It was a low-productivity weekend. Football got me the way it did in the old days.
They say football is a religion in the South, but I never believed that. The South has religion, and it has football. Sure, both involve prayers, but one’s thousands of years old and the other is a hundred and change.
I try not to pray about football games anymore. That wasn’t the case in my high school and college days, and my just out of college days, and my just after marriage days, and my…
But that’s not the point.
In recent years, I’d started to notice that my ability to get upset over the things 18- to 22-year-olds did was unbecoming.
I’ve sat in my chair with fingers crossed, which isn’t the same as praying, and my entire emotional self at that moment depended on what happened during the next play.
I put my sense of well-being on the line based on what other people did. Authors write entire self-help books explaining exactly how that is the path to ruin.
On the other side of the coin, entertainment is about feeling something. When squirming in my seat during a movie car chase, I give up just as much control over my emotions as when I watch a good football game.
So I’m not attacking football. I love it. I used to love it too much.
At one time, my Saturdays, Sundays, Monday nights and Thursday nights were spoken for.
While still capable of catching a game on any of those days, Saturday became my only appointment day.
I started missing a lot of regular-season NFL games, but the playoffs are fair game because they’re the playoffs. I also watch the Super Bowl because I’m a good American and see it as my patriotic duty to eat chips and salsa with the rest of the nation.
But I’ve pulled back. The kids helped along my transition. I could justify spending one day wrapped up in football, but not all the other days.
In the past few years, I even started missing a lot of Saturday games. I mean, I watch my team and try to watch teams that will play my team, but I don’t watch every team.
Obviously, I never could watch “every team.” That would be impossible, but football Saturday in the South goes from 11 a.m. until after midnight. I used to be there for as much of it as I could take.
Then I backed away, except for this past weekend, when I gorged myself the way an addict does when he falls off the wagon.
Football was in my veins. And those dang kids, those 18- to 22-year-olds, had firm control over my emotions for most of the day.
It should be noted that I didn’t pray for any of those teams. Football isn’t a religion. All I did was hope really hard that my will would be done on football fields across the nation.
My team played early in the day, and it didn’t look good for most of the game. I might have put some promises into the ether that I would mend my ways if my team prevailed.
And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with football: My team’s playing again this coming weekend, so I’m stuck figuring out how to be a better person between now and then unless I want to blow our chances.
