Okay, so I have to be deadly honest with you. I don't know what to write.
SPORTS!
Football season is coming up right around the damn corner. And I know all of you need a second before you continue reading to go ahead and roll your eyes. But, I don't care. If you don't like it go back to Pitchfork or Facebook or whichever medium you chose to waste your life on today.
Anyway, football season is coming up. And it's a lot different for me this year than everything that I've been used to has been. This whole going to college thing? It lays down a huge effect on my sports fanhood habits.
I'm sure I've mentioned this in previous posts, but I spent every Sunday for the last twelve years of my life watching NFL Sunday, specifically Packer games, with my family. Let me give you the cast and crew of my Sunday afternoon, and no, that does not entail the improv troupe (sorry guys). Me! my dad, my brother Andrew, my brother Peder, my dad's friend Matt, his son Mike, my dad's friend Ted, my brother's friend Nick, my dad's friend's daughter Lindsay, my mom, my mom's friend Jane, chicken wings, brats, beer and Brett Favre. Yeah, it was a frickin' party. We were all Packers fans (this includes chicken wings and beers). We devoted our lives to the rollercoaster that is NFL fanhood. Some of us were much more interested in the actual events than others, but everyone had their reason to be there. Food, family, fun, festivities, football. That's what Sundays truly meant. That and church. Church sucked. Boring and churchy. But after church meant we set up and caught whatever we could of pre-game before camping out at Damon's for the bonanza known as NFL Sunday.
This event has been destroyed to a sad sad degree. This September when the season kicks off and all becomes right with the world once more, my dad and Andrew will meet up with Matt, have some beers, enjoy some appetizers and watch the game (they'll smoke plenty of cigarettes too). Yeah, that sucks for them, but for me, it's worse. I will scramble to find a sports bar showing my Packers game, by myself, then I will have not beer and not cigarettes as my Packers trounce the inexperienced Eagles in an opening week contest. I will pay too much for bad wings and diluted soda, and wonder why a 26-14 win feels so much less satisfying now then it did six years ago.
The family will network their thoughts on the game, and none of it will matter. The game will go on, while some younger family declares it their finest hour. My dad will turn to my brother and say, "I wonder how El's doin..." and my brother will say "he's fine, he's definitely watching this. He's not Peder, he'll find a way to see the damn game." He will be right, but it will still be wrong. There is a sea of students here at the U of I campus, and I'm sure there are at least 2,500 Packers fan friends to be made here. I will find probably 154 of them, and meet six. None of them will be as mad as Andrew is when we run a draw on third and eleven. None of them will as seamlessly alternate between annoyingly optimistic and annoyingly pessimistic like my father. None of them will be as awkward a fan as my mother was (love you mom, but you were ALWAYS either too excited or too distraught by our excitement). None of them will be as much of a goofy turdball as Matt was. Well, maybe they will. The venue will be different, and definitely not Damon's. Damon's was eaten by the tornado of Sunday, March 12, 2005. Damon's had four big screen tv's playing four DIFFERENT games, and plenty of other tv's playing plenty of other games. FUCK YOU BUFFALO WILD WINGS. YOU DO A BAD JOB. Ted and Jane (married) stopped being regulars to our gatherings, which meant we saw their children Nick and Lindsay less. Mike went to college. Peder went to college. My dad divorced my mom, so she stopped being there. Hell, even Brett Favre left us.
Ahhh, wipe your faces kids, it's not all gloom and doom. We all still love the Packers. We just will be doing it this season from different corners of our midwestern universe. Except for Brett Favre. He'll be doing it from the dark side. Asshole. Those days were my introduction to the great game of football. They taught me something that I have yet to learn to teach others: football is and always will be the greatest thing in the world and everything else is just "pretty cool". People don't see the point in sports. It's just dudes doin' stuff. But if you allow for it, there's so much more to it that skyrockets the entertainment value of the games. It's called investing yourself. If you allow yourself to care, that caring will come back to you in a variety of ways in which you aren't ready for. First of all, which is a better conversation starter, music or sports? If you're at Lollapalooza, maybe music. In a real (not dream-fantasy-heaven-awesomeness-IstillamobsessedwithfuckingLollapalooza) setting, it's clearly sports. Try as you might to argue it, it's just fundamentally easier and more engaging. I can walk around school wearing an Arcade Fire t-shirt and six people will instantly become a fan of my personality. However, I can walk around school wearing a Green Bay Packers shirt and twenty five people will give me conversation starting remarks about how either they are as well Packers fans and that it's always good to see other Packer backers out there, or how they think I was raised by idiots because I'm not a Bears fan. The point is, sports are more universalized. They're, in fact, the universalizedest. You have baseball, football and basketball. You can bring any of those subjects up in a conversation with 90% of people you can have at least a two minute conversation about why they don't like the NBA or how they just don't care about baseball anymore. Whatever. You bring up any band in particular, there's like a sixty percent chance you're missing their music tastes. Even then, musical tastes are such random amalgams of bands that there's no way you can go into a conversation expecting to have your music tastes match up perfectly. You can do this easily in sports. If you can do that, you're half friends. Really. It's that easy.
Other than that though, sports has a lot to offer. People seek emotional ecstasy from music, right? Well, I feel a genuine rush of jubilance every time the Packers score a touchdown. Sure, being a sports fan entails a lot of losing and therefore rushes of depression so it kind of balances out. Regardless, I take so much pride in my Packers and will always. The Packers will never dump me. They will never change. They will never make a shitty fourth album. They will never not give me their all. They are the single most dependable entity in my life. They may do shitty, but damn it I know they're trying to make me happy. Also the players are all really cool, regardless of whether they actually are. They're super strong, super quick and they are real people. They are rock stars in their own right.
As for the actual entertainment itself, I guess you just have to know what's going on. If you don't know the rules and regulation to the games, you're basically watching dudes doin' stuff. And really, they're carrying out finely tuned precise plays that are reliant upon each and every individual player. It's cool. Again, FOR YOU MUSIC LOVERS, it'd be like someone not realizing that piano is anything more than throwing your hands at the keys. Oh and did I mention how awesome it is to see people get hit really hard all the time? Yeah it's cool.
Anyway, that was my best attempt. You still won't like sports. But you can't say there's no reason to like them. Everything we do is little more than a waste of time, but that doesn't mean we can't enjoy the shit out of that time we're wasting. So this year, I will be looking for a place to go on Sundays. For the first time ever. I will search, scavenge, network and finally find a place where other like-minded sports nerds congregate to fawn over the athletic display set before them by the idols of their little brothers. Meanwhile, you can go ahead and listen to the Drake album again, to try and convince yourself to like it just a little bit more. I will be basking in the glory that is NFL Sunday, or as I like to call it, the respite that God himself intended us to have on the sabbath.
SPORTS POST!
--Eliot Sill
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