November 6, 2005
Dear Customer Care:
I’m writing this letter in order to request that the Sunday Ticket component of my DirecTV satellite service be terminated. I realize this may well be a matter one could address by calling 1-800-DIRECTV. I have, as your records will undoubtedly show, called (as well as e-mailed) Customer Care on numerous occasions with questions and concerns, and my queries were always answered satisfactorily. In fact, because of the high quality of both your company’s product and support service, I feel you deserve a full explanation of the reasons behind my request. I will try my best to explain.
I was born in 1969, and since that time the Detroit Lions have a winning percentage of .435. Only the Cincinnati Bengals, the St. Louis/Arizona Cardinals, the New Orleans Saints and the Atlanta Falcons rival the Lions’ futility over the course of the last three and a half decades. But in truth, since Monte Clark took over as Lions’ head coach in 1978, around the time I myself began following the team, their winning percentage has dropped to an even more anemic .405. They have won but a single playoff game in my lifetime. Outside of the 41-14 humiliation at the hands of the Washington Redskins in the 1991 NFC championship game, the closest the Lions have come to the Super Bowl was 1982, the year the title game was played at the Pontiac Silverdome, the Lions’ home field at that time. The 2006 Super Bowl is scheduled to be played at the Lions’ new stadium, Ford Field in downtown Detroit. Once again the Lions’ players, and not just their fans, will have to find whatever solace they can in rooting for another team.
Sports matter because I’m the youngest of four boys. Less than five years separate myself and Brent, the oldest, while Mike and Dave, the twins, are just eighteen months older than me. Childhood was sports, playing them and watching them. Occasionally we ate or did homework. Adolescence included predictable diversions — girls, drinking, and drugs — but for us they were just that, diversions. We were addicted to sports. We loved sports. That was the point.
Before I forget, I wanted to be sure to mention that both Carla (ext. 3440) and Patrick (ext. 3302?) from technical support have been nothing short of stellar: professional, knowledgeable, and friendly. As you must know, your impressive menus and subscription services, while wonderful, can be a bit intimidating. And don’t even get me started with the finer points of on-screen programming! Carla and Patrick could always be relied on to walk me through things clearly and patiently. I hope that when reviewing my account, you won’t assume that my present decision in any way reflects dissatisfaction with their care. Nothing could be further from the truth. I think each would make a fine manager. My wife used to joke that I was having some sort of affair with Carla. I never found this funny. Thankfully she spared Patrick her cruel jokes. Not that it mattered in the end.
Me and my brothers played all three big sports: football, basketball, baseball. But mostly football. Our house happened to border on an undeveloped lot. A big empty rectangle that subdivision bylaws required be maintained. In other words, mowed. I grew up next to a football field. We considered it ours. Land title aside, it was ours. The Kramer girls, Carrie and Laura, lived on the other side of the field, but would ask us before going out there to practice baton.
Look, here’s one way to think of what it means to be a Lions’ fan. Since Brett Farve — whom I admire greatly, though I root like hell against the Packers — has been in Green Bay, the Lions have started thirteen different men at quarterback. Sucky thirteen. And the best of them (Erik Kramer? Scott Mitchell? Rodney Peete?) has been average, and that’s being generous. Sure we’ve had some great running backs: Barry Sanders and Billy Sims before him. But does anyone remember Roger Craig? Or Dorsey Levens? Everyone knows that the Broncos got along fine without Terrell Davis. Montana, Young, Farve, Elway. Those are the guys who win Super Bowls. I’ll admit it, I was a quarterback myself. But I think I’m being objective here.
Despite your excellent coverage of last year’s draft, Jen, my wife, wouldn’t let me watch. And that was just as well. I knew the Lions’ brass were going to burn it on another high-priced wide-out. But either you got it or you don’t, and as much as Joey Harrington is a class act, and probably a decent talent when removed from the violent chaos of a collapsing pocket, he just doesn’t have what it takes to be a big-time NFL quarterback. I told Jen to go to hell for telling me what I could and couldn’t watch, but maybe she was right. She claimed she was just asking or begging or warning me, not as a threat, just cautioning me that it would only make things worse. But I figure every draft day some team brings a player on board who leads the whole damn team to the Promise Land: Montana, LT, Elway (he was drafted by the Colts, but immediately traded to the Broncos, so he counts). Why can’t I dream? Why can’t it happen to us? Is our franchise that sick?
