Football Is Love: What the Game Has Given Us and What We Give Back

The moment David Tyree caught that football from Eli Manning…I’ll never forget it. The Giants defense had played spectacularly well against those vaunted New England Patriots led by Tom Brady and were seeking an unprecedented undefeated season. The game was closer than the experts had predicted. But when Tyree caught that football, miraculously, against his helmet, I knew one thing for sure, the Giants were going to win that game.  

That was just one of the two Super Bowls Eli Manning would win. Just one of the two Super Bowls he would win against Tom Brady. And one of the things that should have gotten Manning into the Hall of Fame the first time around. But I digress. As atrocious as the New York Giants have been for quite some time, I’ll never forget the feeling when the Giants won that Super Bowl in 2008. That moment when football made even the wildest dreams seem possible.

The first time I felt the pigskin in my hands was unlike the first time I picked up a basketball. Picking up a basketball felt like instant love. Picking up a pigskin felt difficult instantaneously. Having to lace my fingers just right on the white stripes and throw the perfect spiral…made even a younger me feel self-doubting. Often, a football would land like a thud. But one thing the pigskin did was connect me to my dad since my dad was the one who introduced me to it, in the first place. I never became a Minnesota Vikings fan, like him but I do, admittedly, keep an eye on them throughout the season. Almost as an adage to him. It took me awhile to fall in love with football, but I’ll never forget throwing the pigskin with my dad. Without memories, what is life?

Do you remember the first game you ever saw? Or the first time you tossed a pigskin back and forth? Or maybe the first time, football made you angry? Made you want to kick your television screen? Or maybe you did kick the screen…

Football has changed over the years, of course. When I first started watching, fantasy football hadn’t reached the precipice it has reached now. There were not days dedicated to the schedule release and there definitely wasn’t an enormous number of endless opinions about it from sunup to sundown. Football hadn’t quite become the 24-hour news cycle it is now. For good or bad, the NFL is a machine. It dominates the market. It even has surpassed the world of sports since one of its biggest stars just happened to marry the biggest pop star in the world. Football is in a league of its own.

Being a New York Giants fan has been beyond difficult in the late 2000s. A carousel of head coaches, who didn’t do much but engaged in awkward press conferences. A litany of quarterbacks that never lived up to expectations. Plus, endless questionable front office choices have left my fandom often in the pits. A friend of mine even reminded me last year that I said multiple times I wanted to give up on them. (Not that I did) But watching loss after loss, the frustration was reaching breaking points. Often, when I tell someone, I am a Giants fan, they laugh and ask if I enjoy being miserable. Normally, they’re Cowboys fans and I tell them that at least I watched my team win a Super Bowl in recent memory.

It’s hard being a fan of a team that is always losing, isn’t it? Imagine being a Jets fan. They share the same stadium as the Giants and their despair may run deeper. Imagine being a Raiders fan…and not even understanding where it keeps going wrong season after season. Or being a Cleveland Browns fan and wondering if the momentary trek to Baltimore truly was a curse? A losing football team makes fandom feel like a long road down a dark path, reaching the end and still seeing nothing but darkness. So why stay being a fan of a team that brings such misery? The simple answer is because you just do. Sometimes you come from a family of Jets fans and it’s like a birthright. Maybe you took one look at Jerry Rice catch a football and the 49ers became your team for life. Or like me, you once saw your team reach the pinnacle and you dream of that day once again. A fandom is just that. A dedication. A dedication to a team, good and bad. We laugh at Dallas fans and their yearly misery but it’s slightly commendable that they stay dedicated to a team that underwhelms season after season. Until the Detroit Lions had their recent success, you can sympathize with a Lions fan because having historical losing seasons was unbearable to watch, even for a casual football fan. Football takes dedication. Even when most people might say, borderline absurd.

When this country celebrates holidays, football is intertwined. But none more so than Thanksgiving. The cutting of turkey. The fall leaves. The gathering of family around a long table. Conversations filled with gratitude and the afternoon filled with one football game after another. When you reach the second slice of pie, the second game has probably already begun. Football even begins in the morning. In the cool brisk, while the dew is still resting in the skyline, a pigskin is thrown through the air. Competitiveness starts at the beginning of the game and often ends in bygones being bygones. On Thanksgiving, football is combined with family. Shared with friends. Even your aunt, who barely understands what a touchdown is or a false start penalty, can sit down for a split second and be transfixed. Football just does that. It draws people in.

But there are times when football lets even its most dedicated fan down. The controversies in the game can often overshadow what the game is meant to be. The constant replay issues never cease to end. The increased lack of awareness for crisscrossing legalized betting and trying to distance from it, in the same vein. The lack of transparency in a personal conduct policy that doesn’t allow for some things but excuses others. And the increased evidence that upon retiring from football, there may be traumatic brain damage or just a lack of basic health benefits, in general. Football, while it has its chokehold as the country’s most popular sport, has its bad side as well. The fans don’t boo Roger Goodell at the draft every year because it’s just something they do; it’s their way of saying that even the game they love has its fair share of holes in the system. It would be amiss, not to understand even a sport so close to our hearts…can let us down.

When August arrives; it signifies the impending closure of the summer season. It brings cultural sadness. The beach days are coming to an end and the amount of time to enjoy outside picnics and long walks in the park are starting to diminish. August feels like the end of a story. For me, although, it’s the beginning of one since my birthday falls in August, but I understand the culture’s emotion with its arrival. One thing August signifies besides the ending of a season; is the arrival of training camp and the upcoming start of a new football year. It brings with it a feeling that every team starts with a feeling of hope and what ifs. Even a Jets fan. Even a Browns fan. Even a Giants fan…even though, admittedly, some of my enthusiasm has waned off about the Harbaugh signing.

A new league season can make the last one obsolete. Even the team that won the Super Bowl last year, the Seahawks, will be starting over. What they did last year will soon be forgotten. The NFL, more than any other league, is what have you done for me lately? And soon enough, football fans will ask, can Sam Darnold do it again? Football is a fast-moving sport. After four games, a team’s season could be deemed over. After eight games, a quarterback could be benched for a rookie. After 13 games, fans may be prematurely crowning a new champion. But at least when the season starts, there is renewed hope in the air.

Football does something that we don’t normally do, willingly. Selfishly, we spend a great amount of our time chasing after things that run quickly through our hands. Or bouncing our attention from one fleeting thing to another. Football requires us to hold on. Even when it makes us angry or makes us physically ill or makes us spend morning hours at work obsessing over all the ways, we would do things differently. Football requires us to love something so intently that joy rivals the birth of a child or the moment you walk down the aisle. Football requires us to be selfless.

Isn’t that what love is?

In life…and sports.

Football awaits our deepest love.