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Looking for football gear? Tread carefully in the trunk of the Haft family minivan — and be careful of the dealcoholized wine that is close to the gear.

Claire Tisne Haft, Greenwich Time Columnist, at her home in Greenwich, Conn., Tuesday, Sept. 25, 2018.

My 11-year-old George is on a town football league and all hell is breaking loose.

First off, no one in the Haft family has ever had anything to do with football. We are the family that shows up to the Super Bowl party and eats all the football-shaped cookies without watching the game. More times than not we don’t even know who’s playing but the food is great — so we do what Hafts do best: we eat.

Our kids have never done the flag football thing, in part because we didn’t understand what that even meant (along with follow-up questions regarding the national identity of the flag in question). We never joined the neighbors’ Sunday football games nor were we seen “tossing” a football on our autumnal “lawn” (which is already decimated by the rooting snouts of our potbellied-pigs. It’s more like a front mud flat.)

My husband Ian’s family observed Shabbat when he was growing up, which meant he could not play sports on Saturdays — which meant he did not play team sports at all. If any of our children asked Ian to toss a football — well, they just wouldn’t ask.

I grew up in Brooklyn where kids played stick ball in the back alleys and sold morning papers. Well, not really, but football just wasn’t my deal — even though my father’s mood was directly correlated to how the Giants’ season was going every fall.

Enter George, age 11, bulked up from pandemic snacking, shoulder-length hair he refuses to cut and no interest in sports whatsoever. He was the kid who played “Titanic” on the playground and licked the ice during hockey tryouts.

“I’m just not a sports-y child,” George has complained to me over and over again — but like all good Greenwich parents, we don’t listen. We’ve tried every sport under the sun, convinced there must be something that would catch on at some point. The amount of barely-used sports equipment that stands in a toppling pile in our garage looks like a cross between the Tower of Pisa and a bad example of brutalist architecture.

It just sits there looking at me as if to say: “You are the kind of parent who starts things and doesn’t finish them, thus failing to teach your children perseverance, commitment and patience, which are essential life skills. So basically, you failed.”

During the spring, George had a playdate with a hardcore football family and the dad suggested tackle football as a potential fall sport.

“Let’s get that extra bulk to work for us!” he told me excitedly, practically licking his chops.

His enthusiasm was infectious, and so on a wing and a prayer I signed George up for tackle football, despite outrage from everyone on Ian’s side of the family — who were all convinced George would be maimed by a concussion or worse. But I had been told the equipment was excellent, that tackle was a great sport to start in middle school and that the town of Greenwich rocked the football league like none other. So I signed George up and we were assigned the Cos Cob Crushers, although we live nowhere close to Cos Cob and the name “Crushers” did little to assuage the worries reverberating throughout the Haft family.

“We come from a line of scholars,” Ian told me. “Not Crushers.”

Regardless, I kept at it — because perseverance and discipline are the building blocks of good character — and we started to attend practices even though we were always late, never had the right equipment and often had had an argument on the way over.

But then last Thursday I received the following text from a mom with a child on my 11-year-old George’s football team.

“Hi Claire, Ques: is there any chance George’s water bottle accidentally had wine in it?! The kids mentioned it (and didn’t want to get G in trouble) but not sure (and no judgment) but thought you would want to know.”

The emoji following her text was the “grimace emoji” which, if you look it up on Google, is defined as “a face with its mouth open and stretched out to reveal clenched teeth representing nervousness, embarrassment, tenseness or awkwardness.”

Ian had picked George up from practice that day in his gurgling Corvette, and this text came in simultaneous to Ian’s which simply read: “You gave George alcohol in his football thermos.”

After deposing George, I started to piece everything together and found myself writing the following email to the head coach, league organizer and my friend with the subject line “wine in water bottle.”

“Ummmmm — apparently my son George Haft who is on the juniors team was eager to report to everyone yesterday that I put wine in his water bottle. So here’s what happened: and I can’t even believe I’m writing an email, I had dealcoholized red wine thrown in the back of the car and all we had was old Pellegrino and George was having a fit because he didn’t have a Gatorade so we improvised by putting a little bit of the dealcoholized ‘grape’ in with his water — But George KNEW that this was not wine he just wanted a flavor … and so he took great joy in spreading word of my atrociousness because he is mad at me right now because I have made him start a new school. … But I am so sorry for the confusion. I imagine that’s one for the book …

See you tonite, … I am GLAD to report George can’t walk today due to the awesome strenuousness football practice …”

Ian, who had been cc-ed (because I was now convinced a Corvette was exactly the kind of car a parent who puts wine in their kid’s water bottle would debut in the pick-up line) responded to my email with: “This is the funniest thing you have done in a while. You must write about this.”

“Who even drinks dealcoholized wine?” my friend quipped, concerned that no one would believe it.

I do — but that’s a story for another time.

Claire Tisne Haft is a former publishing and film executive, raising her family in Greenwich while working on a freelance basis on books and films. She can be reached at Ctisne@surgiscapital.com.

Claire Tisne Haft is a former publishing and film executive, raising her family in Greenwich while working on a freelance basis on books and films. She can be reached through her website at clairetisnehaft.com.