Before I forget, if by any chance my November 1st conversation with Carla was in fact recorded and/or monitored for quality assurance purposes, I was wondering if I might be able to ask of you to remove that conversation from your records. Actually, if it was only monitored, nevermind. It was following the overtime loss to the Bears (interception returned for a touchdown, of course), and I was in a bad way. Maybe you could forward my apologies to Carla, too, since she’s been away from her desk an awful lot since then. If company policy requires it, I’d be happy to submit this request in writing separately. Though I’d prefer not having to specify my reasons any further at this time.
Growing up, I spent a lot of time getting the snot beat out of me by my brothers. At school they would swarm and flatten any bully who messed with me. Ask Kenny Sturtz. But football is football. We didn’t play touch. And I wanted to play. Sometimes they had to talk me out of it. When Brent brought home an even bigger kid, like Tom Smolinski or Brian Pavel (walked on at MSU, 1985), they made me watch, for my protection. Smolinski could bench 325, so I couldn’t much argue. But if it was just us, what did they care? Brent would get hell from Mom whenever she saw my blood all over my t-shirts (they’d use the hose outside to clean up my face), but if they couldn’t find anyone else to come over, what were they supposed to do, play one-on-two?
By the way, the enclosed check is for the rest of this billing cycle. I’m pretty sure it’s for the right amount. Honestly, the billing aspect of DirecTV continues to baffle me. Don’t get me wrong, this has nothing to do with my decision to terminate part of my service, but I won’t exactly miss trying to decode yet one more subsection of your invoices either. Truth be told, I gave up on that a few months back. Another thing Jen gave me grief for. Pay Per View is a mixed blessing, let’s just leave it at that.
By the age of twelve, playing backyard ball with a bunch of high schoolers day in and day out, there wasn’t a whole lot any middle school linebacker could do to get me frazzled in the pocket. What are you going to do? Sack me? Go ahead, blindside me. My brother weighs 75 pounds more than you, and at Keller Field (that’s what we called it) no one wears pads. And so yes, as you might have guessed, I became a quarterback.
Jen has argued that everything bad about me can be traced to my quarterback mentality: I like to give orders, I want to be the center of attention, I don’t do anything myself (apparently she’s never heard of Steve Young or Randall Cunningham!), I need to be surrounded by selfless people who sacrifice themselves for my protection, I always make sure I can blame someone else for dropping the ball. What quarterback worth his number blames the receiver? I’m not arguing with her about my ability to take responsibility; maybe she’s got a point there. It’s just why does she have to drag all quarterbacks through the mud along with me? That woman sure knows how to stuff a point down your throat. It’s like being married to the ’85 Bears. Jen thirty-seven, Rob nothing.
I don’t know if you (or your parent company) have a corporate relationship with any chain of hotel or motels, but if you’re considering something along those lines, I’ve been very impressed with Motel 6. My experience with Red Roof Inn left a lot to be desired. But the people at Motel 6 — at least the one here in Wheat Ridge — definitely know how to make their guests feel at home, especially those of us Extended Stay Guests. Granted you have to watch the Broncos every Sunday, but at $218/week what do you expect, the NFL Sunday Ticket Superfan Package?! Anyhow, Dewey’s Bar and Grill across the street has a decent satellite set-up. They usually got four or five games to choose from. Not that it matters at this point.
Part Two
I never had a great arm, and at six feet in heels I wasn’t exactly Coach Harrison’s dream come true, but I had my upside just the same. Brent, Mike, and Dave all played for him and I went to all of their games and more than a few of their practices and by the time I was on JV I knew the whole playbook chapter and verse. I’d been throwing to Kyle Martin and Jay Jurvis since seventh grade. I knew how they ran their patterns and that Kyle couldn’t catch anything across the middle so why bother, but that he timed his curls perfectly and that Jay needed to get at least one pass a quarter or he’d stop trying. Starting JV quarterback. In a year or two I’d be doing the same for Varsity.
Now all this time I’m becoming more and more of a Lions fan. Becoming one and not knowing it, or at least not thinking much about it. It was just happening. Look, I was seventeen, that’s when Mike and Dave went off to Western, before I could make my own decisions, before I realized such a thing was even possible. It was another two years at least before I had become my own man. As they say. I know you’re thinking: but you’re a quarterback, Rob, quarterbacks are leaders. Maybe, but I guess I wasn’t that type of quarterback. At least not off the field.
