My Complicated Relationship With Football

Decades into my study of football in all of its forms, I confess.  I still don’t understand the game.

I was born into football country.

My father was a senior at Notre Dame – we lived in South Bend, Indiana for the first year of my life.  I grew up in an Irish-Catholic town in Connecticut. Fealty to the Giants and/or Patriots came with the territory.

Falls and winters were a haze of Saturday afternoon shouting matches with the television. I remember once saying to my dad “Why do you care so much? You don’t even go to school there anymore!”

That joke, as they say, was on me.

In high school I had a crush on the boy next door. He was the quarterback of the local high school’s football team, so naturally I went to every game. He taught me how to throw a football in the middle of our dead-end street. That memory is a heady flashback of his closeness, the scent of the laundry soap in his clothes and the sweat on his skin as he stood behind me, holding my arms and moving my hands over the ball, demonstrating how to put my fingers on the laces. Over the football season I learned to track his stats; yardage and completions started making sense to me.

Later, when I attended Notre Dame myself, I was a student manager for the football team for two years. Knowing what was going on in the game was essential to my job. And yes, after I graduated and even now 100 years later, I understand why my father yelled at the television so much. In fact, a few years ago when the “Bush Push” happened, so many ND grads were gathered in a living room in Los Angeles screaming in front of a large screen TV that we nearly started an earthquake. At the very least, we made all of our babies cry.

Now my own child is playing football. Granted, it’s flag football, and he’s only six years old, but it’s football nonetheless.  Stewart coaches his team, and he’s really into it.  Tonight as we were discussing today’s game, he asked me “Did you see how organized the defense was today?”  Um, I thought.  No.  Decades into my study of football in all of its forms, I confess.  I still don’t understand the game.

It doesn’t matter if it’s flag football played by 6-year-olds, high school, college, or pro.  When the ball is snapped, I follow the ball.  I get faked out by a fake.  I don’t know how to predict whether the play will be a pass or a rush or a carry.  Or whatever.  I don’t know what the tight end’s job is, or what the safety is supposed to do, or when to be outraged that the middle linebacker missed a block.

(Side note:  I do, however, know that “roughing the snapper” is a bogus call.)

I ignore professional football for the most part because, as with all professional sports, it’s all about the money.  Team loyalty is fiction in that arena.  Why bother feeling anything for a specific group of paid players who are only playing for that team because that’s where they got the best deal?  That kind of back-room negotiation happens in college sports, too, but at least there you still find the concept of school spirit.  When I was a student at Notre Dame I took classes with the players, ran into them on campus, and drank beer with them at parties.  They were friends.  Who can say that about Ben Roethslesaoiueoubberger?

And so it is that like much of the world, I tune in to the Super Bowl with mild amusement, curious about the too-hyped commercials, the halftime show, and the winner of the party’s betting pool.  We attend a friend’s Super Bowl party every year.  It’s the only time we ever see them.  And this year they are hosting a chili cook-off.  That’s my kind of competition.