Emily fucked up. Or so she thought.
She spent most of the last few weeks apologizing, even though I was steadfast in my assurance that it wasn’t that big a deal and that she had nothing to apologize for.
Still, she felt awful for her gaffe, awful that she booked us a return flight home from a weekend trip to New Jersey during the Super Bowl. And I mean during the wholeass, entire Super Bowl. That is, the game kicked off as we were boarding, continued on as we were flying, landing, deplaning, waiting for our checked luggage, and driving home, and ended with Jalen Hurts’s final prayer, which fell to the turf just as we were pulling in our driveway.
Emily felt awful because—as you might surmise from my last newsletter—football is a pretty big deal for me. Or, at least it used to be.
Sports in general used to be a pretty big deal for me. I love watching sports and, for most of my life, have been deeply invested in a handful of teams (Villanova and UNC basketball, the New York Mets, Inter Milan, and, above all, the New York Football Giants).
I love sports. I love how, as Coach K so aptly said, sports is the only true reality television. I love watching people do superhuman things with their body and their guts. I love the tension that is real and palpable. I love how nervous I get for an entire week before a big game. I love the elation that comes when my team wins those games. I even love the profound sadness that follows a huge loss.
I love most sports. But I especially love football. On any given fall Sunday throughout most of my life, you could find me couch-bound from 1pm at least through the late game and often until the final whistle of Primetime. Monday nights were for football, as, eventually, were Thursdays. And because of that investment, because of those years spent in front of the television or in the hard plastic seats at Giants Stadium, my emotions would swing in concert with the ups and downs of my favorite teams.
But, as it has with with most everything else in my life, having children has rearranged that for me (a realization aided no doubt by the Giants’ last decade of futility).
Slowly, at first, and then suddenly, I realized that the successes or failures of my favorite teams didn’t really matter to me much any more. I realized that I was allowing my emotions to be dictated by college-age kids; babies themselves. I realized that Sunday afternoons in the fall, especially here in North Carolina, have a tendency to be absolutely magnificent and that my time is much better spent being out in them rather than on my couch for six consecutive hours watching the ADD-fest that is the RedZone channel (but damn, how fun is the RedZone channel?).
I realized that spending time with my family is far more important than a football game.
Of course, we could have changed our flights to get home in time for a meaningless-to-me game. And in the past we very much would have. But we made plans to visit my cousin and her husband—a woman who has always been like a big sister to me and a guy who was my friend long before they started dating—before heading to the airport for our 7pm-during-the-Super-Bowl flight back to Raleigh/Durham International Airport.
And if we did, we would have seen the entire Super Bowl from the comfort of our living room, rather than watching it on tiny seatback screens where the sound was cut every time the flight crew made and announcement (which the pilot did, smack in the middle of Rihanna’s excellent halftime performance!); rather than watching on my phone as I waited for our luggage to appear on the baggage carousel; rather than listening to those final few drives on the drive from RDU to Chapel Hill; rather than watching that game-winning field goal and final Hail Mary from our car in our driveway as our kids slept in the backseat.
But if we did, we would have missed out on one of the best afternoons I’ve had in a long time, catching up with two people who very much matter to me, watching their kids—two boys on the precipice of teen-age—play with our kids, imagining how happy these moments would have made our mothers—two beloved sisters who died long before any of us had babies of our own—and sharing moments that are far more fleeting than a football game.
Like every newsletter I write, this isn’t prescriptive, to be clear. I’m not saying abandoning sports has made me a better father. Nor am I saying it will make anyone else as much. I’m not saying that, as my kids get older and find their own ways into fandom, I won’t be right alongside them.
In fact, I can’t wait to use sports as yet another tool to bond with my children. I can’t wait to use sports as a lens through which to help me explain the world to them. I can’t wait to watch them perhaps grow into the kind of fervent and passionate fans that I used to be. I can’t wait to sit beside them at their first Giants game or Mets game or Villanova game, to continue to walk with them up the hill from our house to the Dean E. Smith Center, decked head-to-toe in Carolina Blue to cheer on the Tar Heels.
I can’t wait to comfort them after a tough loss by promising that it’s just a game and that there are far more important things in life.
P.S. You can bet your ass that our flight would have been changed immediately if the Giants were playing in the Super Bowl. Come on. I’m not a lunatic.
P.P.S. Allow me to take a moment to say that if your wife is booking the travel and she books the “wrong” flight, she has nothing to apologize for. As my mother would have said, “Book your own fuckin’ flight, pal.”
P.P.P.S. That P.P.S. applies to pretty much everything in a relationship.