My name is Kris. I wasn’t always a college football fan. For a long time, I disdained the game as nothing more than a cruel joke in which the same teams always seemed to win, and there was any opportunity for the little teams to move up into the world to overtake the big boys of the sport.
It didn’t help that I went to the University of Maryland, a place where football mostly played second fiddle to the basketball team. At my freshman orientation in 1997, newly hired football coach Ron Vanderlinden (the 4th coach at UMD in a decade) proudly stood before us and promised that before we graduated not only were the Terps going to be ACC Champions but that we were going to go into Tallahassee and kick some Seminole ass. As of the start of this season, Maryland still has never won at Doak Campbell Stadium. In my 4 years, Maryland was never very good. By the end of 2000, I had pretty much stopped paying attention to the college game. It didn’t hurt than in my hometown, Baltimore, we had a very good NFL team, that was about to go on a defensive run for the ages, one that would lead to a Super Bowl victory.
So, I basically ignored the college game. Sure, there were great players and great plays. But I ignored it, waiting so much for the start of an NFL Sunday. I paid a little attention whenever Maryland made it to a bowl game; and cheered for those teams and The Fridge, but mostly the game was an exotic curiosity, a time filler before the real games on Sunday afternoons.
Then, in 2005, I met a woman. She was fun and smart and lots of fun to be around. And she loved college football. She was a Notre Dame grad, and loved nothing more than to spend Saturdays flipping around the dial, watching games, betting on them, and generally just having a great time. Her best friends went to SEC schools, Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee, and they would come over to her house for day long Saturday afternoon parties; multiple TVs would be on at once, between CBS (SEC), NBC (Notre Dame), and whatever boring ACC game ABC would put on (me). I was skeptical at first, convinced of the superiority of the NFL game, however as the leaves started to change, I started getting into these college games. Gradually, I got sucked into the great passion the game presented to people.
As our relationship deepened, the day finally came, when she told me we were taking our first trip together: we were going to Notre Dame Stadium, to watch the 2005 Navy/Notre Dame matchup. As we drove our rental car from O’Hare, through the flat plains of Northern Indiana, into South Bend, you could feel the excitement building with each mile. The roads got busier, and as we entered the town on that Friday afternoon, you could smell the tailgate fires already going.
Game Day itself was a riot of color: green, gold, navy blue. People cooking, shouting, drinking, kissing, tossing footballs back and forth in the parking lot; there was the clear, crisp air of a Midwest Saturday afternoon. The entrance into the stadium, hearing the Notre Dame Victory March for the first time, I got chills experiencing it. I squeezed the girl’s hand and she smiled back at me, kissed me, excited by the fact I was getting into this experience. The people sitting to our right had been going to games since 1976, and they still loved the spectacle and the scene. Sitting on those hard metal bleachers, cuddling close to someone you love, enjoying the game that had been played for a long time and would continue long after, the understanding of what makes college football great became clear to me.
There will always be cheating and scandal in the game. But, it’s the thought of cozy coeds exploring first love, alumni coming back trying to regain lost youth, and kids on the field seeking to try to reach the next level; either for themselves or to reach the pro ranks. That’s what the game is about.
And I got swept away by it.
I got to see several of those SEC Saturday scenes over the next few years. And it was fun (everything you hear about the women at those schools is absolutely true) but nothing compared to that first Saturday in a place where the college game mattered.
The relationship eventually ended, but I thank her every year for getting me into the wonderful spectacle that is college football. Now, enjoy the games, root like hell for your team, and Go Terps!
No comments:
Post a Comment