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My First Football Game - 1 Feb 2000
I've never been a very big Football fan. Like other non-sports oriented people,
I've just never seen the point of a spectator sport. To me the whole concept of
getting all worked up about some game that has nothing to do with your own life,
seems rather lacking in point.
This weekend though, my eyes were opened. Despite the fact that I had not
watched, cared about, or even paid attention to a report on football for the
last three years, this game excited me. The game was the superbowl. I watched it
along-side the other CBTR writers and Joe Lloyd.
In the past I had only watched the superbowl for the new beer commercials, and
spent the time that the game was being shown, playing cards with a nearby person
who was also disinterested. This year, my fellow couch occupants were all
interested in the game, and the commercials were lacking creativity (although,
the commercial with the cat-herders was great), so I gave in and tried to watch
the game. As I watched, my friends patiently and willingly explained the rules
and strategies of the game, pointing out the subtleties of the violent spectacle
before me.
Suddenly, in the midst of all the talk of first-downs, place-kicks, and
two-point-conversions, I lost myself in the game. My sympathy for the under-dog
turned into an affinity for the Tennessee team. The commercials stopped being a
source of entertainment, and became a time for discussion on the present
situation of the game: What should the favored team do now? What's the history
of that star player? What was up with that last play? and so on.
By the end of the third quarter, I was fully engrossed in the game, cheering
when MY team scored, frowning when the opposition balked them, and yelling at
the TV when I felt that bad decisions had been made. When the last few seconds
were playing out, I held by breath along with every football fan in the nation,
and watched as the ball fell short of the end-zone by what looked like inches
(this was later shown in the replay to be about two feet). I felt a certain new
camaraderie with my friends as I watched their reactions. I watched Ben leap
into the air celebrating the money he had against the spread, at the same time
Joe fell to the floor and groaned audibly about the dinner he had on Tennessee.
Holding his hands out in front of his shoulders, Ben commented that the next day
the Tennessee newspapers could print (actual size) how much they had lost the
superbowl by.
I can't say that I'm going to start watching football on a regular basis. In
fact, I probably wont see another game until next year's superbowl, but I can
say that I have become a football fan. That game brought me closer to my friends
and showed me parts of each of them that I had never seen before. This is called
'team spirit' and even in my days of announcing high school basketball, I had
never really seen what it meant to posses this spirit. I get it now... I finally
get it.
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