Superbowl XLI was last Sunday, and I’m very happy to say that I wasn’t a football widow. Mostly it’s because I’m not married, but more importantly, it’s because I have recently fallen in love with the game.
I’ve never dated a die-hard sports fanatic, which I always saw as a good thing. But in the year-and-a-half that I’ve been dating my boyfriend, I’ve gained a new appreciation for the game of football. Scott is a life-long Giants fan. His dad has owned season tickets since before he was born, so you might say he’s never even had a chance to love any other team. He’s not the kind of guy that slaps on body paint and totes around an over-sized foam finger, but he loves his New York Football Giants. He follows their season like People Magazine follows Britney Spears. Unfortunately, between moving to upstate New York for college, and then to the west coast for work, there have been many years that he hasn’t been able to join his dad in Section 140, Row 16. No matter, his love for the Giants has never faltered—even during some of the darker years.
I knew Scott really liked me when he invited me to go to a game with him a few months after we began dating. I’d been to few high school and college football games before, and I’d even shot a few games from the sidelines as a stringer for a newspaper, but I’d never been to an NFL game. And this was going to be a good one: the Giants versus the Cowboys.
I, of course, immediately started thinking about what to wear (long johns under my jeans?) and what kind of snacks to pack (pb&j?); he immediately called his dad to break the news that he’d be going with me, instead of him.
My knowledge of football to this point was extremely limited. I don’t think I’d ever watched an entire game on TV, and I certainly didn’t know the positions or recognize any of the player’s names. But the more time Scott and I spent together, the more football was on the TV at my house, as well.
When Scott would watch a game, he’d tell me about what was going on—and why. “There’s a flag on the play. Did you see that big guy, number 85? He grabbed the other guy’s shirt. That’s called holding, and you can’t do that. They’re going to lose ten yards because of that.” He encouraged me to ask questions and made sure I understood the answers. “Oh, they’re letting the play clock run down and then they’re going to call a time-out, right?” “You got it, babe.”
After a month of Sundays, I was getting it.
