Title

THE 108th Street Dog-bears: Book 1, Chapter a.1

By TheDarkHorse

In late August 2008, at the age of 31, I joined the 108th Street Dog-bears, a semi-pro football team based in El Porter, California. El Porter, about 35 miles northeast of Los Angeles, is an overlooked and forgotten town, made up largely of Chinese and Czechoslovakian immigrants—hand-to-mouth, working-class families. There were very few Chinese on the Dog-bears, but our offensive coordinator, Mal-Xi Po—a disciple of John McKay’s I-formation offense—was from the Mainland. He’d spent the first five years of his life in Shenyang, under Mao, before exiting the Red nation–with a flood of aunts, uncles, and cousins–for California.

Mal-Xi would pull me aside during practice and ask questions.  “Do you remember those Seattle Seahawks teams of the late 1980s?,” he’d ask, staring into the woods beyond our makeshift, yellowed practice field stationed awkwardly behind a Super Target.
“No.”
“That was a team content to go 8-8 every season. Utterly content. The Dog-bears cannot be like them.”

At the time, I lived in a single apartment with no television. I owned 22 books and a bed. I refused to gather items–I charted my expenses in a ledger. My luxury came in the form of the better-than-decent steaks I kept in my freezer—I’d cook one for dinner every night. grilling it methodically, mathematically.

Every night, I studied Mal-Xi’s 208-page playbook. The day I joined the Dog-bears, I quit the beer. I quit the beer and, to be specific, the rye whiskey that commonly partnered with the beer. I grilled steak each evening, after practice. I ate it along with a baked potato, oven-heated rolls, green beans, tomato slices, and a glass of milk. During my day job at the agency, I dreamt of the steak dinner–and the oven-heated rolls–endlessly.

I dug into that playbook. I memorized everyone’s assignment on every play: we were required to, in order to successfully operate the scheme.

Mal-Xi’s I-formation attack was, in reality, an offshoot of the classic incarnation—something he called the “I Am I.” It was the I-formation only in name, and only for a fleeting moment on the field. Set in play, the I Am I was a devastation to unsuspecting defenses. It incorporated a deeply (overly) complex network of men-in-motion and pulling offensive lineman to create an array of mismatches. We were in a league comprised of men in their early thirties—some in their forties: insurance salesmen, taxmen, factory workers—math instructors. It was an unwritten rule that strategy remain vanilla, but Mal-Xi ignored that mandate. In our first practice scrimmage against the Sun Valley Legioneers, the I Am I generated 248 yards and 28 points in 10 minutes of play. Flustered officials stopped the scrimmage to craft a memo to the league office inquiring as to whether the Dog-bears were in violation of league rules. The upshot: There was no rule against “being better” than the Sun Valley Legioneers.

Mal-Xi maintained a “Master Playbook” with more than 4,200 plays. Our slimmed-down version included the 208 plays I studied over dinner, but Mal-Xi made it clear: “Gentlemen. Do not get complacent—my binder includes another 3,992 gridiron designs that I will unleash at a moment’s notice. We must be students of the game.”

To be continued…