It’s Super Bowl Sunday and I’m going to watch the game tonight. I mean, I am American. A Patriots win would be boring. An Eagles win would embolden the worst sports fans on the planet (or the best, depending on your fondness for anarchy). I’ll watch for the commercials and the halftime show and for the ability to participate in water cooler discussions tomorrow.
The football game that I care about it begins five and half hours earlier. Tottenham Hotspur is playing Liverpool at Anfield (Liverpool’s stadium). In our first meeting with Liverpool in October, we beat them 4-1, but that was at home. Playing at Anfield against a team that can light up a defense is going to be difficult. A win will put Spurs ahead of Liverpool in the table and back in the top four. A draw will be unsatisfying but tolerable. A loss will ruin my weekend.
Sports can break your heart. People ask if I have a football team. I don’t. I did but that was years ago. In 1991, the Buffalo Bills were playing the New York Giants in the Super Bowl. I loved the Bills. I watched them every Sunday and their run to the Super Bowl was amazing. I was thirteen, the perfect age for sports fandom to be cemented.
It’s too painful to get into it, so, I’ll just skip to the end. We lost. It came down to a field goal for us to win. Our kicker, Scott Norwood, missed. Unlike most Bills fans, I never blamed him for the loss. If we were the better team, it wouldn’t have come down to a field goal.
The Bills made it to the next three Super Bowls and we lost each time. Then I went to college and stopped watching. I just forgot to pick it back up again. I play fantasy football and I’ll watch a New York team every now and again. I can’t be a Giants fan because they were the first and deepest cut and I can’t be a Jets fan because I tried and good God is that hard. I’m like a football widow. Yeah, I had a team once but that was a long time ago, dear…
I’ve been watching Tottenham Hotspur since 2007 and pretty religiously since 2008. That’s a decade of my life. I’ve been with Spurs through three presidents, three girlfriends, and the death of my parents. I used to go to a bar in Williamsburg every Saturday or Sunday morning to watch. That ritual got me through some difficult times. I’d show up with my coffee (they were cool with that) as the bartender would turn the barstools back over from the night before. The bar would have that morning bar smell of beer and mop water soaked wood, which, contrary to that description, is quite pleasant, I’d wear it as a cologne if I could. They would turn on the big screen and the white noise of the roaring crowd and the voices of the British announcers would take me away from life for a couple of hours.
Kick off is in forty-five minutes. Two hours after that, I will know what my mood will be for the rest of the day. There are times when I wonder why I do this. The hurt of a loss is greater than the joy of a win and I’m ostensibly an adult who should be able to get over a group of millionaires who all happen to be wearing the same shirt. But, in sports as in life, if only it were that simple, to just get over things that have the potential to make us miserable.
