Teaching Football Widows

Mrs. Doris Laurini, 26, is a pioneering scholar in a new field of academic study. In addition to weekend field trips, she has supplemented her extensive library research with materials obtained through that remarkable tool of educational technology, television. Her subject is football, and strange as it may seem, she is currently teaching a course in the pro game at Triton College in the Chicago suburb of River Grove. Her class is made up of "football widows," who want to learn the fine points of game watching in order to enjoy Sunday afternoons with their husbands.

Mrs. Laurini's noncredit seminar huddles Thursday evenings in a classroom that the community college rents from a local high school. Tuition is $15 for ten lessons. She requires pupils to memorize the colors and emblems of every National Football League team, assigns each student a game to report on each week. Mrs. Laurini diagrams plays on a blackboard like a coach, explains subtleties and details by using instant replays that she videotapes while watching the previous week's games.

Tackles and Tidbits. Occasionally she will use housewifely metaphors to explain gridiron concepts. Her definition of a trap play, for instance, begins: "Short for mousetrap. The defensive tackle (mouse) is lured across the line of scrimmage by the cheese (the quarterback) and the offensive linemen."

But her curriculum is all business. "We start with the basics," she says, "positions and formations." Already her pupils are at ease with such knowing terms as flares and neutral zones. To help them one-up their friends, Mrs. Laurini tosses in such statistical tidbits as the average height and weight of defensive tackles in the league (6 ft. 4 in., 260 Ibs.).

Like many of her students, Mrs. Laurini used to while away fall Sunday afternoons reading, because her husband, a high school teacher, glued himself to the tube from noon to nightfall. Eventually she started watching the games herself. "We got our first color television set when I was pregnant," she recalls. "I can't say whether it was the TV or the pregnancy, but I started to crave football games."

When her husband became irritated by her questions, she started to read up on the game. Eventually she even made a research trip to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. This fall Triton agreed to sponsor the course--if she could round up a dozen students.

"The toughest students to recruit," she says, "were the ones who don't like to learn the game because it would be losing a challenge point to their husbands. You know, she can say 'Well, you watched the games all day Sunday, so I have a right to go out.' " Her proudest catch is a rather sheepish football widower, a balding businessman who enrolled because: "In my business there are men who constantly talk about the week's games, and 1 felt ignorant because I couldn't say anything."

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