That’s Football, Guys. That’s All It Is.
I’ll by crying today. Weeping openly. Not because I’m a lifelong Packers fan, not because they’re in the Superbowl, not for the schmaltzy 5 million dollar Kay Jewelers commercial or the soaring pregame musical scores, not for Donald Driver’s last game or for Aaron Rodger’s first Superbowl, not even because I imagine Brett at home in Kiel, sighing heavily, full of regret. I’ll be crying today because my dad isn’t alive to watch this game.
Last year’s Superbowl party was in the surgical ICU at Froedtert hospital in Milwaukee. I don’t even remember who played. The Colts? It didn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. I drove up north for an hour to spend what I couldn’t imagine at the time would be the last football game I’d ever watch with my dad. He had just been in for his second cancer surgery in two years, but hopes were high that he’d pull through, even as I watched him struggling for breath on a CPAP machine, surrounded by tubes and wires. Painkillers left him in and out, nurses obstructed our view, paper smocks and rubber gloves kept us from touching, a breathing tube had stolen his voice, but he knew we were there, and it meant everything that we were.
My dad and I were never very close, but we weren’t un-close either. We didn’t hug, we shook hands. There were a lot of things we didn’t see the same way, but we loved to talk football. During countless hour-long commutes, I’d call and chat about last week’s Packers game, or the crazy upset that he somehow managed to get right in our Pick ‘Em League. We’d talk about the move to a 3-4 defense under Capers or the disputed talent of this guy from California warming pine behind Favre, the intelligence of drafting Hawk or letting Kampman go, the love of a little-known fullback from Shippensburg who happened to share our last name.
There was one thing that we could always agree on: the Packers were our team. They’d been his team since before the first Superbowl, mine since before Majik and Sterling turned the team into something more than perennial losers. We both grew up loving them, win or lose. When I was little, he told me he wished that the Packers would be good again, like when he was a kid. And in the 90’s, thanks to Holmgren and Reggie and He Who Must Not Be Named, they were. It was a little too late to catch my childhood, but I remember feeling, “This must have been what it was like for Dad.” And now I hope that my sons, despite living in Bear Country, will grow up Packers fans, and after I’m gone, will remember today, when the Packers won it all.
Al Pacino in Any Given Sunday was given some amazing words to recite, among them: “You know when you get old in life things get taken from you. That’s part of life. But you only learn that when you start losing stuff. You find out that life is just a game of inches.”
Only it’s not. It’s a game of centimeters. Of millimeters. It’s the toe of a shoe out of bounds, the length of a cleat in frozen mud, the nose of a ball over an imaginary line on the ground, the loose stitch on a quarterback’s hand, the cut of a surgeon’s scalpel. The unrealized and uncontrollable growth of a single cancer cell. That screenwriter was right - all those millimeters added up make the difference between winning and losing, between living and dying. Living is the six inches in front of your face. Living is now, not in the past, not in the future. It’s this Sunday’s game, not last Sunday, not next Sunday - not last year, not next year. It’s now. Today.
So I’ll watch, my watery eyes glued to the screen, and remember my dad. I’ll be watching with all those other Packers fans, all of them with something like the same story I have - full of love for a team, yes, but more importantly for the love of parents and children and community, the love of shared memories, of winning and losing, of joy and sorrow. I’ll watch today with my 1 year-old son playing at my feet and my 7 year-old son on the couch next to me, hoping they won’t forget the year the Packers won the Superbowl, and Dad had tears pouring down his face.
