In the last few months I’ve been telling a lot of people that baseball is my favorite sport, but football is the only sport that’s ever made me cry. This has come up in conversations centered around what my friend David calls my “bandwagoneering” of the San Francisco 49ers. It’s been a long time since I followed football, and for the second half of the 2011 NFL football season, I've been riveted by the Niners and football in general.
The last time I really paid attention to the 49ers was in 1999, when my father and I witnessed firsthand what’s come to be known as “The Catch II,” Steve Young’s dime to Terrell Owens with 8 seconds left in the game to give the Niners a playoff win over the Green Bay Packers. I was a freshman in college hugging my father, weeping at everything marvelous in the world as the crowd exploded around us. That was the second time I cried watching sports. Then the Niners lost the division to the Falcons, and between then and this fall, I’d watched about three football games.
Since I began watching the Niners again this season, my friend David, whose brain and life is a sports almanac, has taken to incessantly pestering me to name 6 players on the Niners off the top of my head-- last week he did it and truth be told, I had a hard time. I should be able to name 6 players in a heartbeat, given the energy and passion I direct toward a Sunday television screen when the 49ers are battling their brains out. But since my love affair with NFL football was rekindled somewhere between Halloween and Thanksgiving, what I’ve been basking in mostly is just the great sum of all its parts: the new look of football, how it’s been high def’ed, crystallined, and cinematized since the days of my youth, and also, something familiar, the sound of the crowd. It’s the anti-thesis of the baseball crowd. Not calm, not slow, barely a crescendo, a nearly constant roaring sea.
When I was growing up, Sundays were the worst. Maybe it was just the shadows looming because I had to go back to school the next day, but somehow Sundays were the day when my parents fought, the day that I fucked up the worst, the day I had to slog through all the homework I hadn’t done, the day my mom just made quesadillas. But for a few months each sunday in the fall and winter, whatever beef my dad and I were having and whatever else would be drowned for a few hours in that roaring sea. And if you grew up in the Bay Area then, it wasn’t just any sea. We were a father and son amidst Bill Walsh’s 49ers, possibly the greatest football teams of all time. And that meant of course, that on some fifteen Sundays a year, I had Joe Montana to look forward to.
Which is why the first time I ever cried while watching a sports game was in 1990. The New York Giants were playing the 49ers for the NFC Championship, just as they did two weeks ago today. The 49ers were up by 4, deep in their own territory, and Leonard Marshall, enormous Leonard Marshall, on 3rd and long, laid a jackhammer of a sack on Joe Montana. Joe Montana, for a while afterwards on the field on his hands and knees. Joe. Down.
You can watch it here, and if you listen there’s something missing: you can’t hear that sea. But that isn’t because games were quieter back then, it’s because the 49ers were playing at home, in Candlestick Park, and in those moments before and after, the people were becoming aware that the 80’s were over. Leonard Marshall had just about laid Joe to rest. Montana missed almost all of the next two seasons, then left the Niners for the Kansas City Chiefs.
I was ten years old after that game ended, and I cried like an animal in my dad’s study, in front of our little RCA color television, feeling a Leonard Marshall jackhammer- sized Sunday existential emptiness. This was the first time I cried for a sport. And such was my sadness after the game that my mother gave my father permission to buy me real candy. My dad and I rode our bikes to the candy store downtown, and he bought me my favorite buttered popcorn and watermelon Jelly Bellies. It got dark while we were out, and we had to walk our bikes up the big steep hill to my house.
One of the football games I did watch in the last decade was the 2008 Super Bowl between the New York Giants and the New England Patriots. In this game, one of the biggest upsets of all time, Giants quarterback Eli Manning executed what my friends and I call the “double somehow.” Down by 4 points with a minute and ten seconds to go, on 3rd and 5, Eli Manning somehow broke out of a clawing cluster of Patriot pass- rushers to air an arching pass to David Tyree, which Tyree somehow caught for the first down that would set up Plaxico Burress’ game- winning touchdown. That game and the double somehow instantly made me into a Giants fan. So this season, when I haven’t been rooting for the 49ers, I’ve been rooting for the Giants. And today, when the Giants go up against the Patriots in the Super Bowl, I’ll be screaming for the G-Men.
That friend of mine David is a Giants fan, and yesterday he joked that I can probably name more players on the Giants than I can the 49ers. It might be true, but only because my friend Fernando’s last name is Cruz. And a defensive end named Jason Pierre- Paul? That's just unforgettable. And because usually it’s that skinny Jewish kid with glasses in 4th grade in the corner fiddling with a TI-82 whose name is Eli, not the Christian team captain. Somehow I’m rooting for the Giants. Even though Leonard Marshall made me cry.
When we sit with our people, buffalo-wing-greased-fingers clasped tight, watching the helmets crash above the line in the middle of that roaring sea, we are witnessing a kind of war, and how the warriors suffer. But they take the field of their own free will, as the broadcasters repeat over and over again so astutely, “they go out there every day and leave it all on the field.” We make them our heroes, sometimes grow to love our mortal enemies, and we learn to cry. I’ll admit statistically, David, that I’m a bandwagoneer. But I’m also just like everybody else, hoping for a miracle in the long Sunday shadows.