Regardless, our school’s a bit of a powerhouse at the high school level, and less than an hour and a half away you’ve got U of M and MSU, both pretty storied programs, but somehow I fix my sights on the Silver and Honolulu Blue. My brothers’ fault. They were crazy about the Lions. Mike knew everything there was to know about Billy Sims: the name of his home town, his favorite movie, what he ate for breakfast on gamedays. Dave slept in an Al “Bubba” Baker jersey the night before each game. Did it for years after Baker left the team. Brent was too old for such rituals or even for simple hero worship. He chose instead to take it all very, very seriously. He believed in them, made it clear to us that we were to believe in them, delivered complex arguments each and every fall as to how and why this was finally going to be the Lions’ year: the healthy return of a once-injured Pro-Bowl offensive tackle, the long-awaited maturation of the secondary, the hits our rivals in the NFC Central took in the off-season, and worst of all, the arrival of some new quarterback who had what it takes. I looked up to Brent. While he took his shots on occasion, he also protected me from Dave and especially Mike, neither of whom seemed too concerned with my well-being. Brent didn’t tell me to care about the Lions. He made me want to love the Lions by way of personal example, because he loved the Lions and because I loved him. I wanted him to be happy and satisfied, to see all that patient loyalty start paying some long-awaited dividends. When the Lions would score, when they’d win, and the four of us would holler and give each other high fives and act out the whole damn thing afterwards down in the basement, finishing up the pop and pretzels mom set out for us, the couch and armchair worn out from tension and excitement, I made sure to sit near Brent, to listen to his recap of the game, to hear him ask after a certain climax, “Man, how sweet was that?!” To feel the spent warmth that came off his body, to get a good look at the way his eyes would open wide with optimism and relief.
Do you get letters like this from fans living in New England? What must it have been like to live in Dallas or San Francisco in the early nineties? Did a single person cry in Pittsburgh from 1975-1980? What is it like to win, to win it all, to end your season with a victory, with everyone else, people all the way in Spain and South Africa, watching you celebrate, raising that oversized trophy in the air, to remain in your filthy, champagne-soaked uniform hours later, because it’s is the filth of a champion, and not having to ask yet again what went wrong and what can we do better and how can next year be the year it finally happens? Is that when the pain stops?
It’s not that the JV team got much attention, but we were a couple wins better than the Varsity. And they knew it. We were deferential to the Varsity guys, we weren’t stupid, but they knew we knew. Mike and Dave knew that their team was turning into a down year for the program. They were 4-3 as Halloween approached, and with the Garden City game coming up the post-season wasn’t looking too likely. Meanwhile we had won six straight since the opener, and I was emerging as a leader. And I knew it. You see, when you’re the youngest of four and you’re thrown into it with them from before you can remember, you’ve got no choice but to learn and mature quickly, if you have any intentions of surviving. I wasn’t an exceptional athlete. But I had Varsity knowledge of the game. I had thrown hundreds, maybe thousands, more passes than your run of the mill Junior Varisty QB. I had listened and even taken notes as Brent talked me through a million situations. And, in our backyard at least, I had learned how to get the ball past defenders way more formidable than anything the tenth graders over at Westville could offer.
A quarterback in control. There’s nothing else like it. No other sport involves so much simultaneous human movement. Twenty-two people set in motion at the snap of the ball. What sport created the need for slow-motion replays? Football. For eighteen different camera angles? Football. For the telestrater? You guessed it, football. A combination of contraction and expansion. The lines crush into each other. The wideouts trying to elude the cornerbacks, the cornerbacks shadowing their every step. Only the quarterback stands alone, watching it all, like a fan, waiting for the proper spaces to appear. But as the man with the ball, and the one equipped to make the most costly, the most demoralizing, momentum switching, season-ending mistake in football, the interception, you don’t have much time. Because the defense isn’t just trying to keep your from completing your passes, they’re trying to prevent you from passing in the first place, by doing whatever it takes to bring the team leader, painfully if possible, down to the turf. But knowing this you still stand in the pocket, this improvised, fleeting space you know won’t last more than three or four seconds, and you survey your options, taking it all in, until you find that moment when it’s time to pull the trigger. And so if you can’t really watch you can’t really throw, not when you’re supposed to and not to the right spot. Which is why when things aren’t going right for a QB all that failure just builds on itself. The collapse of the pocket seems not just inevitable, but immediate. The windows that open between your target and the opposition seem impossibly small and then slam shut in an instant. You’re no longer seeing, you’re not letting yourself see, so you make one bad decision after another until coach sits you down. Which is an act of mercy, since pretty soon your brain was going to melt and run right out through the holes in the side of your helmet. I’ve pretty much seen it happen. You all beamed it to me from Chicago back in September. How in the world does a professional throw five (five!) interceptions in a single game?
