I Didn't Watch the Super Bowl

I didn't watch the Super Bowl last night--in fact, I haven't watched a football game in a very long time. Years.

I want to say quickly that this is not because I feel superior to it all--or because I'm opposed to violence (in whatever form it exists). No, I quit watching because ... I just did.

I used to be a big fan. My dad had done his doctorate at the University of Oklahoma (and we lived in the Sooner State most of my first twelve years on earth), and he was an enormous Sooner fan.

Dad had been a high school football star in Oregon and had played for the Univ. of Oregon, as well. I had played a lot of backyard football, but our tiny Hiram High School had no team during my years (1958-62). (My freshman year, the senior class had only about a dozen students.)

Anyway, because of Dad's Sooner fandom, I became a fan, as well. Always watched their games. Celebrated when they won (often), grieved when they lost (not often--in my youth they won 47 games in a row between 1953-57!).

When we moved to Hiram, Ohio, in August 1956, the Cleveland Browns were using Hiram College as their pre-season training facility. Around Hiram I saw Browns all the time in the summers--including Jim Brown, Lou Groza, and other football-celebs. I played ping-pong once with halfback Ernie Green (he won).

And very quickly I became a Browns addict. Watched the games on TV--listened to them on the radio. I was at the old Cleveland Stadium in 1964 to see them win the NFL Championship v. the favored Colts.

My Browns-mania went on for a long time--until, in fact, they cut Bernie Kosar in Nov. 1993. And then some switch in me began to flicker off and on. Eventually, I just completely lost interest. I haven't watched a Browns game (or listened to one) in a long, long, long time.

I did watch the very first Super Bowl (Packers v. Chiefs) on my tiny black-and-white TV in my tiny apartment in Twinsburg, Ohio, in January 1967 (they weren't yet calling it the Super Bowl). Just a few months earlier, I had begun my teaching career at the Aurora Middle School.

I just checked: popular trumpeter Al Hirt was the halftime performer in that first game--along with marching bands from Grambling and the Univ. or Arizona. (Packers won easily, 35-10.) (Link to Al Hirt playing--I don't recall that he did any J. Lo dance moves.)

And then I watched every subsequent Super Bowl for decades. And then the switch went off.

(The same Off switch has flipped for me re: the Cavs and the Tribe. I haven't watched/listened to any of their games for years. Unthinkable, really: I had been a huge Tribe fan--ditto, Cavs.)

I think we go through our lives not even realizing that we have inside of us a variety of Off switches. In my own case, I was completely unaware that I had them until Life flipped some of them.

There are some powerful On switches, too. I wasn't really eager to be a grandfather, you know? But when I saw newborn Logan Thomas Dyer, who arrived almost 15 years ago, that Grandpa Switch went to On, and in seconds my heart and my life changed.

Anyway, I don't go around now during the World Series and NBA Playoffs and NFL Playoffs and Super Bowl and feel superior to those who are following the sport, the teams, the players. Not at all. I was once one of them.

Instead, the games are now events out there that just don't affect me.

Yesterday evening, for example, Joyce and I drove out to get some coffee at a drive-thru, then stopped and got gas for the car. Home, I read some books from my nightstand, streamed parts of some shows we love. Crashed.

I'd completely forgotten about the Super Bowl until this morning when my Facebook feed was full of news about it. (I couldn't have told you who was playing!)

So ... a Mystery of Life. An interest is born, thrives, ages, dies.

My dad remained a football fan until his final breath on November 30, 1999. I'm pretty sure that now--wherever he is--he's giving me The Look, the one that often formed on his face when he could not understand at all what was going on with me.