COLUMN: Maybe there’s something to this game after all
Two weeks ago I had a miraculous experience.
I had just come home from a long day at work. My feet were sweaty, my armpits were damp, I had a kink in my back and I had just discovered we were out of Marshmallow Mateys. It was a rough start to the evening.
I milled around my apartment for a while, flipped through a couple of books, surfed around on Netflix and finally consigned myself to stare blankly at my wall.
Something was missing.
Now if you’re not an idiot and you’ve been a fan of Aggie football since you were like two years old, you probably know what my problem was. In fact, if 2-year-old you had been sitting in the room with 20-something-year-old me while all this was going on, 2-year-old you probably would have said something like, “You’re an idiot, idiot,” and gone to raid things from my fridge.
As it was, I was alone and I had no gifted 2-year old, or anyone else, around to guide me.
Fortunately for me, a thought came down which just may have changed my life forever: football.
Now just to give you a little background, I’ve never been much of a football guy. As a child my parents didn’t really like TV on Sundays, so we never watched Sunday night games. In high school I was actually cool, but it was in the I-spend-my-weekends-going-to-shows-and-growing-my-hair-out kind of way, not the I-am-strong-and-I-throw-good kind of way. In college I was far too freaked out about homework loads, project deadlines and chasing around my good-looking soon-to-be wife to pay any attention to sports.
So the idea of watching a game came to me as a little bit of a stretch.
I had nothing to lose. Hoping for at least a distraction from my confinement I cracked open my laptop, navigated to the USU Athletics page and hit the streaming button.
That was when the miracle happened.
You know that feeling when you’ve worked a long, hard day with no breaks and then you find out your mom has cooked your favorite hot meal for you? Or when you go to class freaked out because you didn’t study for the test and then your teacher says it’s been cancelled? Or when you’ve always been kind of a jerk but then you do something nice for someone and suddenly you feel all nice inside?
It was like that.
As the raw noise of thousands of Aggies cheering in unison came rising out of my computer speakers, I felt a transformation take place inside me. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t just listening to or just watching a game – I was experiencing it. For the first time in four years as a student at USU, I wasn’t just an Aggie – I was a fan.
The next 90-something minutes were some of the best of my life. Watching what’s-his-Keeton slide all over the field and leave tumbling defenders sprawled on the ground was like acing a daunting test without cursing.
Watching consecutive throws turn into consecutive catches and consecutive touchdowns amounted to pure consecutive awesomeness. Staring at those numbers blazing at the bottom of the screen when the game was over, 34-3, was like staring at a winning lottery ticket.
“How the heck did this happen?” I wondered to myself. “How did four years go by without me ever getting into a game? How did I not realize that one of the best parts of the Aggie experience had been taking place just a few blocks away while I was busy doing other things? How did I not know that watching your team beat the crap out of the other school’s team made you feel like somehow you were an awesome-er, confident-er and way more muscular person than before?”
There are only two possible answers to that question: one, the fancy new Athletics logo came prepackaged with irrefutable Nike power that made our players play better and our fan ability more potent, or two, I was just being an idiot all along.
I kind of think it was the logo idea, but it’s possible that I was just being an idiot.
So here’s my point: If you’re the smartest smarty-smart pants in your class and you know it, good for you. As someone who spent my whole college career trying to become smarter, I tip my hat to you. However, if you’re the kind of guy or girl who gets wound up in knots because you’re so focused on being smart that you can’t even enjoy your toothpaste in the morning, I have a remedy that just might help you ease into the world of normal, happy college people:
Football.
– Rob recently completed his degree in political science and works for the USU Institute of Government and Politics. He can be reached at robmjepson@gmail.com