Barbara shares how her father instilled a love of the game, though organized teams at that time did not allow for female players.<\/p>\n
“I should have been born a boy,” Barbara quips.<\/p>\n
Still, she found a way. As it turns out, the Pahl family was the only one in the neighborhood that owned a football and other equipment; and so, Barbara was invited to join the boys for backyard games.<\/p>\n
What position did you play?<\/p>\n
“Quarterback,” she says, grinning at the fond memory. “I had the ball, so I got to play quarterback. I was the only girl.”<\/p>\n
Barbara went on to attend Monroe High School in St. Paul, where her father’s previous Marines teammate, Martin Norton, served as principal. Richard also attended Monroe and shined on the football field as a right guard (he was inducted into the school’s athletic hall of fame last year), but he and Barbara never crossed paths during high school.<\/p>\n
It was nearly 10 years later when they met at a mutual friend’s New Year’s Eve party.<\/p>\n
“I was at the party with someone else,” Barbara tells me, laughing. “But that didn’t last long.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Barbara shares how her father instilled a love of the game, though organized teams at that time did…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":663110,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2073],"tags":[7,233,259,2529,6383,6384,1025,6,234],"class_list":{"0":"post-663109","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-minnesota-vikings","8":"tag-football","9":"tag-minnesota","10":"tag-minnesota-vikings","11":"tag-minnesotavikings","12":"tag-news-community","13":"tag-news-community-stories","14":"tag-news-index","15":"tag-nfl","16":"tag-vikings"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/115858047251362896","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/663109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=663109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/663109\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/663110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=663109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=663109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=663109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}