But for me, time passed slowly in the pocket those first seven games. I knew just how much time I had and I used it wisely. It’s chaos, but after a while it’s predictable chaos. I checked off one, two, three receivers. I could find my tight end or a half-back to dump it off to when protection broke down. Worst comes to worst, I’d scramble for a few yards. You see, most JV units throw the ball half a dozen times a game. Because your passing game is a complicated thing. The routes, the timing, the decision-making, throwing a ball well in shoulder pads, getting the goddamn offensive linemen not to hold. But the JV Hawks had a bona fide air attack. Against Salem I had twenty-one completions. Against Franklin I threw for three TDs, in the first half. Most of the time, if you’re coaching a JV defense, you’re not really concerned with much beyond your nose guard, tackles, and middle linebackers. It’s nice to have a decent safety, but outside of making sure nothing that squirts past the linebackers goes all the way, ninety percent of the time your secondary could sit on their helmets. Because most JV offenses can’t manage anything more elaborate than trying to run it between the tackles. Us? We ran eleven straight pass plays against Central. They were so desperate that when we finally ran the ball, a draw play, Brian Kelly waltzed in untouched from eighteen yards out. We were toying with them.
My father converted a couple Betamax tapes of that season to VHS a few years back and gave them to me for my birthday. Jen agreed to watch. She’d heard more than a bit about those days, as you might have guessed (as has Carla for that matter!), but outside of a couple photo albums she’d never seen what it was all about. I’d actually been bugging my dad for some time to transfer the tapes, but you don’t want to be too hard on him. The games were pretty much as I remembered them. Maybe my spirals weren’t quite as tight as I recalled, but the poise and the leadership, you could still see it. Watching the games with Jen made a mess out of me. Morale was already pretty low at our place. Part of me just wanted to watch the games, but part of me wanted her not just to watch them but to want to watch them, and to watch them close enough to get it, and to love me for ever having been as graceful and as able and as seamless as I was then. I wanted her to turn from the TV to the living me and find the remnants of my tenth grade self in the man and husband sitting next to her. Because there was no way she could fail to love a man tied in any way to that other time and place and person. Against Cherry Hill I saw the fifteen-year-old me throw the ball forty yards in the air to Jurvis, who didn’t need to speed up nor slow down. Didn’t even need to extend his arms. All the lucky bastard had to do was open them up, just to make a little bit of room for the ball. I didn’t pass it so much as place it there for him. At certain moments the line between sport and art gets pretty fuzzy. Hell, you all know that, those amazing promotional montages you put together. That damn Barry Sanders was a dancer, plain and simple. But by this point Jen just didn’t have one tenth the patience I had back there on the field. She couldn’t separate good football watching from bad football watching. Bad football watching.
Part Three
Since I’ve been in Denver, I’ve met more than my share of serious fans, and we get talking and pretty soon they see that I’m what you might call a football purist. Carla knows about this. And at some point one of these Denver fans will ask me, “But how can you be a fan of a team doesn’t just play on turf, but plays on turf indoors?” Knowing it’s coming I usually just smile, take another sip of beer. And there’s no point in explaining, not to someone who was a perfect stranger just an hour earlier. Of course I love football outside on actual grass. Back on Keller Field, in the middle of summer, we’d play some marathon games. Counting up by sevens, touchdown after touchdown, final score 105-84. Eventually, when our own house would already be casting a long shadow halfway across the field, Brent would call some wild play. A Statue of Liberty flea-flicker that led to a screen and then an improvised second pass, this time forward, all the way to the end zone and a pile of grass-stained bodies laughing like idiots, not just the four of us, but some of the regulars, Jamie Miller and Danny Gurchik and Pete Baachi, too. The game would be over, no one had to announce it, and the rest of us would migrate lazy down to the end zone that was marked off by two baseball hats, one t-shirt, and an old shoe, collapsing to the grass, absently plucking out weeds, putting wildflower stems in our mouths, trying to find the energy to get up and head toward the hose, but instead sinking deeper and deeper into the field that was and wasn’t ours. I knew that Astroturf was a recent invention, and not a good one. In ’82, the Varsity played the State semifinal in Flint on Astroturf, and Brent came home with pink and red burns up and down his arms. He just shook his head, saying it was like playing on cement. I respect the dirt of football, the way football decided long ago that outside of lightning all weather is welcomed, that the season was in fact designed to begin in the grueling heat of late summer and end in the brutal cold of early winter. I knew that the Silverdome was fooling with something that shouldn’t be fooled with. Football’s version of genetic engineering. I understood all that, but I understood something else, too.
