Sports Make Life Worth Living
Watching the AFC Championship Game, when Peyton Manning finally wiped that “Manning Family Adversity Puss” look off his face and the Colts started to figure the Patriots out, I was calm. Preternaturally calm. When the Pats defense went from swarming the Colts like the Army of the Dead routing Sauron’s boys at Minas Tirith to getting pushed around like American Indians (sorry to be politically incorrect, the Native Americans were great warriors and all, but they did start out in Plymouth and ended up in San Mateo), I should have been throwing up in my mouth. But instead there was one thought I just couldn’t shake.
That games like this one, win or lose, are the reason I’m a sports fan. Maybe it’s because I was watching the game with my brother Jack that I had this epiphany, but I’ll explain that later.
This is why we lift all them weights. This is why we spend weeks pouring over mock drafts. This is why we watch the preseason NIT. This is why we check the first round leader board from the Greater Milwaukee Open. This is why we stay up late to see the end of a rain-delayed Red Sox-A’s game in April. Because every once in a great while you get rewarded by getting to witness a game as great as that. And if you’re lucky, a team you love is involved in it.
If it’s possible for a grown man to love a thing, then I love the New England Patriots, and I always have. I was an impressionable little kid back when it when it meant something to be a Celtic or a Bruin. And everyone always loved the Sox, especially me. But without a doubt, I grew up in a Patriots house. And that was at a time when the Pats were a laughingstock admitting you were a fan was equivalent to saying “K-Fed‘s music really speaks to me.”
The first sporting event I ever went to was when Jack and our brother Bill took me to a Pats game in 1976, and I was hooked. Not to go all “Wonder Years“, but you know how you remember everything about the first schoolgirl you had a crush on? How she wore her hair or the way her voice sounded, or the first time you instant messaged her MySpace page? I remember everything about my first Pats game. To this day I can’t watch a guy puke beer and hot dogs in a dirt parking lot without getting all wistfully sentimental about that particular coming-of-age moment.
Hell, yeah, I’m disappointed the Pats lost. The only people who think you love a team more when they lose than when they win wear suspenders with matching bow ties. Winning beats the snot out of losing every single time. But Sunday was one of those days that makes me goddamned sorry for the people who don’t love sports. I know some people like that, and I honestly can’t imagine what their lives must be like without moments like Sunday’s game.
My Beautiful Trophy Wife is heavily involved in musical theater. And it shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone to learn that very few guys in that world give a flying crap about the ups and downs of a football team. They can tell you who played what character in what production at which community theater, but to a man they couldn’t tell Matt Light from Kelvin Kight. I’ve got nothing against that. Hey, whatever puts lead in your pencil. It’s just that I’ve been to parties with these people, and I have no idea what to talk to them about.
This past weekend, a female friend and her husband invited me to a party. I’ve barely met him, and literally knew no one else there. But I did know that he’s Red Sox obsessed (I could probably steal the guys identity using the password “yankeessuck” for everything in his life) and I expected their friends to be the same way. Jackpot. I spent the whole night talking to complete strangers about Joel Pineiro and JC Romero and had a blast. Again, what the hell do non-fans have to talk about?
Being a sports fan is central to every important relationship I have in my life, even my Sweet Irish Rose and our little Tax Deductions. Every morning while I’m waiting for the school bus with our older son, he and I catch up on how the Pats, the Sox or Tiger Woods are doing. It’s the only thing that saves him from hearing about my dead-end job or me listening to “Star Wars: Battlefront for X Box” stories.
This is especially true with me and Jack, who raised me to be a Pats fan. Last April, he ran a cable out to his back deck and we watched the NFL Draft over beers and cigars. Since I had studied up and Jack has enough innate knowledge about each year’s draft class to make Mel Kiper quit his job and join the circus, we watched the entire broadcast and never ran out of stuff to talk about. The next day, I was talking to a buddy about it and he said “Wait…you didn’t actually watch the draft did you?”
“Um…just the first six hours” I said. Outside. In the 40 degree cold. And I couldn’t have had a better time.
All this kind of hit home with me in the week before the Colts game. Jack was supposed to come over my place to watch the Divisional Playoff against San Diego. But the call came in the morning saying he had had a heart attack. Not a Fred Sanford, clutching your chest “I’m coming to join ya, ‘Lizabeth” job. But the kind where you generally feel what the doctors call “like crap” and a few hours later you’re at Beth Israel with a stint in your artery.
Now a normal well adjusted person, the kind who can balance the important issues in life like work, family, musical theater and “Star Wars: Battlefront” would, in a situation like this, use the dreaded “P” word. That a scare like this really puts something as insignificant as a football game into…perspective. That sports are entertainment, a nice little diversion, but nothing more.
Which is pure, unfiltered bullshiat. NFL football was never more important than it was on that day. I talked to Jack in the afternoon, and he was just glad there was a TV in his room so he could watch the Chargers game. Not five minutes after the Pats pulled the game out (and nearly put me in the cardiac unit with him), he called me. And while he sounded like James Caan at the end of “Brian’s Song”, he was feeling great because the Pats won. The next day I visited him, and we spent about 10% of the time talking about what the doctors had to say, and 90% talking Patriots. If we were musical theater people, do you think for one second we would’ve spent the afternoon breaking down and analyzing the last act of “Les Miz”?
You can keep “perspective”; I wouldn’t trade times like this Patriots playoff run for anything. And I’m glad I’ve got people in my life who think the same way. Get well, Jack. The Pats have two first rounders. But maybe we’ll cut back on the cigars this year.