ready for some football?

There's a football game (of sorts) on in the next room this Monday night, but given that I know what false starts, fumbles, and missed opportunities look like, I've long since wandered away. That's just the kind of fan I am.

It's not as if I grew up in Texas, or even in a place with a good team. Here, we first had a lousy team and then no team at all. Even my high school team was terrible, and had been for years. It's surprising that I care at all. Bad teams don't tend to inspire interest in a sport-- unless there's something else there. For me, that something else was my mother, and she watched the Cowboys.


I'm not sure where her interest came from, but she certainly made it known. We spent every Fall Sunday with Landry and Staubach, Dorsett and Johnson. To this day I think of replacement QB Danny White, who's now 54, as "that young kid" so strong was my mother's influence and the memory of that time. I was a quiet kid, but I spend the fourth grade arguing with the boys about the NFL. What could I have possibly been talking about? I've no idea, but I'm sure my mom was right.

So for me, football isn't tailgaiting, it's TV. It's the muffled background noise of the crowd and the whistles and the inevitable nap through the second quarter of the three o'clock game. It's chili in the living room with blankets on the floor to make sure we don't ruin the carpet. It's growing up having an opinion about sports when not all girls did, a habit that opened the door to many friendships and much fun.

And it's more than that, too; it's actually the game. While it doesn't match hockey for taking out vicarious aggressions, there's still something satisfying to me about the tackle or the sack, something beautiful in the thrill of a well-executed play. Having done my time in Green Bay, I've earned my claim to the Packers, and I watch Favre with an interest that's strong enough to make me believe that driving to Green Bay by way of Cedar Rapids and back again the next day wouldn't actually be insane if it would mean getting to see him play. I didn't actually get to do that, thank goodness, but I wanted to. I guess that's the kind of fan I am.