Last week, as my wife and I sat down to eat homemade pizza and watch Indiana play Oregon at the Rose Bowl, we shared the enthusiasm of thousands of Hoosiers who had waited 58 years for a bid to a championship game. Their regular season game had been a relatively close contest favoring Indiana 30-24, so coupled with all the media hype and build up, we thought this Rose Bowl could be a barnburner. Considering that Indiana still dedicates nearly two-thirds of its land to farming, the term barnburner means that we Hoosiers we take any notion of barns, or their destruction quite seriously.
So, my nervous tension found considerable relief within the first eleven seconds of the game when Indiana’s D’Angelo Ponds intercepted a pass on the first play and returned it for a touchdown, setting the pace for Indiana’s rout of the Oregan Ducks, 56-22. After multiple turnovers by Oregon, razor sharp pass completions by Heisman trophy recipient and IU quarterback Fernando Mendoza, a season marked by discipline and hard work paid off in more than Hoosier corn husks. Even if it took IU coach Curt Cignetti the entire game to find something to smile about, his trademark grimace turned upside down by game’s end, as did the lopsided score and performance. It was a win celebrated across the state of Indiana and in Atlanta where a sea of red IU shirts filled Mercedes Stadium.
Of course, I’m rubbing our win in here, building up to the final game next week, January 19th where we meet Miami for the college championship. It’s an exciting time for Hoosiers, a time when we allow ourselves to act out any number of odd behaviors while watching football in the confines of our living rooms. After all, we have buried our heads in some infertile football turf over the last five decades, waiting and hoping for a winning season, and we are ready to show the world Hoosier Daddy.
Watching the game last week, I have to admit I acted a little over the top. To show my support during the Indiana-Oregan game, I came off the couch no less than 117 times, resulting in three drink turnovers, and one personal foul to myself when I bit into a slice of piping hot pizza and burnt the skin off the roof of my mouth. Overwhelmed by my own enthusiasm, I also provided our family’s halftime entertainment with an embarrassing slow-motion re-enactment of wide receiver Elijah Sarratt’s incredible one-handed catch, a move that knocked over the three cameramen played by my grandchildren, resulting in my ejection from the living room until some semblance of order could be restored.
Obviously, it takes a lot of self-control for me to sit down on the couch for an entire sporting event, but I know a ton of men who do a lot of couch potato-ing, and not just when Indiana is playing but every Saturday and Sunday during football season. They are the marathoners of TV, ironmen who develop sofa sores and urinary incontinence watching hours and hours of pre-games and in-depth interviews. These husbands and fathers become talking heads of football – they have committed entire team rosters to memory and understand the religious significance of funky jive moves and signature handshakes in the end zone. One friend of mine knows his favorite player’s license plate number, and the meaning behind a Mayan symbol he had shaved into his head. He knows his pass patterns and sleeping patterns and where the guy went on his honeymoon. I’m not sure I really want to know anyone’s sleeping patterns, frankly, but apparently that’s very important to some fanatic fans.
I pick up on football passion mostly at the gym when I work out. I overhear unique football discussions among men who are not really there to work out at all, but who come into the gym to talk about football statistics, to stand around the weight machines and exchange what I would call “insignificant dust on the astroturf of knowledge.” Like a herd of hairy bisons, they mozy about, grazing on the latest data, milling around out on the plain of meaningless sports dribble. Periodically, they scan the gym to check on the herd and finally drift back out of the gym to greener pastures, home to their smart screens, where they will feed again until next day. Their conversations from the annuls of sports trivia will have no bearing on the world at large but will drift, as I said, out there on that i-cloud of astroturf dust.
Just the other day at the pull-up bar I caught wind of this conversation from two weight- lifters:
“Dude, did you see the pre-game show last Sunday?”
“Oh yea, wouldn’t miss it,” his partner added, “I didn’t know that Gericho Dunkirk pours protein powder all over himself before every game.”
“No way! isn’t that crazy? I heard he stretches, for like, seven hours before he goes on the field!”
“I thought they said eleven. I was watching another game on a split screen, so you could be right. You know QueLonte Long from the Boston Narwhals?”
“Yea!”
“Well, he made a heart sign on the field to his girlfriend and was penalized for using an emoji unbecoming of a football player.”
“Unbelievable!”
“No doubt! What was he thinking?!”
I hear this stuff all the time, and ask myself, what did any of that mean?
Well, good or bad, I was raised in a culture where participating in the sport favored watching the sport. I have old tapes still running in my head of my father saying, “don’t ever watch something you could be doing yourself,” so we kids were pressed to get off the couch and get out there, to just do it as encouraged by the Nike slogan.
Yet, there was a time back in 1967, when my father and a physician friend of his took us boys up to watch IU beat Purdue in Bloomington at Memorial Stadium, a game that cinched the Big Ten title and sent IU to the Rose Bowl in 1968. Suffice to say, times were quite a bit different then. Both teams mostly ran the ball, and trick plays like on-side kicks and flea-flickers were a regular part of the action. We boys, however, were ancy, so our fathers let us roam the stadium freely during the game, and we spent most of the time trying to get autographs, leaning out over a roped off area near the benched players.
Our dads didn’t worry where we were. It was just a different time, a safer time. Football stadiums were not the setting for billion-dollar franchises they are now. At halftime, when both college teams left the field to strategize, halftime entertainment consisted of a ten-minute marching band led by one dazzling baton twirler. Meanwhile, my brother and I left the stands and joined dozens of other boys in the Indiana end zone where we freely played our own version of football until the teams returned to the field.
Sometimes there were forty or fifty kids down there running around playing some loose form of tackle football, and usually there was more than one game going on at a time. We ran helter-skelter all over that end zone, tackling each other for no apparent reason, catching passes from some other game that might be going on right next to ours. We boys considered ourselves to be the national champions of our world – after all, we were in the stadium’s end zone! There were no losers – just kids who believed they owned halftime football until the real IU players came back out on the field.
I recently thought back about these wild pick-up game the other day after Indiana won against Oregon, after I finished jumping up and down like I’d just won the lottery. I thought about how we all become like little children when our team is winning, how it takes us back in time and makes us feel like we are all part of something amazing. Maybe that’s what those gym guys feel as they exchange player profiles and win-loss records.
When I was cut loose to run like a wild Banshee and join other boys in the IU endzone, the world slowed to a crawl and nothing mattered but being lost in our half-time entertainment, a pick-up game in the endzone of Memorial Stadium. We were just little buffalos then, boys with no records of anything, playing out in the field of football fantasies, dreaming we were playing with the big bisons, those Hoosiers who would soon run back on the field and show us, teach us, what it was like to never lose a game.