Spectator Sports
I’m sitting in my empty house, watching the BCS Championship Game. The fans are crazed–I have never heard a crowd with that energy level. It’s a paradox, watching sports alone. I get to concentrate on the game, but with no one to banter with, it’s hard to concentrate on the game. I learned to love watching football as a family when I was young, when my new dad moved my family to the DC suburbs and into Redskins country.
Football is all about the bond, to me. Dad taught me the plays, the penalties, the positions, and the formations. I showed him how interested I was by asking questions…”Was that a sack?” “What is the quarterback doing?” “Why did they call that penalty?” I may have been the only little girl in the metro area with a poster showing the ref signals for each penalty. I still know them all.
And more than one young man has been wooed by my ability to hang with the boys as a fan. (Not Joshua, though. I actually said to him one night: “Can you believe how lucky you are to come home to a girlfriend who is watching the World Series in lingerie?” He laughed, but was not appropriately appreciative, I assure you.)
As years go by, my family always comes back to the same formation, and we had a classic gathering last week for the end of the regular season. Sunday afternoon, huddled around the hearth and the television. Beers, chips, and lots of shouting. Sometimes cursing. We are great Sunday afternoon arm chair coaches. Mom and David, my brother, are the most avid, spending summers reading up on fantasy football picks and keeping up with four games at once on Red Zone. Unless it’s a Skins home game: then whoever is in town is huddled around the tow-able gas grill in the Gold Zone parking lot. OK, so it’s not high culture. But it’s warm, it’s engaging, and it’s a bond that always holds.
When Brett and I designed our “custody agreement,” I made the case for the bond, and somehow it held there, too. So from the Season Opener to the Superbowl, I get to have my kids for Sunday night football. That privledge has moprhed into having them all day Sunday, so Brett can meet his “significant work obligations.” (So many English professors work on Sundays, really.) Despite the fact that he needs it, Brett meets the “football clause” with disdain–Sundays are when I expose my kids to “artificially-induced football fandom,” “orgies of junk food and television,” and the like.
But Ben is ready to play. I started looking for a youth league near me, and was faced with a list of semi-pro, size-huge 9 year old boys. Until I found the JCC’s flag football league. Perfect! No tackling, and all Jew-boys. He should be safe for now, and I’m ready to be his chief spectator (and nail-biter).
I got a taste of chief spectator last week, when my kids and I went to the northern NYC suburbs to meet Joshua’s family. It is a slippery slope, I know, but we made the most of it, especially Ben. When we arrived, I went to lie down in Joshua’s sister’s lovely guestroom. I saw figures moving outside, so I curled up on the wide, white windowsill and watched my boy on his first sled ride. And his second, third, and fourth. Then he became the hero of Joshua’s six nephews by riding down the hill STANDING UP on the skimboard-style sled. Snowballs flew, and his smile was whiter and wider than the snow. Maybe he can play with the big boys after all. And I, like always, love watching.