Practices were tense the week leading up to Garden City. Varsity needed to win if they were to have any chance of making the playoffs. The JV were confident enough, but we knew it wouldn’t be right if we won and they lost, if we rose to 7-1 with them falling to 4-4. It would be disrespectful and against the proper order of things. But we were going to play Thursday night, a day before Varsity, so there was no way for us to know if we were supposed to win or lose. Mostly we just kept quiet in the locker room. To encourage them would be patronizing and to show them how confident we were, and we were, would be insulting, because they weren’t (and shouldn’t have been). But there wasn’t anything you could do. They were average and we were great and that’s just how it was. What the coaches should have done was scrap the Wednesday Ritual, or Wednesday Torture as they players called it. Make up some excuse. How hard would that have been?
While Jen and I were still living in Royal Oak it never occurred to us to subscribe to satellite service. All the road games were carried by the networks, and if a home game wasn’t sold out and the network blacked out local coverage, something that happened more and more in the nineties, it wasn’t hard to find a bar or a friend with satellite. No big deal. But when I got transferred to Denver we needed a plan. Was I happy to get transferred? I pretended to be proud, and I guess I was, since it was a promotion. New Head of Regional Sales for a major pharmaceutical outfit. Nineteen percent raise and stock options. Half a floor of people working under me. A personal secretary plus an assistant. But the farthest I had ever lived away from Detroit were my four years in East Lansing. I’ve been to Canada five times, three of which were just across the river to Windsor. Jen put together our honeymoon to Cancun, but that’s it. I didn’t even know the rest of the world called soccer “football” until last year. Maybe I’m a bit provincial, it never bothered me. Anyhow, we celebrated, and then Jen rewarded me with the whole package. A Zenith 50″ Plasma widescreen with HDTV and a home theater system to boot. She had everything delivered the morning we met our movers at the new place. I was high all day. And surprised. Not just because of how much money she decided to spend on me, but because by then we’d already had a few fights about my sports viewing habits, as she called them. But Denver was a big change, and she knew I was nervous, about leaving home and about the new responsibilities, and she did still love me then, and the electronics were a surefire way for her to tell me so. She gave me something that I could rely on when times got tough. Which isn’t to say it was a good idea. Because even though times got tough, sometimes they got tough because of this thing I could turn to when times got tough. That day we arrived in Denver was in fact the time I contacted all of you. It was my good fortune that the next available Service Representative happened to be Patrick, who was kind enough to answer some of my home theater questions, though this obviously falls a well outside his official purview. Thank God for Patrick. The people at Sony make great products, but their customer service has clearly been outsourced and not to the right people.
