Our hour was up, and I happened to mention the Bears game as we walked off the court.
My tennis partner smothered the endorphin glow by barking that responsible people ought to stop watching pro football, because -- well, because it's simply bad in just about every way.
Intellectually, I didn't disagree. Several years ago, I added football to the list of things that never should have been invented: porn, boxing and booze.
Still, I love football.
"Get over it," my partner said.
My tennis partner, and all the other tennis partners who we're hearing from in the conversation around the new film Concussion -- I fear these people aren't fully aware of what they're asking.
Because they haven't examined the brain of a middle-aged NFL football fan.
Let's get out the scalpel.
***
I was a kid before ESPN came along and injected sports into every home.
Our Hudson, Ohio home had music, so I took piano lessons. Dad was into antique cars, so I went to car shows. Both my parents were into horseback riding, so I did that. I didn't know about sports, beyond the cultured-sounding "human drama of athletic competition," which we saw some Sunday afternoons on ABC's Wide World of Sports.
But when I was 11 years old, I suddenly and totally fell in love with football. I vaguely associate this cataclysm with a "math football" competition among the homerooms in fifth grade at McDowell Elementary. Playing for Mrs. Anderson's Dolphins, maybe I figured that if football could make math fun, it could make everything fun.
It sure made reading fun. Every afternoon I rode my bike to the Hudson Public Library until I'd read everything they had on the NFL. I don't remember checking the books out. I remember reading them in the library, and hearing in the silence the roaring echoes of real stories about magic men with magic names. Johnny Unitas. O.J. Simpson. Bart Starr. Jim Brown. Gayle Sayers. Joe Namath.
For a boy growing up in a WASPy little Ohio town where everyone was named Murray or Sullivan or Butler or Keane, these men's names were as strange as anything from Tolkien. Curly Lambeau. Big Daddy Lipscomb. Bambi Alworth. Roman Gabriel. Sam Huff. Ray Nitschke. Chuck Bednarek. Dick Butkus. Hell, Zeke Bratkowski!
I read about The Sneaker Game, the Heidi Bowl, the Ice Bowl, the Immaculate Reception, Wrong-Way Regal, Ghost to the Post, The Longest Game, the Sea of Hands, the Perfect Season and The Greatest Game Ever Played.
I gaped at the pictures of the sun-splashed September grass, the crisp-clear October air, the mud-caked men of November, the frozen granite fields of December and the Super Bowl palm trees of January.
It was all impossibly rich -- and to me, impossibly beautiful.
As bewildered as my parents may have been at my Fosbury flop into football history, they must have been glad to see me spending so much time at the library.
Maybe as a form of encouragement, my dad started watching Cleveland Browns games with me on the big TV, up in my parents' bedroom. Our English Springer Spaniel had lived the first few years of his life in a civilized house, and so when Dad and I would yell and slap high-five, the dog reasoned that a fight had broken out. He would bark madly, shattering the Sunday afternoon peace and prompting shouts from my startled mother, below. "Jesus! What's going on up there?"
Incredible things were going on up there. That year, the Browns happened to have a season seemingly made for me.
Brian Sipe was a fragile little quarterback that an undersized 11-year-old could relate to. With a black rubber sleeve protecting his weak right elbow, Sipe heaved the ball over the line like a shot put over a woodpile, and it somehow wobbled into the waiting arms of enough resourceful Browns receivers that Sipe somehow won the MVP of the American Football Conference that year.
That wonderful team was known as the Kardiac Kids, because every victory was last-minute. (And so were the losses.) I could go on about the Kardiac Kids, and their coach, Sam Rutigliano, a kind of Phil Donohue figure who said things like this, after a tough loss: "There are 800 million Chinese who didn't even know we played today. We'll get over this." I could name every player on the roster, right down to Dino Hall, the short, slow, butterfingered kick returner who we loved anyway. In fact, it is very hard for me to stop writing about that team. Let's move on, before we get to the bitter playoff loss against the Oakland Raiders, when Sipe threw a terrible interception in the back of the end zone when all we had to do was kick a short field goal to win the game and I walked out of my parents' bedroom and sat on the stairs and sobbed.
