Is it Football Season Already?

Sunday night saw a barrage of postings and status updates on facebook about football season, and what everyone was doing in relation to it.

Football season vs the Walking Dead

As the date approached, I had a few friends counting down the weekends until football season the way I count the days until the next season of The Walking Dead. Good on them, that they finally have something to do on Sundays besides church and hanging out with friends.  Now they can hang out with their television and watch overpaid athletes grapple for a ball on a field in front of a live audience.

Sports fan adjacent

Maybe I wasn’t indoctrinated into the culture at an early enough age. My mother was no fan of any sport, American or otherwise, so the influence wasn’t there. My father, when we did see him, was into sports, but he was more a fan of soccer. In the eighties, televised coverage of that sport was almost nonexistent. So if we weren’t watching it in person, or playing it on the field, it wasn’t being watched at all.

He liked the NY Mets, and he took us to baseball games all the time at Shea Stadium, but he didn’t watch the games on TV (or maybe I just don’t remember him watching).

The only football game I remember actively watching at any time was the Super Bowl in 1986 and again in 1990 when the Giants played. My dad rooted for the NY Giants, therefore I rooted for the NY Giants. It was cool. He bought T-Shirts, we really got into it. There was a party at the house of one of my father’s friends in NY. There was food and good times, and to a kid (as I was at the time), that was a big deal.

The Super Bowl Holiday

To me, the Super Bowl is the sport equivalent of Thanksgiving.  A sport holiday where one gathers with friends and/or family to eat copious amounts of food and talk trash at a television once a year.

I wasn’t a big sports watching fan in high school.  I was on the Varsity Fencing team.  Fencing isn’t a team sport the way football, baseball, lacrosse, field hockey and soccer are team sports. You don’t get crowds cheering in the stands. My close circle of friends (mostly female) were not into sports. We had our minds entrenched in academia.  

Football and the scholastic social scene

I attended some of my high school home football games, and going to the homecoming game was almost compulsory.  But I attended a private prep school in New England. It wasn’t Friday Night Lights up in there.

Besides, going to the game was more about the social scene and to hang out with friends outside the classroom than the actual game. I can’t even remember if our team was any good.

I didn’t catch football fever on the college level my first go round because I went to a college with a Gopher as its mascot. You can be assured I was too ashamed of the mascot to work up any enthusiasm or semblance of school spirit. It was almost poetic justice that all the teams sucked too.

I transferred out of there to a local state school, but by that point I couldn’t have cared less about the school activities. I was too depressed about having had to move back home with my mother.

No football at home

mr horrible, for all his other shortcomings, was not a sports fan and he often looked down his nose at anyone who was. He abhorred watching any televised sport. In our 14 years of marriage the only Super Bowl we watched together (meaning one he cared to watch) was this past 2013 Superbowl. We were getting divorced, I was moving to Texas and taking the kids with me. And it suddenly dawned on him that it would be the last time he’d have the opportunity to watch one with us. Forget the other 13 missed opportunities, those don’t count I suppose? Whatever. 

Basically, watching football at home never was a thing.

Don’t come between a Texan and their football season

I have contemplated getting into it now. People around these parts seem real fanatical about their teams. I could make like the locals and root for the Dallas Cowboys, but it seems so half-assed. I’d basically be jumping on the bandwagon with no real conviction about the team. I have no ties or affiliation to teams where I have lived previously as an adult. And no ties to the teams from New England where I grew up.

People in Texas are either real into the local teams, or super gung-ho about representing the team from their home state if they were not born and raised in Texas. Being a football fan is practically a competition sport in Texas.

In the end I am left feeling very meh about it all. Sundays will be the same as always. Any football watching will be purely coincidental.