I don’t know what Pontiac looks like these days, but when I was a kid it was out in the middle of nowhere. We’d be driving and suddenly, there it is, the Silverdome’s eight-sided, puffed-out white roof looming in the distance. Half enchanted palace, half oversized dessert. Majestic and secretive. It looked so out of place the outlying forest landscape seemed transformed, as if our destination were actually some mutated medieval castle. All that unlikely architecture just for football. Air pressure kept the roof from collapsing. At the end of a blowout, and there were a few, the four of us would go play by the exits. We’d open a regular door, instead of the revolving ones you were supposed to use, and soon find ourselves fifteen feet down a walkway leading to the parking lot. The science of all that air pressure. But the magic was being let in, not getting shot out. Settling into your very own seat, Section 134, Row 25, Seat 19, looking up and out and seeing how you’re an integral part of the 80,000-plus who have come to see the Lions. And the crowd and the game were only the beginning. After all, over 100,000 assembled a half-dozen Saturdays a year not an hour away in Ann Arbor. What made the Dome special was right there in the name: a fully enclosed sporting facility. Watching the Lions in a single room occupied by more people than you’ll meet in your entire life. Just you and 80,462 other people closed off from the rest of the world, no planes or even clouds passing overhead to bother you, not a single thing reminding you that another world exists. The awesome impossibility of climbing into Spaceship Roar turned all the supposedly negative features of the Dome into its transcendental virtues. The absence of real grass, of dirt, it wasn’t fake or sterile anymore, it was pure. The predictable air, 69 degrees year round, the studio-quality lighting, the game deserved this concentration of technology. The regal parabola of the tumbling pigskin on a kick-off, or better yet the sight of a Hail-Mary climbing higher and higher into the air, the crowd screaming with insane anticipation, this kind of magic deserved the invention of a brand new place. The Colosseum is 2,000 years old. Piling thousands of people into a single structure to watch men hurt each other according to the rules was nothing new. Football is a recent invention, one perfectly suited to our age. The sophisticated equipment, the improbable complexity, the intricate language of war that suits it maybe a bit too well. Professional football needed a place like the Silverdome. When a player finally got behind the defense and the whole damn field opened up before him, a single man running a perfectly straight line down an absolutely flat stretch of green chemical carpeting marked off into yard-long segments, the crowd rose with a joy that in its immediacy had to be private. Something the so-called purists can’t understand.
Today’s a Sunday, and according to my company’s laptop it’s 11:19 p.m. The Lions traveled to Green Bay this week. ESPN’s Sunday Night Game. he Packers are having a down year, but I imagine they’re still nearly a touchdown favorite. No matter. I disconnected the cable wire from my room’s TV. It’s in my trunk. This computer’s modem would happily climb aboard the wireless signal the good people at Motel 6 offer free of charge, giving me instant internet access to Real-Time Updates, including all the stats. I might even be able to find a highlight or two of the game still in progress. But the cable is in my trunk for a reason. I’m writing this letter for a reason. I’m living in a Motel 6 for a reason. Now’s not the time for updates.
Part Four
The Wednesday Ritual began when the JV starters walked up the small hill leading from our run-down field to where Varsity practiced. And then onto a short scrimmage between their second string and our first. Traditionally the Ritual just meant the JV starters getting their asses whipped up and down the field for twenty minutes. Looking back on it, I can’t say I understand the rationale behind the Ritual. Make the second-string feel better, since they spent the rest of the week getting their own asses whipped up and down the field by the Varsity starters? Maybe the coaches thought that for the JV squad it was the equivalent of strapping five-pound weights around a sprinter’s ankles the day before a big race. Since the next time we suited up it would be to play regular old tenth-graders and not a bunch of put upon eleventh-graders who wanted nothing more than to remind us of the natural pecking order, to for once not be on the business side of all that brutality. Maybe it was just one more sign of how a football team is like an army. Sadistic hazing in the name of sadistic hazing. But you see, what I knew was this: a lot of playing football is just coming to terms with doing whatever it is you’re supposed to do while in a lot of pain, and while your opponent is trying to make you feel even more pain. Once you make your peace with that, that you hurt and will soon hurt more, it gets easier to concentrate and fulfill your duty to the team. Which is why fear, though perfectly rational, must be overcome. So I looked at the Wednesday Ritual as an opportunity to get past being afraid and hurt. Having basically lived the Wednesday Ritual with my brothers day after day for years on end in the unofficiated field next to our house, for me this wasn’t all that much of a challenge. Here at least I had pads and my very own helmet. Plus, I knew that dumb luck had made the eleventh-grade players sub-par as a unit, whereas we were playing at a very high level. My fellow JV starters took a while to realize all this: to stop tightening up the moment they climbed the hill, to figure out they could do more than just try to survive the next twenty minutes, to take a little pleasure in seeing if it wasn’t possible to score against the Varsity right their on their own field.
