Posted on: Sunday, July 8, 2001

Commentary
Praise for lessons learned in high school football

By Troy Obrero
Damien Class of 1992

I got a call from Marcus Rivera (Damien senior class president, 1992) recently and he reminded me of the game and my first-ever sack as a football player.

Feeling dazed and confused, I just lay on the quarterback for a while and, according to my teammate, the ref had to pull me off him while I beat my chest and whooped and yelled. They hauled him off the field for a play and I went back into the huddle.

You probably don't remember the game. It was just a freshman game. But I then became one of about five sophomores invited to play on the varsity team.

I played my one varsity year and moved on to other things.

I wasn't a very good football player; but this is what I learned from those two years in the game: Don't take crap from anybody, and always — ALWAYS — know you can win!

I left football to power-lift competitively because in my first meet at the Kamehameha High School Power Lifting Competition (something I did to bulk up for my varsity season), I was laughed off the stage for coming in last place by many points. By the time I left the state for college, I had four Hawai'i state age and weight class records with the American Drug-Free Power Lifting Association.

I chose the university I eventually attended because it was the only school of those I applied to that determined I didn't deserve a scholarship.

I graduated in three years and a quarter. The money I saved during my last year was my way of eventually getting that scholarship.

I started working in the highly competitive San Francisco biotechnology industry in a position that was second from the lowest position you can have in the field. I was told it would be difficult to advance or get into management because I don't have a Ph.D. or even a master's degree. I grin now as I manage not one, but two different groups with my own set of employees; and I secretly smile to myself when I'm the only non-Ph.D. in managers' meetings.

But this story isn't about me. It's about my friends on this list and the countless other Monarchs who have continuously stared adversity in the face and said, "Bring it! And you better bring 10 of your friends because I'm not going down easily!"

It's about the "Purple Line," that place where all who've played and will play for the Mauve and Gold honor the pain and glory left out on that tiny sub-regulation practice field.

It's about how all of our struggles start with a gathering of ourselves at our own personal "Purple Lines." It's about calling friends in different states or going to their weddings and reminiscing about high-school football.

It's about patiently and mischievously waiting to tell their future kids that I once saw their dad intercept a football and run it the wrong way. It's about destroying hearts, pride, spirit, and maybe even futures while trying to protect bodies. I have this quote on a wall of my office; put it in yours:

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better.

"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."

— Theodore Roosevelt

Troy T. Obrero was student council president and a member of the Class of 1992 at Damien Memorial High School.