One of the great toys of my life was a Tru Action Electric Football set. I spent countless hours on hands and knees lining up my running backs and lineman, hoping for a score. Sometimes I had a friend over, but often I played by myself.
The set featured 11 men on a side, 7 down linemen and 4 backfield pieces. The early sets had metal players with metal razor blade-like runners on the bottom. When the set was turned on, it vibrated and caused the men to run downfield.
Sometimes.
Often, however, the running back crashed into the line, got turned around and headed for the opposite end of the field. You weren’t supposed to touch the men – even when they ran backwards, but we occasionally bent the rules.
One of the backs was the quarter back who had a spring-powered arm that held a small cotton football. The idea was to pass to a streaking man downfield, but the passes often traveled twice the length of the football field, so completions were few and far between.
One spring, I decided to use the quarterback and his rifle-like arm in an imaginary baseball game. I cut out an old sheet and drew an infield with bases and a pitcher’s mound and lined the outfield with a fence from my Ft. Apache set. I can’t tell you the number of hours I played that game, keeping scores and stats with my baseball card collection as players and the quarterback as batter.
But back to football.
The Tudor Football set had one major drawback. Since it spent most of its time on the floor, it was subject to being stepped on, and that was the end of that. All the men would then run helter-skelter to the dented place, and it was supreme chaos. I suppose I had 3 or 4 sets in my youth, and they all eventually met with the same fate. But the quarterback hit a lot of home runs in the off season.
