My Mother's Curse - Football

This entry has only a tiny bit to do with hitchhiking in France. Still, I must get it out there, get over it, put it to rest.

My mother spent the first day of my life listening to the Rose Bowl game (USC 7 – Duke 3) on the radio (no TV yet). She’d planned it that way, scheduling her C-section and me for the 31st of December.

A lifelong fan, especially of OU, she was thrilled when I was hired by Dave and Dave who did most of the artwork for the NFL. The picture is the program for the 2nd AFL vs NFL contest, not yet named Super Bowl. I only did paste-up for that since I was on vacation from the Metropolitan Opera Company at the time (stage-managing, not singing).

Because I liked the Daves, and they loved football, I developed an appreciation for the artistic side of football (yes, it’s in the photos of guys upside down in mid air or zonked flat out on the ground), but also an impatience with the importance people gave (give) it.

I happily ignored football for years after the Dave era.

It began creeping in again when we (Thrim and I) worked at the University of Colorado during the time McCartney was coaching the Buffs and won (or tied for, depending on your perspective) the national championship. Phone conversations with my mother became non-confrontational as we talked about football – OU still, of course; UCLA, Colorado, and the Rams (Los Angeles’s team until 1994).

Yesterday I watched the Pro Bowl, comic relief between the regular season and the Super Hyped Super Bowl. There were no riots afterwards, nor will there be for the Super Bowl next week, unlike soccer in other parts of the world where fans think a win or a loss is an occasion to burn, riot and steal.

The first soccer match I ever saw was on a cold morning at a hostel in France. Warming up in the kitchen with hot cocoa, I looked out the window and saw two teams running around the field next door in shorts! Shorts! While I was freezing inside a warm room.

This was, again, in the dark ages. Soccer was almost unknown in America. I watched in awe and never forgot those hardy young men running back and forth like basketball players.

When I rank the athletic ability of players of various sports, first comes basketball, then soccer, then football.

It’s amazing to see a 280 lb linebacker do a somersault or a backflip, or go skidding across the grass to be buried under a thousand pounds of the other team then get up to do it again. Weird, eh?

Oh, at the bottom of my ranking is baseball, the sport where men stand around in longjohns and watch the catcher and pitcher throw the ball around.

Now, on to the Super Bowl and then no more football for a long, long time. Go, Lakers!