Are You Ready for Football?

Football season is upon us once more.  It brings with it fun food, camaraderie and a party atmosphere.  We watch football at our house but it is with a laissez-faire attitude more often than not.  It hardly takes precedence over everything else going on at the time.  Sometimes it serves merely as a background to whatever else is happening.  There have been times when a game is on, the sound is muted and music is playing.  I enjoyed many blissful years of existence with a man whose one and only sport was--me!  Eventually, the day came when he, too, was bitten by the football bug and became interested in actually watching the game.  This has always been perfectly okay with me.

I grew up in a household where sports where not in the picture.  This must sound unbelievable to the multitude of rah-rah sports fans in America, I'm sure.  Not one of us played any sport during our school years nor did we ever have the desire to do so.  We had our friendly games of softball and badminton but for fun only, not with the must-win mentality that dominates the American psyche.  Somewhere along the line, probably in college, my brother started watching football and that was the spark which ignited the flame of interest in our home.

My dad began to check out a game here and there and very shortly, my scholarly father developed a passion for football!  He watched the games in his own particularly dear fashion.  My dad was a gentle man, a man not prone to yelling or screaming.  When he saw an excellent play executed on the field, he would clap his hands and say things like, "good play".  It was the funniest thing but so very like him to show his appreciation in this way.

For about two seasons I really tried to watch and make some kind of sense of the game.  Every game looked the same to me and I found the constant halting of them every few minutes extremely annoying.  I had always wondered for the longest time how on earth a one-hour game could go on for three hours!  Now I knew.  I learned names of many of the quarterbacks and could match them to the right team.  I began to recognize coaches.  I could never understand why the coach whose team was winning always looked as grim as the coach whose team wasn't.  I suppose their mindset is stuck in "it ain't over 'til it's over!"

I got pretty good at matching teams with the correct city.  I came to develop a small appreciation of helmet design and would, in fact, use this criteria to select my favorite team (totally non-interested-in-sports-female that I am).  For the record, my favorite helmets (and teams) have always been the Seattle Seahawks and the Cincinnati Bengals.  Awesome helmets; wouldn't you know the same person designed both teams' helmets?

I've long since given up trying to figure out the plays and positions of football.  Who cares?  I surely don't.  However, a comment from John Madden uttered several years ago gave me one of my best laughs.  The Dallas Cowboys were playing against whomever and John Madden said, in all seriousness, something to the effect of "if Dallas is going to come up from behind, they've got to start getting some penetration".  This struck me at the time as being very funny and I came to appreciate football commentary as a great source of amusement.