Football soothes my soul

  

I like football. 

I know not why. I don’t watch any other sports; not basketball, not baseball, not even hockey. 

But football... I’ve watched since I was young. Back in the 1980s, if we were lucky, we’d get three televised Saskatchewan Roughriders games a year. The rest were on radio. Yes, as a young boy, I even listened to football. 

The ultimate experience of my youth was going to watch the Roughriders play at Taylor Field. We would travel for four hours to a city called Regina for a three-hour game and then drive another four hours home. To watch them lose. Every single time. It was the 1990s, after all, a dismal period when telethons were needed to pay players’ salaries and tickets were, at most, five bucks a pop resale. 

The losing was so bad that, in my childhood innocence, I wondered what it would be like to leave Taylor Field after a win. Would there be less cursing? Would fans be less drunk? Only much later in life would I find this not to be the case. 

I was at the game where well-respected coach Wally Buono gave our fans the finger for throwing beer cans at his team. I was in the stands, singing with the fans in the rain, when a lightning strike halted the game just as we were mounting a comeback. Apparently, not even God wanted the Roughriders to win. 

Football fans in this province are invested. I’ve been to an NFL game where I was perplexed by the lack of passion and foul language coming from the crowd. I’m convinced there must be a history of losing over and over again to make fans want to burn the stadium down. Football fanaticism (not to be confused with fascism) is part of our culture. 

To be honest though, I don’t enjoy all the yelling at games anymore. I prefer the quietness of my downstairs cavern, where it’s just me... yelling at the TV.  

While some games are stressful, I find that football improves my overall mental state. It’s not a stretch to say that the NFL kept me sane during the first year of the pandemic. With all the turmoil society went through – the isolation, the uncertainty, the lack of toilet paper – at least we had football. It saved me hundreds of dollars in therapy. 

Unlike the CFL, which was battered by the loss of fans, the NFL could survive on TV contracts alone, now worth $10 billion a year. The NFL Network continues to run every day of the year, showing that there’s always drama, whether it involves trades, the draft, or Aaron Rodgers explaining how to use horse deworming medication to treat covid. 

In December, the NFL had Thursday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday games. That’s 57% of my week covered. They didn’t even leave Christmas alone – on the most sacred religious U.S. holiday, football games ran for nine straight hours. And no, I didn’t watch all of them. 

Do I support the ludicrous amount of public funds to build multi-million/billion-dollar stadiums amid housing shortages and chronic homelessness? Not really. Sigh. I just like to watch the games. 

And the biggest one will soon be upon us. This Super Bowl, it’s expected that over 100 million people will tune in worldwide. Some will watch solely for the commercials that now cost seven million dollars per half-minute. Some will watch for the halftime show. Some might even watch just to catch a glimpse of a jet-lagged Miss Swift. Whatever. 

I’ll watch the game.  

Because I like football.