How my friend affected my life Anonymous

The crack of the shoulder pads atop two burly young men signals that the high school football season is in full swing. If not for the electric Friday nights under the lights of a shrine to hard work, there would be weeks when I simply existed and hadn’t really lived. But on these nights when the school comes together just as I do to cheer and possibly inspire these fellow classmates, you are reminded just how amazing it feels to really live life.

When I think of football, I think of my closest friend Russ. In middle school, he would use me as an elbow rest after church, but I was okay with that, because he was Russ, and he played football, and he was cool. As a freshman in high school I realized that I wasn’t supposed to like his football team because they were rivals from the town north of me. But it didn’t matter, because he was Russ, he played football, and he was cool. Russ ran faster than me, had three times as many admirers at school than me, and could lift five times as much weight as me, but we were connected by a close friendship.

I always thought of him as the wonderful big kid who played hard, worked hard in school, and gave his best all the time. At 5’ 11’’, 230 lbs., he was too small to be recruited as a big time...