Seven years ago I wrote a piece for Huffington Post, titled, “Dissecting the Irreversibly Altered Brain of a Pro Football Fan.” It was an attempt to explain why I still watched football even though I wouldn’t allow my own child to play it.
Sunday night, after watching two games over The New York Times, a Bloody Mary, a nap, a book and a bourbon—I opened a bottle of wine, ordered some Thai food and set out to watch a third game, during which I decided I would try to explain why I still watch pro football even though the safety issues haven’t exactly been resolved—and furthermore, it’s getting late enough in the game that is my own life, that it’s probably time for me to stop running the ball.
A friend of mine is in his 70s, and he stopped watching sports on TV a few years ago for that very reason. “I’m running out of time,” he said, “and I have too much left to do.” Yet there I was on Sunday morning, telegraphing to my wife that it was Bucs vs. Chiefs tonight—Tom Brady vs. Patrick Mahomes, two names even she knows. As if she was going to make me watch Masterpiece Theater if I didn’t reserve the living room as my temporary man cave for the evening.
Here’s how it went down—the Thai food, the wine, and the game.
***
I think I’ve shared the excerpt from the HuffPo piece about why football meant so much to me as a kid; if you’ve read it, skip over it:
I was a kid before ESPN came along and injected sports into every home.
Our Hudson, Ohio home had music, so I took piano lessons. Dad was into antique cars, so I went to car shows. Both my parents were into horseback riding, so I did that. I didn’t know about sports, beyond the cultured-sounding “human drama of athletic competition,” which we saw some Sunday afternoons on ABC’s Wide World of Sports.
But when I was 11 years old, I suddenly and totally fell in love with football. I vaguely associate this cataclysm with a “math football” competition among the homerooms in fifth grade at McDowell Elementary. Playing for Mrs. Anderson’s Dolphins, maybe I figured that if football could make math fun, it could make everything fun.
It sure made reading fun. Every afternoon I rode my bike to the Hudson Public Library until I’d read everything they had on the NFL. I don’t remember checking the books out. I remember reading them in the library, and hearing in the silence the roaring echoes of real stories about magic men with magic names. Johnny Unitas. O.J. Simpson. Bart Starr. Jim Brown. Gayle Sayers. Joe Namath.
For a boy growing up in a WASPy little Ohio town where everyone was named Murray or Sullivan or Butler or Keane, these men’s names were as strange as anything from Tolkien. Curly Lambeau. Big Daddy Lipscomb. Bambi Alworth. Crazy Legs Hirsch. Roman Gabriel. Sam Huff. Ray Nitschke. Dick Butkus. Hell, Zeke Bratkowski!
I read about The Sneaker Game, the Heidi Bowl, the Ice Bowl, the Immaculate Reception, Wrong-Way Regal, Ghost to the Post, The Longest Game, the Sea of Hands, the Perfect Season and The Greatest Game Ever Played.
I gaped at the pictures of the sun-splashed September grass, the crisp-clear October air, the mud-caked men of November, the frozen granite fields of December and the Super Bowl palm trees of January.
It was all impossibly rich—and to me, impossibly beautiful.
Football doesn’t feel like that now, doesn’t look like that now. Football looks like a video game, played in stadiums that look like they’re part of the metaverse, on grass that doesn’t stain their uniforms. And the players look like supercharged robots, except when they’re writhing in agony or lying limp on the prescription turf.
Less than a minute into this game, Kansas City pounces on a fumble on the kickoff and scores the opening touchdown.
I’m bored already, and I know that if I drink enough of this wine I’m going to be doing what I normally do to keep things interesting: what I call, “Alzheimer’s Play-by-Play.” Since I don’t know or care to know most of the current players’ names, I announce the game from my armchair—noisily enough that my wife sometimes yells downstairs for me to keep it down—based on long past players from the two teams. So tonight, even though the starting quarterbacks are Mahomes and Brady and the leading receivers are Travis Kelce and Mike Evans, my wife might hear me shouting urgently:
“Dawson drops back, he’s looking left. Rolls to his right, and throws—Otis Taylor has it and gets out of bounds to stop the clock.” Even though Len Dawson died last month, at 87. (Because he chose to smoke.)
