Thank God for the Superbowl!

My college, The U.S. Air Force Academy, used punishment to force me to like football. Football games at The Academy were mandatory. You were forced by the ruling dictatorship to go to the cold-ass games, in a giant open-air stadium, in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in the middle of November. At the game, as a freshman, you were forced to do the number of pushups equal to the number of points the home team had every time they scored. If you skipped the game? You were given fifteen “tours” (I don’t remember the number), which consisted of marching around in a twenty-five meter square with a fake plastic gun for fifteen hours, an hour at a time. It sounds really stupid in retrospect, but at the time… it was really stupid. This “mandatory fun” created more animosity in my heart for the game of football. Especially for “Air Force Falcon Football,” which I still have an especial hate for, except for when then play Army or Navy because, well f#@% those guys, am I right?

Somewhere between college graduation and reluctant middle-aged manhood, a passion for the game grew. I now completely claim the mantle of being a basic bitch-man who loves football. It probably started at the advent of the modern Seattle Seahawks, which as a Washingtonian, I claim as my hometown team. I would like to pretend I cared very much in 2005, when the Seahawks went to their first Superbowl, but that would be a bandwagon lie. I enjoyed it for sure, but I probably didn’t check in until the second round of the playoffs that year.  The real love started with the Russell Wilson era, when suddenly, after my childhood of the Seahawks being thoroughly mediocre, they were now consistently good. Slowly, a spark became a flame, and I started watching games during the regular season. I even started paying attention to what other teams were doing. After the Seahawks won it all in 2014. Bandwagon be damned! I was fully on board.

This year though, I watched more football than my entire life combined. There are two reason why: First, my brother gave his older dead-beat brother(me) his YouTube TV password. This gave me access to so many games and so much commentary (why am I watching the commentary? I just saw the whole game with my own eyes?). Second, and the most obvious one, is the pandemic. I, like many others, found beautiful solace and distraction in watching game after game in the year 2020. I didn’t only watch every Seahawks regular season game; I watched all the other games and relished those hours of competitive escapism. Any moment, to keep my mind off the crazy world and time of 2020, was a welcomed respite. Hey my wife had “The Housewives,”(New York, New Jersey, Orange County, Atlanta, Potomac, Beverly Hills, Salt Lake? Schenectady? Chattanooga? Walla Walla? I lose track), I had football. So forgive me if Sunday, Monday, Thursday and sometimes Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays for the last four months, I was fully engrossed in football.

I look forward to this Superbowl for several reasons. First, Iook forward to watching the only player older than me still play. It allows me to fantasize that in another life, where I was supremely talented and much more athletic and dedicated than I was in this life, I could still be out there playing. Thank you Tom Brady, for keeping the dream alive for us 43 year-olds). Next, I am relishing the fact, that as a pilot, normally I could bet that I would be working during the Superbowl. Instead of catching glimpses on the TVs of airport bars, I will be watching on my own TV in my own home. My own home! I am excited to watch the game in my own home. Alone! This cannot be overstated, because of the pandemic, there is no social pressure to be watching the game with twenty or thirty of my closest pseudo-friends, with only half-of them caring what happens. Finally, I am looking forward to the four hours of escape from the real world, that I have missed so much for the last two weeks. So as 2020 has become 2021, I give thanks to football for helping me survive the crazy year that was with supreme hope and optimism that I will never have to watch as much football again.