For several straig
My tennis partner smothered the endorphin glow by barking that responsible people ought to stop watching pro football, because -- well, because it's simply bad in just about every way.
Intellectually, I didn't disagree. Several years ago, I added football to the list of things that never should have been invented: porn, boxing and booze.
Still, I love football.
"Get over it," my partner said.
My tennis partner, and all the other tennis partners who we're hearing from in the conversation around the new film Concussion -- I fear these people aren't fully aware of what they're asking.
Because they haven't examined the brain of a middle-aged NFL football fan.
Let's get out the scalpel.
***
I was a kid before ESPN came along and injected sports into every home.
Our Hudson, Ohio home had music, so I took piano lessons. Dad was into antique cars, so I went to car shows. Both my parents were into horseback riding, so I did that. I didn't know about sports, beyond the cultured-sounding "human drama of athletic competition," which we saw some Sunday afternoons on ABC's Wide World of Sports.
But when I was 11 years old, I suddenly and totally fell in love with football. I vaguely associate this cataclysm with a "math football" competition among the homerooms in fifth grade at McDowell Elementary. Playing for Mrs. Anderson's Dolphins, maybe I figured that if football could make math fun, it could make everything fun.
It sure made reading fun. Every afternoon I rode my bike to the Hudson Public Library until I'd read everything they had on the NFL. I don't remember checking the books out. I remember reading them in the library, and hearing in the silence the roaring echoes of real stories about magic men with magic names. Johnny Unitas. O.J. Simpson. Bart Starr. Jim Brown. Gayle Sayers. Joe Namath.
For a boy growing up in a WASPy little Ohio town where everyone was named Murray or Sullivan or Butler or Keane, these men's names were as strange as anything from Tolkien. Curly Lambeau. Big Daddy Lipscomb. Bambi Alworth. Roman Gabriel. Sam Huff. Ray Nitschke. Chuck Bednarek. Dick Butkus. Hell, Zeke Bratkowski!
I read about The Sneaker Game, the Heidi Bowl, the Ice Bowl, the Immaculate Reception, Wrong-Way Regal, Ghost to the Post, The Longest Game, the Sea of Hands, the Perfect Season and The Greatest Game Ever Played.
I gaped at the pictures of the sun-splashed September grass, the crisp-clear October air, the mud-caked men of November, the frozen granite fields of December and the Super Bowl palm trees of January.
It was all impossibly rich -- and to me, impossibly beautiful.
As bewildered as my parents may have been at my Fosbury flop into football history, they must have been glad to see me spending so much time at the library.
Maybe as a form of encouragement, my dad started watching Cleveland Browns games with me on the big TV, up in my parents' bedroom. Our English Springer Spaniel had lived the first few years of his life in a civilized house, and so when Dad and I would yell and slap high-five, the dog reasoned that a fight had broken out. He would bark madly, shattering the Sunday afternoon peace and prompting shouts from my startled mother, below. "Jesus! What's going on up there?"
Incredible things were going on up there. That year, the Browns happened to have a season seemingly made for me.
Brian Sipe was a fragile little quarterback that an undersized 11-year-old could relate to. With a black rubber sleeve protecting his weak right elbow, Sipe heaved the ball over the line like a shot put over a woodpile, and it somehow wobbled into the waiting arms of enough resourceful Browns receivers that Sipe somehow won the MVP of the American Football Conference that year.
That wonderful team was known as the Kardiac Kids, because every victory was last-minute. (And so were the losses.) I could go on about the Kardiac Kids, and their coach, Sam Rutigliano, a kind of Phil Donohue figure who said things like this, after a tough loss: "There are 800 million Chinese who didn't even know we played today. We'll get over this." I could name every player on the roster, right down to Dino Hall, the short, slow, butterfingered kick returner who we loved anyway. In fact, it is very hard for me to stop writing about that team. Let's move on, before we get to the bitter playoff loss against the Oakland Raiders, when Sipe threw a terrible interception in the back of the end zone when all we had to do was kick a short field goal to win the game and I walked out of my parents' bedroom and sat on the stairs and sobbed.
For several straig