Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays and for a long time the Turkey Bowl was a yearly tradition with guys I grew up with.

If you will indulge me, a thread (1/?):

We started officially playing the Turkey Bowl when I was in the 6th grade. My dad had secured a site for our flag football league to play. He worked for the power company so he had lights donated and it was “our” field. We got the idea to play the Turkey Bowl there.

The first couple years it was the Old Guys vs. the Young Guys. Dads on one team and the kids on the other. The dads cheated, of course. They had no other way. Changing the rules mid-game. Telling us we couldn’t rush the passer since there was no line. Standard stuff.

We did this all the way through high school and even my first year of college. It was an annual tradition. And an awesome one. We would have 12-15 people. It was a chance to see if our dads still had “it” each year.

For a couple Thanksgivings after my grandma died we weren’t sure what to do for the day. That kind of threw Turkey Bowl off. Well that and the fact that the dads didn’t have “it” anymore. At some point your body tells you that it can’t handle it.

For three or four years while I was in college there was no Turkey Bowl. Or at least not for me. Finally in grad school I reconnected with some high school friends and we started the game back up on our high school’s band practice field. This is where it got out of hand.

Our band used old fire hoses to Mark off the field lines. We got the bright idea to move the fire hoses to make our Turkey Bowl field look like it should. Apparently that was frowned upon because the principal at the school was furious we did that.

So the next year we moved the game to St. Jude Park. It was where Bishop Donahue practiced so it had some lines left from their season. We decided to take it up a notch though. We wanted an *actual* field. With lines. Yard markers. Midfield logo.

So we bought paint and went down to the field on Wednesday morning. We had a striper and string. We were determined. We also got a little carried away. These pictures don’t do it justice but we made a 60 yard field that rivaled some high schools:

My best friend is really talented so he got a picture off the internet and went to work on the midfield logo. It took him 5 hours but it was a thing of beauty:

We also wanted an MVP trophy so my buddy who worked at the News Register in Wheeling had an idea. For some reason the state baseball player of the year trophy from 1984 was in the office. Unclaimed and just sitting there. So he took it the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving.

We stopped at Giant Eagle and got a little football helmet out of one of those dispensers (80s babies know) and wouldn’t you know it? It was a Notre Dame helmet. We glued it on the trophy with a little rubber football we had. It was glorious:

The kid in the picture is Danny B. He won MVP - twice. He celebrated with fireworks he brought himself. I mean this thing really got big. People would brag about the trophy all year. I’d see Dan maybe once or twice and he’d remind me he was MVP. It was magic.

Eventually I got married and moved away so I haven’t played in 7 years. Most of the other guys did too. We still keep the pictures and in our #GroupText we reminisce. Today we did just that. It was one of the best Thanksgiving traditions.

So I hope some of you play a Turkey Bowl. I hope to do it one day with Lincoln. This is weird but when we built our house one of the first things I said was, “This yard will be great for Turkey Bowl.”

My friends agreed. What can I say but that we are awesome.

Here are some more pictures from past years and our games. Go throw some football around. I guarantee your field won’t be as good as ours though.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

#GobbleGobble

Oh - one last picture for scale of the Turkey logo. It was, in a word, big: