Super Bowl Sunday
.Today is the first Sunday in February, which makes it Super Bowl Sunday, which is deemed to be a quasi-National Holiday. I grew up both without a resident father and, for one half of my youth, outside the United States. What that means is that I am devoid of any spectator sports obsession of any kind, including for our national sport of football. I have a strange relationship with football anyway. At 6’5” tall and weighing between 300-350 pounds throughout my entire adult life, people always assume that I played football. In actuality, I did play one year of JV football at Hebron Academy in Maine during my Ninth Grade year. It was an uncomfortable experience for me for several reasons. First of all, I knew absolutely nothing about the sport and it is a far less intuitive sport than you might imagine. It is bound up with rules and conventions that make it hard to follow if you are starting from zero. Secondly, there are a lot of high-stress exercises and drills that make little sense in abstraction, but presumably relate to the sport’s contact nature. So, the sum total of what I learned about football from that Fall of 1967 was how to move in a crab position and that I had little or no interest in football.
Four years later, when I arrived at Cornell university as a freshman engineering student, we were required to sign up for a physical education course while we were at Barton Hall for the registration process. Barton Hall is both the large indoor track and the hall used for both Military Science (marching) and large Rock concerts. That morning it was also populated with representatives of the various Cornell sports, all of whom were trolling for new meat for their freshman teams. Two assistant coaches for football immediately pounced on me and asked me if I had ever played. Apparently, there were few enough freshman men my size that they needed to recruit some bulk for their offensive line. They argued among themselves as to whether I had sufficient native athletic ability to qualify. They asked if I would submit to several physical tests. I had little interest, but felt somewhat forced into the trial. Their ideal test for agility was to ask that I get down into a crab position and move left and right, forward and back at their command. THey had picked the one thing I remembered from my JV football training so I did exactly what they asked. I impressed them. They offered me a spot on the team with the caveat that I agree to spend the next summer in their fitness training camp. I often wonder what would have become of me if I had taken them up on their offer. But I didn’t and now I sit here wondering why all the fuss over a football game on the first Sunday of February.
For years in business, I would pretend to know enough about football to be conversant around the water cooler. Whenever I was asked to attend a pro game I always found a reason to defer, but I did intermittently attend Cornell football games, just for the collegiate spirit aspect. Whenever someone would ask me if I “played ball” I was too uncomfortable to explain the whole life trajectory story, so I would just say that I had played a bit in college and leave it at that. The questioner would always nod and usually say that he wished he had had my size so that he could have “played ball” more meaningfully. I would nod back and the topic would change
I married Kim fifteen years ago and her family is populated with four adult men. The average height is probably 6’3” and the average weight is generously (meaning at a minimum) 280 pounds. This is a group that has either played organized football or highly disorganized rugby their whole lives. They live for holiday football games. Depending on how generous I am feeling during the holidays, I either let them turn on the games or I force them to watch movies like Love Actually, just to get heir goats. They cannot get enough of the football stuff and their spouses have seemed to catch the same bug over the years. Lucky for me, musical-theater-Kim has little or no interest in football.
Today we are once again on a mini road trip to Los Angeles to visit Kim’s family. The first thing everyone said when we planned our visit was to remind us that it was Super Bowl Sunday. We therefore had to plan our visit to come at midday on Saturday, stay overnight at the wonderful Langham Huntington Hotel in Pasadena and then meet her sister Sharon and husband Woo at their home in Camarillo for lunch, so as to finish up long before the pre-game shows start. We will hav e three hour road trip home which by my calculations will leave us with a wide-open set of Freeways since one of the lowest travel days in America is none other than Super Bowl Sunday. Perfect.
We are getting used to staying at the Langham Huntington Hotel in Pasadena and I must say it is a very comfortable hotel (which happens to be quite pet-friendly for Betty). I have no idea what the occupancy rate is on this hotel, but for the second time we are here during the Pandemic, it is quiet as a church mouse around here. I am eating breakfast alone on the Terrace by the pool, but this is my second time down here this morning. I came the first time at 7:30am and was surprised to find that there was no one here, not even a service person. The front desk explained that it didn’t open until 8:00am, which strikes me as very unusual for a 5-star hotel. It is now 8:30am and there are all of four tables occupied and this is the only dining establishment open on the grounds for breakfast. You may be thinking that everyone is saving their energy for the big game this afternoon and is taking breakfast in their rooms except that the Langham Huntington is observing strict Pandemic protocol and does not have room service available. Therefore, I can only assume that there are precious few guests in the hotel, which would comport with the general vacant nature of the common areas and lobby the few times I have walked through it.
That makes this yet again another strange “holiday” during the COVID Pandemic. I think it’s fair to say that COVID is making our quasi-National Holiday a little less than Super Bowl Sunday.