It all goes back to one meal at a sports bar

Sporting News, The, Dec 20, 1993 by Pat Jordan

From Doug Flutie's Hail Mary pass a 'Canes fan was born

Before I married her, my wife was a theater acresss. Her first husband was a college basketball star. At night, in their bedroom, they argued over the television set. He wanted to watch the Knicks, she the lates production of "The Hallmark Hall of Fame." Usually, he won, and she either fell asleep to the voice of Bob Wolfe going bananas over another Bill Bradley jmump shot, or she went downstairs to watch "The Hallmark Hall of Fame" there and fall asleep on the sofa. Which is only partly why she is now my wife and not his. Since I'm not that stupid, I learned from his mistakes. After we were married, I made a great production of letting my wife know I'd left my sports past behind me. I never watched sports on TV. I was beyond that now (It also didn't hurt that I was scoring points against her ex).

Anyway, then we moved from Connecticut to Fort Lauderdale, where I became, much to my shock, a fanatic (and that's the only word to use) University of Miami football devotee. I live and die each fall Saturday when the 'Canes play. My wife has equally shocked. She tried to fight it at first, but I was even more adamant about my 'Canes than her first husband was about his Knicks. (What was it in her to men obsessed with infantile sports? Hmmmm, she has yet to find out.)

What shocked us both was that I had always hated football. I was a professional baseball player for four years in the Braves' chain, and that had always been my only sport. It still is. It's the only sport I ever had any interest in playing. Football, I'd always associated with a certain mentality I remember from high school, a fascist, Jesuit-run, Irish-Catholic prep school that exalted its football players to beatification. My school always had the best team in the state, which, since it was Connecticut, was not a noteworthy accomplishment. When the players graduated, they were never talented enough to get a scholarships to schools like Notre Dame, so they almost always ended up at Boston College, which was then a sort of minor league, New England football powerhouse. Small fish in an even smaller pond. Victories against Wesleyan and Trinity and maybe even Dartmouth. After their small, devalued fame at B.C., those players went off into the world, not as tight ends for the New York Giants, but as assistant football coaches back at The Prep, or maybe just as vice presidents of their fathers' sign companies.

Because I had refused to play football at The Prep, the teachers and players there tormented me. I was a "coward " and "disloyal" since, after all, I was big, 6 feet 1, 200 pounds, and could throw a baseball 98 mph. Then, why wouldn't I, out of some distorted sense of loyalty, throw a football for the glory of The Prep? "It's the money, stupid!" I would say, coining a phrase Clinton's advisers would steal from me years later. I tried to explain to those Neanderthals that I was going to get a $100,000 baseball bonus when I left high school and I sure wasn't going to jeopardize that bonus by getting hurt ion football for the glory of my alma mater, which would immediately forget about me when I left it and had to get a job digging ditches because I could no longer throw a baseball 60 feet, 6 inches.

Still, they all continued to harass me until finally, one afternoon in theology class, I got into a fistfight with John McGourthy, a linebacker, who kept hissing "chicken" in my ear from the seat behind me. The fight ended in a draw but just went to reinforce my attitude about football players. Neanderthals in love with their mock war games, all that fight-fight crap and building manhood for God and country and, most of all, The Prep. Besides, how could any thinking person be a slave to a sport that can be disagrammed on a blackboard beforehand? Sports was all talent and instinct and creation in the midst of action, not a plodding, mathematically controlled march.

So, what happened to me? Well, the first thing that happened when we moved to Fort Lauderdale in the fall of '84 was that I took my wife out to dinner at a restaurant called Roland's. It had a 6-foot tall TV screen at one end of the room that we tried to ignore since it was showing a football game. But it was almost impossible to ignore because all of the patrons were hovering around it, like cavemen, for warmth, screaming and cheering after almost every play, which seemed to be a touchdown for one team or another. My wife insisted I go over to that group of adolescent men and ask them to quiet down so she could enjoy her dinner. I did as I was commanded.

Just as I approached the crowd, I saw a football float high on the screen, I leaped up to see where it was going. It landed in the arms of a Hurricanes split end for a touchdown against Boston College, I instinctively flashed to all those Prep players who had gone to B.C. on football scholarships, and screamed out, "Awright!" But those B.C. ghosts woulds get me yet. I was watching the "Hail, Flutie" game, which B.C. would win, 47-45, on a last-second touchdown pass from Doug Flutie. Like everyone else there, 'Canes fans all, I let out a terrible groan after that pass. I slunk back to my wife, 20 minutes after I'd left her. She was finished with dinner and fuming. But before she could even open her mouth, I snapped. "Don't say it! I'm warning you! Not a word!" She was stunned to silence by the look of fury on my face.