Hurt So Good
The Week Before The Super Bowl
My wife Emily likes the sounds of football on TV though she does not watch. She grew up with two boy cousins who used to visit on the weekends and watch football. For Emily, football provides comforting, nostalgic sounds.
Emily doesn’t watch because she suffers from chronic migraine and something called “convergence insufficiency,” a neurological spatial management disorder; her vision is 20/20 but tracking anything, words on a page or images on a screen, gives her an unforgiving headache. Looking at a big screen TV will make her nauseous within minutes.
If she could watch, I’m not sure she would, with all of the violence; but the brutality is muted when you listen. Instead, the audio—referee’s whistles and network theme songs—becomes part of the sensory fabric of our winter days. I made roast chicken and a banana bread this past Sunday as the Patriots advanced to the Super Bowl in the snow in Denver and the Seahawks outlasted the Rams in Seattle.
I haven’t cared about the NFL since the late ’80s, still, I have watched every Super Bowl since January 1980 and I was eight years old. That’s when the Steelers beat the Rams—my first encounter with heartbreak. The underdog Rams were so close to an upset—their quarterback Vince Ferragamo sure to be the next Joe Willie Namath—only to falter at the end as the Steelers won their fourth title in six years.
Hope for the best, expect the worst.
That summer, in the long-awaited sequel to Star Wars, Darth Vader turned out to be Luke Skywalker’s father and my parents’ marriage collapsed.
In the late ’70s, when I first became aware of the NFL there were two teams to choose from on the playground: The Steelers or the Cowboys. Yeah, there were factions that preferred the Raiders or the Dolphins, never mind locals wed to the Giants or Jets. But the two most popular choices were: Pittsburgh or Dallas and I chose the team with the silver stars on their helmets.
Immediately, I fell in love with Ed “Too Tall” Jones and the Doomsday Defense; Tony Dorsett, the swerve, the speed; Butch Johnson, third and long, with the six-shooter touchdown celebration, pew pew! And then there was their coach, Tom Landry, the ultimate father figure, synonymous with authority and discipline; distant, imperturbable, and unlike my father, silent, but always present.
I quickly learned that by choosing the team with the star on their helmets, I was making a statement, and choosing a side meant defending yourself. People questioned my character for the choice. What the hell was I thinking?
I already knew about loving and rooting for the bad guy. In the waning years of my parents’ marriage, my father was portrayed as the villain—by my mother and even his family. Nobody, it seemed, was rooting for him. But I did.
Each year, the Cowboys played well and lost in the playoffs. The worst of it came months after the Yankees lost the 1981 World Series to the Dodgers—the year my father left. (The Yankees, another front-running choice, though since I grew up in New York, more defendable.) That’s when Dwight Clark made his famous catch and the Cowboys blew the title game to the San Francisco 49ers. The play that would be aired ad nauseum for the rest of time, cornerback Everson Walls’ fingertips brushing the back of Clark’s jersey, a reminder of that exquisite defeat.
We watched the game at my father’s friend’s house upstate; Marty had Lipton iced tea mix at his house and Sabrett hot dogs. I cried on the drive home in the dark, my forehead pressed against the cool glass of the driver’s side window, replaying everything that had gone wrong.
I rooted for the Cowboys through Danny White years. In the fall of 1985, my freshman year of high school, the Bears humiliated Dallas 44-0 in week 11. The next day, I went to school wearing my Tony Dorsett jersey, Cowboys sweatpants, and—yup—Cowboy wristbands. To prove I was no chump.
Girls who didn’t know anything about football laughed in my face.
I balanced this front-running by rooting for the Jets, which of course only made things worse. Jets pain, peaking during their AFC championship game loss to the Dolphins in 1981, and the 1985 divisional round playoff loss to the Cleveland Browns, hurt too and is too unseemly to unpack publicly. It was also expected.
Before my mother remarried, we lived in an apartment complex and sometimes I’d watch the Jets with the father of a classmate from school. The kid lived with his mother and his dad probably liked the company. During halftime highlights, there was always a look at the Dallas highlights where Tom Landry wore an expression of pain, concern. My classmate’s dad liked the Jets and wished his son cared about football, too. He served me ginger ale and devil dogs, neither of which we had at my house.
My mother didn’t dissuade me from watching football but Sunday after Sunday, year after year, she couldn’t comprehend why I came so unglued. Why I had to be so dramatic.
“Why are you crying?” she’d say.
Catching a touchdown pass ranked up there with hitting a home run in my daydreams. Dunking came later. I was a skinny kid who loved playing pick-up football. In 8th grade, a group of us—we called ourselves the Scrub Football League—played outside every day during lunch period, no matter the weather. None of us were half as good as the best jocks in our grade, but we didn’t miss a day.
On days it wasn’t too cold, our science teacher, and my future high school baseball coach, Mr. Wulfhop, joined us as automatic qb. This was usually good news for me as I was a frequent target. There were usually five or six kids on a side, and everyone ran deep and hoped Wulf would chuck it to them. “Hit me, hit me, I’m open, I’m open!” everyone yelled at once. I caught more passes than I dropped, and Wulf kept looking for me.
