Most of the stuff I'm obsessed with usually has an author and a body of writing that goes along with it. For instance, take football. I've been a football fan since about 5 years old. I played "widget" or "midget" football when I was kid. I spent many a weekend afternoon chasing the pigskin...(my father would loft the ball as far and high as he could and I'd run as fast as I could trying to make what he'd call a "circus catch."). In my head, I was another Raymond Berry, a Dick Gordon, a Paul Warfield. In reality, I was kind of a clumsy, gawky kid, stumbling around in a field, trying to impress my dad.
I wasn't really much of a football player, I think I peaked in about fourth or fifth grade. By high school, I was too small, too slow, and well, my hair was way too long to be on the team anyway, and well, at that point, I was not going to cut it for the coach under any circumstances.
Being born and raised in Chicago meant that I have always been a Chicago Bears fan. Just like my father, and his father and his father...it's strange how a sports team, an organization, becomes a symbol, a tie, a tribal identity, that binds you to your past and your heritage. There's great amount of energy invested in a team that transcends specific players and times. There's a continuity across generations. The team's successes and failures somehow carry over to you.
I remember watching Vince Lombardi and George Halas coaching on the sidelines. I remember going to Wrigley Field with my father to watch a Bears/Lions game (Bobby Douglas threw a 54 yard touchdown - with a broken wrist?!). I remember when football players had other jobs in the off-season, working for Insurance companies and Car dealerships, because their football salaries were not enough. Man, is that another world or what?
Most of the time I've been a fan, the Bears have not been very good, although, there were always great players like Gale Sayers, Dick Butkus, Walter Payton, Richard Dent, Dan Hampton, Wilbur Marshall, Doug Plank, and the not so great, Virgil Carter, Bob Avelini. The 1985 Bears team was the one great exception. They were clearly the best team in the league that year, and they and we, and the rest of the league, knew it. Those Bears were big, and loud, and wild, and hell, they flaunted it (Super Bowl Shuffle indeed!).
Anyway, the Bears are going to the SuperBowl (hell, I remember when there wasn't a SuperBowl!) and you don't get to write something like that very often. This is a group of underdogs who have not gotten a lot of respect. And instead of a snarling Cro-Magnon as their Coach (Ditka! Gibron!), they have a sweet, gracious guy named "Lovie," at the helm. I have been a skeptic this season. I've vacillated between, "they're not as good as they look," and "they can't be as bad as they look."
So, anyway, the author that I associate most with football is Frederick Exley. He wrote a novel about his "doppleganger" Frank Gifford, when Gifford was the star of the New York Giants (Gifford played offense and defense!). The book is called "A Fan's Notes." It's about football, success and failure, fathers and sons. A great read. I mean, it's truly one of the great American novels (all of Exley's novels are great). It's about another time and place, another world...a world that's gone, and then again, one that's strangely still with us too, eventhough it's evolved, changed, morphed with the times.
So, well, times are different, players come and go...but well, the game, the team...endures. Go Bears.
