How football saved my relationship with Dad

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 01:00:00 +0000

As a kid I watched football with my dad, an inveterate Texan and incorrigible Oilers fan. I collected football cards and put them in a wicker knitting basket that said on the front in needlepoint, “Enough is better than too much.” Ignoring this, I crammed it with cards for players I hardly knew, teams I had no particular interest in; I collected to collect. I would sit with my father in our basement, the ironing board behind us, our feet up on a coffee table, and organize my football cards by team or position or color while this game I hardly understood unspooled on the screen, yelling when my father yelled, cheering when he cheered.

I’m not a sports fan, as a rule. My progressive high school required that girls learn to play football, and my main memory from those gym classes is that I could throw a football with no more accuracy than I could throw anything else. I haven’t learned much in the intervening years. I remain unclear on what “intentional grounding” is. I am unsure what a neutral zone infraction consists of, and how that differs from encroachment. I don’t know who’s in what division, including my own home team, the Rams, although I do know enough to lament them, generally.

Salon.com > Annalisa Grier

How football saved my relationship with Dad