I enjoyed nothing as much as making a tough catch or breaking one up.
Except hitting someone. I also liked hit, so long as I caught the pass.
After school we didn’t bother playing touch. One day, I chased my pal Gordy from behind when he juked me and I collided with Chris, coming from my right side, head-to-head. Although he was a much stronger kid—who had previously broken my nose in another collision—I was up first and ready to play the next down. It was less than an hour later before I found myself walking with another pal a few blocks away. He was saying, “How many times do I have to tell you? You got up, finished the game, we left, got something to drink and you keep asking me what happened and I keep telling you.”
I got the NFL Films Crunch Course videotape with a subscription to Sports Illustrated and watched it endlessly. If my baseball education meant books and reading, my understanding of football history was cinematic. The game is suited to film in a way that other sports are not and NFL Films was both shamelessly jingoistic and also cartoonish, self-mocking, and funny. My sense of the game, my football fantasies, were rooted in NFL Films as much as the games each weekend—the commanding voice of narrator John Facenda, and even more, the soundtrack provided by Sam Spence.
Crunch Course glorified big hits. Of course, I loved Ronnie Lott, the hardest-hitting safety of the era, but my favorite defensive player was Kenny Easley, a UCLA-alum who starred for the Seahawks, a team I cottoned to because my friend Don rooted for them. Easley was similar to Lott, but his team didn’t win titles, and Easley’s career was cut short by a kidney problem; he sued the Seahawks claiming the issue derived from improper medical treatment, and the case was settled in 1990.
The best hit I ever had was the kind I dreamt about. In an afterschool game at the local little league field, I blitzed a quarterback who had his back turned to me. I lowered my shoulder and drove through his hips, his body snapping back like I saw on NFL Films. It felt as sweet as hitting a ball on the right part of the bat.
I didn’t know the kid well but liked him. That that didn’t stop me from replaying the moment for years.
After my cousin graduated from Brown, she moved to Manhattan, and within a few years began dating Dave, the man she would marry. Dave did not share my family’s sensibilities. He said “y’all” and ate pb and j with the crust cut off. He’d gone to school in Texas—at SMU, and I proudly wore the Mustangs t-shirt he gave me—and rooted for the Cowboys. He watched every Cowboy game, it was a social affair for him, yet he never seemed punctured when they lost.
I thought he was the opposite of a die-hard but secretly envied his ability to not take any of it too seriously.
Dave and my cousin and their friends would get together annually in Central Park for a game of two-hand touch. My brother, sister and I were always invited, and I anticipated the games as if I were preparing for final exams. Come game time, the twentysomething yuppies didn’t know me like Mr. Wulfhop. I was just another putz yelling, “hit me, hit, I’m open, I’m open.” Some years I made some good catches, other years I stormed out of Central Park, raving like a madman to my siblings about how unfair the game had been, how stupid those yuppies were for nothing throwing me the ball.
I imagine they too looked at me and thought: Why?
By the time I got to college I’d discovered weed and no longer had the desire to hit anyone let alone tackle them. Long before talk of concussions, I’d had enough of the NFL. I’d quit the Cowboys already, after they fired Tom Landry in 1988. And though I kept an eye on them during their ’90s run, I could no longer publicly consider or identify myself in mixed company as a fan.
I had the Jets, who at least made losing perverse. The Neil O’Donnell Jets. The Rich Kotite Jets. The one-season before he was got good Pete Carrol Jets. J-E-T-S, Jets, Jets, Jets. During college, when the Jets fumbled a game-opening kickoff in an early season contest, my friend Henry packed a bong hit and said, “Well, boys, looks like we’re in for another long, stupid season.”
Bless the Jets, they never disappoint.
I’ve continued to follow football as a general sports fan but without emotional investment, which belong to the Yankees and Knicks. Still I watch, and Emily listens. My cousin is still married to Dave. They live in Houston and have been season ticket holders to the Texans since the team’s inception. He still gets up for games and still does not lose sleep no matter the outcome.
Last year, Kenny Easley and Mr. Wulfhop died. Easley was 66, Wulf, a decade older. Easley, laying back as free safety, surveyed the field, picking his spots to gamble for an interception or a bone-rattling hit. I didn’t watch him often, and he didn’t play very long, but I thought he had the best job in the world. I didn’t comprehend the cost—as a kid, why would I?
Mr. Wulfhop continued substitute teaching until last year. My nephew and niece knew him, a shrunken guy with a combover. But in 1984, he was someone who looked for me as I ran as hard as I could, and he threw me the ball, tight spirals that passed over my head, just ahead of me so that my outstretched hands could grasp the ball in time.
[Painting by Ellen Lanyon via The Art Institute of Chicago]
Artie Wulfhauf lived next door when I lived on Lake Oscawana. One of the nicest, gentlest men I’ve known, and very shy. He always had a beloved dog by his side.
Brings back the drama and dreaming. I appreciate the ease now of reading the bios of NBA players (my sport of choice), so I can choose who I think might be the ones to like.