for the education group of McGraw Hill, has played on this field for 19 years. “I have to race out of mass every Sunday, but I make it for sure,” he says.
As do they all. Unlike virtually all other pickup leagues, these devoted players do not miss a game. “You just don’t let your friends down,” says Light, who with Slepman and Lupo founded the team back when all were a lot younger. “It’s not about the competition, not about the winning. It’s really about the fun and camaraderie.”
And fun is something this crew creates in abundance, despite, or perhaps because of all types of weather. “It was really tough, but hilarious this past winter, when two feet of snow covered the field. Lord, was it hard to run in that stuff.” says Joe Bonafede, a short, burly, former corrections officer, who has caught his share of passes for the Blues this game, including an interception. Off the field, Bonafede runs his West Windsor-based security company Technocality Inc. It is not hyperbole to say that each man highly prizes his membership in this elite club, valuing the memories and his fellows as a major factor in his life.
Rivaling the U.S. Senate as one of the land’s most exclusive clubs, there is currently a two-year waiting list to join the league. But no, it is not one’s athletic prowess that sets the standard — even though you have players like 52-year-old Karl Dentino, president of Dentino Marketing in Princeton, who recently took seven years off from football to achieve running one marathon in each of the 50 states. And certainly space on the team is not won by socioeconomic status. Even though players rub shoulders with corporate attorneys, international bankers like Lupo, and a hedge fund manager or two. What wins you space on this team is the content of your character.
However, waiting lists were not always part of the process. The league began modestly enough in early 1990 when Slepman, Light, Lupo, and a few others gathered one Sunday in the park to play a pickup game of football. It seemed like such fun that Slepman proposed meeting next week — and the next.
“We would drag in guys off the street, folks walking their dogs or playing with their kids.” says Light. Behind the field, back in “the woods” as they call it, lay a new housing development, where the team could flush out fresh recruits. “I recall one Sunday, I am relaxing in my house, and I hear these people,” recalls Girandola, “They are calling ‘Lyle, Lyle…Come out and play.’ So I changed my clothes and ran out.”
Scouring the neighborhood soon led to a solid core of members, who connected by phone chain weekly. Today, with the ease of E-mail, commitments are set weekly, and teams lists are drawn up and sent out accordingly.
A bit akin to a night out with the boys, the Sunday game is not something most wives claim to understand. “What is fascinating,” says Lupo, “is that when we have our annual party and invite the wives, it amazing how many know each other and find that they are already friends.”
Off the field, the team takes an annual trip to Las Vegas, where, among other carousings, they ferret out a hole in the fence and usually manage to play on some professional NFL turf. But the real season climax comes with the Annual Father-Son Game, held every year on the Wednesday afternoon before Thanksgiving. “It used to be,” says Dennehy, “that the kids were small, and we all took it easy on them. Now these burly high school and college kids come out and zing past us all like lightning.”
As the game nears the end the Blues are down one touchdown. Lupo, as quarterback, fires a pass that wanders between his teammate, Light, and two Reds. A brief argument breaks out over who takes possession. It lasts shorter than the play itself. The consensus is reached. Reds take it.
Within the last five minutes, Lupo calls Final Play Time. The game lasts until noon, and just before it, each team gets one more play. The Reds emerge victorious. But everyone leaves the field laughing, and much more interested in the donuts and cider brought to celebrate Abrey Light’s 52nd birthday.
Watching these adult, professional men joke, wisecrack, and backslap, one senses not only the launch of a legacy, but a lesson. Today, when our expensively maintained playing fields lie fallow until parents march out the children dressed in proper and costly costumes to labor at a precise, boring regimen of game drills, one wonders: Where lies the ghost of the kids’ pickup games? When do we let children get off by themselves, choose up sides, and argue out the close calls with each other, without a whistle honking parent.
Certainly, if a batch of attorneys and bankers can play nicely by themselves, can’t we trust our children to do the same?
