Football

We have a football problem in our house.

A big one is an understatement.  It festers every year but comes out in its full blown ugliness the Saturday after Thanksgiving.  A lot of people don’t understand this at all, a lot do.  It depends on where you come from I guess, where you grew up and how you spent your time with your parents.

I watched football with my dad.  It was our thing. I loved pulling up a chair next to him on Saturday afternoons and talking football.  It made me feel important. Mind you I didn’t understand a lot but he was pretty patient and willing to explain ….at least when his team was doing well.

His team was the Miami hurricanes.

This was neither here nor there when we lived in Massachusetts.  It became more of an issue when we moved to Florida and an even bigger issue when I decided to add Florida State to my college choices.  To say the teams were rivals was an understatement.  Dad called me up before the big game my freshman year with a confident “hope the best team wins”.  They did.  I’m not one for remembering details but I’ll never forget that game.  The first two plays were an interception then touchdown Florida State!!!!  He didn’t take my call the next day, so much for sportsmanship I guess 😉

Watching football was also the last thing I did in the hospital with my dad before he died. It always was “our thing”.

When I got married to a GATOR, my mother was in shock.  She still calls me to tell me the FSU scores when she knows they aren’t broadcast down here.

Keith and his dad grew up going to and watching games too.  They still do it.

Now I have a daughter and I had to make a choice.  I knew how much football meant to me and my dad and how much it means to Keith and his. So I gave her and her dad football.  Only football mind you. And I will STILL be cheering for my Seminoles come Saturday–the day of the yearly face-off.  I tried (I still tell her that Gator is YUMMY ;-)) but I just couldn’t take that away from either of them, knowing all that it meant to me.  She can make her own decisions later but for know, much as it pains me (and it really does) she can be a Gator. During football season.  IF she watches with her dad.

She’ll grow up one day and have to make her own choices.  Adding another rivalry to this family would likely be impossible, unless she went to Georgia.  But we have our bets on Harvard.  That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!