Was it heaven or was it football hell? Three games on Thanksgiving Day, one on Amazon Prime on Black Friday, and then a full Sunday slate, running from 12:30 late into the night to finish off the long holiday weekend. And that’s just the pros.
I caught a tad more of it than I care to admit. But anyway, sports fans, remind me again just how loyalty is formed?
Somewhere in the house is a black-and-white photo of my younger self outside the old family house on Green Street in Sag Harbor, cherubic and longhaired and wearing a “Property of NY Giants” T-shirt. You’d think I would’ve stuck with them.
Instead, my rooting sympathies found their way, not to my namesake, Green Bay, as the schoolyard teasing pointed out, but to the cool purple of the Minnesota Vikings and their mad scrambler of a QB, Fran Tarkenton. The fact that the attachment didn’t last leads me to chalk it up to the string of Super Bowls they played in and lost in the ’70s.
Before that, and before I left the place at age 2, my birthplace of Carlisle, Pa., was the home of the Washington Redskins’ training camp, which I recall excitedly witnessing with my own eyes on some return trip. Of local note and much later, didn’t their great running back John Riggins retire to Montauk, the better to fish and shoot ducks?
But no, no loyalty there either.
Back to the New York teams and the Giants’ poor relation, the Jets, as a kid I had occasion to visit the concrete bowl that was Shea Stadium in time to see Joe Namath still behind center, knee brace and all. Yet, no. And despite the fun of the early-’80s Freeman McNeil and Mark Gastineau teams, it’s just hard to love someone who moves to New Jersey.
Which brings us to the present. Having a daughter attend college in Geneseo, situated above an Edenic valley nearly equidistant from Rochester and Buffalo, has meant innumerable excursions into the vastness of Bills Country. On one such, crashing at an inn the night before her return to the dorms, we unwound from the road together with a wintry Bills game on the TV, complete with the expected Superman heroics of Josh Allen.
It’s a happy memory. You might even say the stuff loyalty is made of.