I Want To Be A Football He-ro

Adjective Queen likes to joke that I am her son Sport's Football Dad. Actually what she says is he is my Football Son. This isn't usurpation of Sport's bio-dad or an attempt at compensating for my having only girls, but rather a simple meeting of minds - he and I are the only members of our circle of friends who like football and sports in general. In our respective nuclear familial units, football is a bane of the first order up there with Dubbya and evangelicals.

I have never fully understood the loathsome regard blue-staters have toward football. I can name several reasons why I believe it to be, but I always come away feeling like I've diagnosed the symptoms rather than the disease. I think they don't like it because athletes are ascendant in most American high schools and the most dominant, almost iconically so, are football players and their female counterparts, cheerleaders and by contrast blue-staters, as individualistic, geeky, brainy, and largely unathletic, tend to be quite a bit south of there hierarchically. They prefer baseball because it has a solid literary tradition. They prefer soccer because they can comfortably root for the snobby Europeans or the noble post-colonial indigenous peoples' teams.
Probably most telling is they don't like it because 'everyone else' likes it, especially unthinking red-staters. It's also violent and there are those pesky cheerleaders to remind women of their eons of subjugation.

I'm confused because I think they should like it. In both the way it is played and the way its league is structured, it embodies the very community ideals and socialist economics they often tout in their ideology. In baseball, individual contributions are toted up to arrive at the final result. In football, everyone moves down the field together or not at all. The teams are made up of players with diverse skills and abilities. The professional league is structured so that revenues are split evenly among all teams, parity is highly desired and achieved so that all the teams and their fans have fair chance at glory, and players have both a minimum wage and a salary cap to prevent any one player or team too great a share of that society's riches. These seem like a blue-state dream, but I rarely see it celebrated.

I really didn't mean to go off on that tangent. It just occured to me as a thought about this post. I mainly just wanted to report that I took Sport to several local small college football games this year and he seems to have enjoyed it, as did I. We talked about plays and strategies and had some dogs and stuff. I almost asked him about the cheerleaders, one of whom looked like a dead-ringer for Kirsten Dunst, but I stopped myself because I thought he was probably too young to have checked them out and my own particular living arrangements have drubbed out any habit I might have of making public comments about a female's appearance - unless I am telling my three how spectacular they look.

I mentioned that Queen calls me Football Dad and I have to admit it makes me feel weird because it makes wonder sometimes how I would do if I had also had a son. I always wanted to have girl children because I knew how hard it was to grow up as a boy. Of course now I have the perspective that they both have their own brand of hellishness. The main thing I figured would be hard about raising boys is that they never talk. Girls talk constantly, so I figure I will at least know what is going on most of the time.

So anyway I was reminded of this during halftime at Saturday's game. We were sitting back shootin' the breeze and I started asking him stuff:
"So have you thought about where you want to go to high school?"
"Nah."
A plane flies over.
"Hey, that could be Lego Guy someday."
"Yeah."
"Do you think he'll fly someday?"
"I dunno."
"So, does he have a girlfriend?"
"Nah."
"What about you?"
"Yeah."
"Oh, yeah. Do you talk to her and stuff?"
"Some times."
"Is she pretty?"
Shrug.
"What's her name?"
"I'm not tellin' you!"
"You're not? I thought we were friends!"

That pretty well sums up my history with my dad, too. We would drive for two hours and not say a word and he'd say, "Enjoyed being with you, son." So, I hope I did OK this season, Queen, in my limited capacity as Football Dad. Oh, and by the way, he hasn't ever heard of Jim Thorpe. What the hell kind of family are you running over there, anyway? Never heard of Jim Thorpe, sheesh.