I can't say I come from a long line of sports fans, but, inspired by Sunday's Super Bowl LX broadcast, I'm going to talk about sports and my family for this week's Sunday Salon. I don't know whether my father followed any sports, because he died about two weeks after my seventh birthday.
I have a very fragmentary memory of attending a game in the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, with my mother and father and my uncle, dad's brother, and his wife. What I remember most is that I really did not see much of the game, because it was apparently exciting enough that people kept standing up, and what I saw most was their backsides! I was five or six, and I didn't know a thing about football.
My mother was a football fan, and she shared that enthusiasm with our next door neighbor on London Road, Mrs. Baker, on the south side of Jacksonville, Florida. They would gather either at our house or our neighbor's house and watch the games on Sunday.
My brother was on his high school football team and track team, but other than that, I don't know that he particularly followed any sports. I don't much remember him at home watching games. In our neighborhood, we had our own sports. We were a motley crew playing basketball in a neighbor's driveway, with participants ranging in age from six to nineteen, and in stature from three or four feet to over six feet. I also played baseball with other friends, usually a small game in the street, or "flyers 'n' grounders" with a friend.
In summer in the 1950s, I would go over to my grandmother's house, in the next block from our house, and we would watch baseball. I latched onto the Brooklyn Dodgers -- yes, they were still in Brooklyn at the time -- as my team, and they have been ever since.
When I was in high school, I would often attend games, and enjoyed watching my friends on the team play, and also enjoyed the social contact at the games. I was a member of the "intellectual elite" of the school, and a bunch of us would gather at the games and make up pseudo-erudite cheers: "Progress! Progress! Ambulate over the turf!" And such as that. We enjoyed the word play; other students looked at us like we were weird. Which we were.
Football at my college in the 1960s was a very big deal. Florida State University had a great team and a great coach, Bobby Bowden. My boyfriend (who became my husband in 1971) and I attended many FSU home games. At one game, it rained and rained. Despite having on our London Fog raincoats, we were eventually drenched to the skin!
I married a sports fan. He enjoys watching football, baseball, tennis, the Olympics, and auto racing. I have shared that enjoyment with him. We used to like watching golf, but since the PGA made some decisions we consider questionable, we have dropped golf from our watchlists. One day, for his birthday, I bought tickets to a rugby game at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, where I was a student at the time, having gone back to college at the age of 60. The game was an international contest, the United States team v. Jamaica. There were several UNF graduates on the U.S. team. We got a good dose of just how weird rugby is!
My husband also enjoys basketball. I can't stand it. It's silly.
For a time, when our city, Jacksonville, Florida, finally was awarded an NFL franchise in the form of the Jacksonville Jaguars, we had season tickets. We were there at the founding in 1995 and for about five years afterward. We went to an organizational meeting of the Jaguars Boosters, where a Green Bay fan came and spoke to us: "You're gonna get crazy!" He was right. But my arthritis started presenting mobility problems, and we stopped going to the games.
We have since enjoyed watching many games on television. This football season, we watched the playoffs intently, as the Jaguars became the Division Champions (AFC South), but were eliminated when they lost to the Buffalo Bills. The team had made amazing progress from 2024's season to 2025's with coach Liam Coen. We're anticipating even more progress for 2026's football season.
I have not found any professional sports team members among my family, nor even any amateur players. Nor have I found any sports-team members among my family members who attended college, except for my father, who played Lacrosse for the Naval Academy.
We enjoy being spectators, and at times making a family occasion out of the viewing. For this year's Super Bowl, we had our older daughter and her husband over. We had munchies -- cold cuts and cheese, veggies and dip, chips and dip, and pie and mini-cupcakes. The game itself was not the most exciting Super Bowl ever. All the excitement came in the second half, when the New England Patriots finally got on the scoreboard, but the Seattle Seahawks won, 29-13. One thing that astonished me is how young the Patriots quarterback is -- 22. Out there on that field, he looks like not much more than a child! Of course, I'm 78, so they all look young to me!
#SundaySalon
No comments:
Post a Comment