I haven’t been paying attention to the game. Somehow, Tampa Bay got a field goal, and it’s 7-3 Chiefs.
I grew up in Cleveland, a raw-hamburger-hearted Browns fan. I can’t root for them now, because they are now not only the losers that they always were, but sociopathic losers as well, having spent something like $250 million to acquire a quarterback who is a serial sex offender.
I used to like the Miami Dolphins, until Dan Marino retired and I realized I just liked Dan Marino. A Marino Jersey I bought in 1995 still hangs in the back of my closet. My wife can’t make me throw it away.
I don’t like any team, really, but here’s the order in which I like teams, most to least:
First, old teams that wear their old uniforms. Bears, Packers, Giants, Colts, Chiefs, Raiders, Cowboys and the like. Next, old teams that wear newish uniforms: Patriots, Vikings, Broncos, etc. Then newer teams who wear new uniforms. The Bucs have only been around since 1976, and they felt it was necessary to change their “creamsicle” orange uniforms to outfits of red, orange—and “pewter,” for crissakes. And last, the Washington Commanders.
Oh my God, Kansas City scored again, and I missed it. They’re up 14-3, with a couple minutes left in the first quarter.
When the Buccaneers were an expansion team in 1976, they lost all their games. They didn’t win a game until deep into their second season. After one of those many losses, Bucs’ coach John Mackay was asked about his team’s execution, and said, “I’m in favor of it.” Meanwhile, Chiefs coach Hank Stram was recorded during Super Bowl IV in 1970 exhorting his players nonsensically, “Just keep matriculating the ball down the field, boys!”
And, Patrick Mahomes just made a Harlem Globetrotters throw to put the Chiefs up 21-3.
He’s wonderful. And Tom Brady has been wonderful. But what does it matter? What does it matter, next to what made football meaningful in the first place: big working class boys playing their way off of the farms, the coal mines and the steel mills where their fathers toiled? What does it matter, next to the upstart AFL versus the establishment NFL, with the backdrop of Vietnam and civil rights in the 1960s? What does it matter, next to two rust belt teams going against each other in the mud, front of their proud and desperate fans, in 1979? What does it matter, next to Frank Gifford and Chuck Bednarik?
Doug Williams just hit Kevin House—apologies, Tom Brady just hit Mike Evans—with a touchdown pass to make it 21-10, Kansas City, midway through the second quarter.
Kansas City has the ball again, and I notice with pleasure that the Chiefs running back is wearing one of these high-tech helmets that’s so new-fangled, it’s retro. I bet he doesn’t even know he looks like little Mike Garrett, a star of Super Bowl I.
This country was so much more regional when I fell in love with football, and my idea of those regions was so romantic—which made many teams seem exotic. For a Cleveland boy, it was really something to see a bunch of guys from New Orleans, or Minneapolis, or San Francisco! (A player was traded to the Browns from the 49ers and our town was full of rumors that the guy was gay.) It was widely known that it was hard to play in New York, because of all the media coverage. (Whereas, the Green Bay Gazette Packers beat reporter could only be so hard on Lynn Dickey in a column on Monday, when he had to face Dickey in the locker room on Tuesday. And every Tuesday, for the next 14 years.) And there were teams you almost never saw, because they were no good—and again, because ESPN didn’t exist yet. So that even seeing the St. Louis Cardinals was a novel event during my childhood.
In those days, football for me was more than just a discovery, and a conduit for my young American curiosity. It was a comfort, a huge relief, a weekly respite: Something I cared about, when I was always in trouble with my parents, for not caring about school. Something that made me feel strong and athletic when I was getting beat up every day during recess, and every afternoon, walking home from school. A field of study, a real-life drama that felt like mine, growing up in a world that seemed organized, directed and defined by everyone else.
The Chiefs score again; they’re up 28-10 with a couple minutes left in the half. I’m getting sleepy and my computer is, too.
And I see I’ve answered my headline’s question, as thoroughly as I know how. I’d say this game is just about over, as far as I’m concerned.
But I’ll probably catch the Monday night game, tomorrow.
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