Friday Night Lights

This weekend I got my first real taste of “Friday Night Lights”.

Let me be clear up front: I am not a football fan. Though I hail from the land of the Giants (and the Jets), football was never really a sport that interested me. I’m married to a Patriot’s fan, so I’m willing to give up television time for the sake of my spouse. Occasionally I’ll watch the Super Bowl, but only for the commercials.

I do enjoy watching other sports. Baseball is fine, though a little slow. Basketball, hockey and soccer are fast paced and exciting. But watching football at home, on television is my equivalent to watching paint dry…or grass grow. It’s just oh so slow.

Perhaps the problem lies with the fact that I have no idea how the game is played. This is what I have learned from watching football: One team has the ball. They go five feet. They stop. They go ten more feet. They stop. Somehow, someone else gets the ball and they go ten feet the other way. They stop. The referees have microphones so everyone in the neighboring state can hear what kind of penalty is being issued. And they dress like Foot Locker employees. The cheerleaders have perpetual smiles pasted on their faces and double stick tape on their short-shorts to avoid unpleasant wardrobe malfunctions on national television. And the commercials are all for mass-produced American beer, Doritos and Chevy trucks.

Granted, I’ve seen exciting moments in football. For example, the Doug Flutie “Hail Mary” pass. Imagine if Gerard Phelan hadn’t caught that ball? Talk about the agony of defeat. Speaking of defeat, how about the moment that ended Joe Theismann’s career? Whenever I mention the words “Joe Theismann” in my husband’s presence he winces in pain and tries to think of something else. Then there was the Patriots’ Super Bowl win over the St. Louis Rams in January 2002. I remember that game well in that it was one of the rare times that I’ve seen my husband cry (a feat to be repeated a few years later when the Red Sox won the World Series).

My kids have never had much interest in football, neither watching nor playing. Both of them enjoy soccer instead. However, many of my fourth grader’s friends are playing football this fall, and he asked if sometime we could watch a game so he could cheer his buddies on. Most of the football games conflicted with our Saturday morning soccer schedule, but this weekend’s game was scheduled in the evening, so we bundled up in warm coats and boots and headed off to the game.

Despite my lack of enthusiasm for football, there’s something about sitting on freezing cold bleachers on a crisp, autumn evening that seems so right. As we walked to the field, the setting sun filtered through the red and gold leaves while a teenage girl sang the national anthem. Since we were the visiting team, our hike to the visitor’s bleachers was lengthy. Our opponents that evening were the Scituate-Cohasset Sharks, a team with the unlikely nickname of “Sci-Cohs” (pronounced like the Alfred Hitchcock film.) I guess that’ better than being known as “Sickos” but it still seemed odd every time the announcer made a comment about a member of the “psycho sharks”.

We don’t have announcers in soccer. When my kids play, no one is sitting up in the booth giving shout outs to players over a loudspeaker. Given my ignorance of the game, the announcements were quite helpful to me. Whenever one of my son’s friends got a mention, I’d let out a huge cheer. Luckily, none of them were injured or taken off the field on a stretcher as that might have made my cheering a bit embarrassing.

My sons discovered another bonus to football: the snack shack. Dollar after dollar found their way into my kids’ hands for popcorn, hot chocolate, Swedish fish and Reese’s peanut butter cups. I consoled myself with the fact that the walk from the visitor’s bench to the snack shack was long enough to burn off the calories of anything they ate.

Did I learn anything from watching the 4th and 6th graders play? Well, if anything it was more difficult to understand the game itself, without the advent of overhead cameras, telestrators and instant replay. But from sitting in the bleachers, I could feel the camaraderie of the parents as they cheered for each other’s kids. I could see the devotion of the coaches as they rotated players in and out, trying to insure that each kid had his fair share of playing time. I watched the younger brothers running up and down the sidelines, tossing footballs to each other and anticipating the day when they could become part of a team. And I marveled at the way my son, who has no real interest in football, jumped up and down, cheering and waving to his friends on the field as they each played their part in an hour of glory under the stadium lights on a crisp October night.

I get it now.