Watching a football game on a 50-inch Plasma High-Definition TV complete with a six-channel high-end home theater system isn’t all that different, as far as poor substitutes go, from seeing a game live and in-person at the Silverdome. The experience, in terms of seeing and hearing, is pretty complete, and what you lose by watching it alone in your remote and isolated living room, you make up for with the close-ups, the instant replays, the in-game highlights, the back-to-back-to-back games, and, most of all, the viewing options provided by your unparalleled NFL Sunday Ticket Superfan Package. Sure, your wife cooks quiet frustration in the adjacent kitchen, she suffering through her Denver exile every bit as much as you. Sure your own home office sits impatient at the end of the hallway, where emails wait unanswered, where the specs for the November trade show sit neglected on your desk, even though the National Director of Marketing was expecting them the previous Thursday. But when you have a $1,700 reclining leather arm chair positioned just so in the sweet spot at the center of your six speakers plus sub-woofer and a meticulously programmed universal remote that can control seven different big-ticket items, then the moment you close the door that once opened up onto your wife and your office and the rest of the world, not because you want to keep them out, but because you want to seal this in, then you’ve built your own private, hermetically sealed Silverdome, capacity: 1. The Rob Keller Dome hosted home games every Sunday and played another on Monday nights for good measure. By our second fall in Denver the RK Dome drastically expanded its operations, having opened its doors for the college game, HBO’s “Inside the NFL,” two to three daily doses of ESPN’s “SportsCenter” along with an endless stream of copycat programs, Major League Baseball’s pennant stretch, the NHL preseason, Davis Cup tennis, the Buick Open Golf Tournament, the X Games, high stakes poker, women’s college volleyball, the World’s Strongest Man Competition, rodeo, and log rolling, all of which you, DirecTV, thought I might enjoy. And I might have.
Meanwhile, in 2001 the Lions had hired Marty Mornhinweg, the one-time offensive coordinator for the San Francisco 49ers, as their new head coach. As far as credentials go, a man could do worse. Half of losing is not scoring enough points, so you can’t blame owner William Clay Ford for thinking that bringing the West Coast Offense to the Midwest would finally turn the ship around. Mornhinweg would coach the Lions for two seasons, leading the Silver and Blue on to the field for thirty-two regular season games. Of which the Lions won exactly five. A .156 winning percentage. The worst two-season stretch in franchise history. A life-long Lions fan learns quickly not to expect too much. He tries to be satisfied when his team remains in playoff contention through mid-November. He takes the moral victories along with the real ones, he tries to agree with the head coach, who, during a post-game press conference, complete coverage of which you, my ever reliable friends at DirecTV, provide as part of the NFL Sunday Ticket Superfan Package, says with a straight face following a 37-9 loss to the Indianapolis Colts, “I thought we played competitive football for the better part of three quarters.” A life-long Lions fan tries not to stay awake each night for weeks on end in order to construct an elaborate set of theories explaining Barry Sanders’ inexplicable decision to abruptly announce his retirement at the height of his game a paltry two weeks before the opening of training camp. But to be a fan is to care. And to be a life-long fan is to care without ever having decided to care, to care before you knew you were caring, to care despite yourself, to care at your own expense, to care in a way exhausting and demoralizing and soul emptying, to care involuntarily even when your wife is sliding curt notes under the door informing you that dinner is on the counter and that she is going out with someone named Gail or Dale and that she’s not sure when she’ll be back. And to be a life-long fan of a chronically rotten team is to decide against your better judgment to watch them play 1,800 miles away from the hi-tech solitude of your living room, twenty years after you at least had the blood close company of your similarly cursed brothers to pass around and swallow together the still thick and bitter taste of disappointment, brothers who have since scattered themselves to preposterous places around the world, to Nanimo, British Columbia, to Nowhere, Bolivia, to a fishing boat in the South Pacific, brothers who once had the sweet, innocent luxury of taking for granted the ever-present love and self-sacrifice of a high-endurance mother, who went from never having so much as a cold in thirty years to dead from breast cancer in fifty-three days, brothers whose father, just like them, fell straight apart afterwards, having never learned how to love each other or anyone else for that matter without the flimsy crutch of rooting for a deformed team that played a violent game their own bodies could no longer tolerate.
By the week before the Garden City game the Ritual had been turned upside down. Week after week I stood indifferent in the pocket, taking my licks, but also managing to climb through the tiny windows that still popped open, windows leading to quick outs by the sideline and, just the week before, a streaking Jay Jurvis who caught Doug Machino stumbling at the line of scrimmage. That sixty-four-yard score undid the whole point of the Ritual. The Juniors had been humiliated, and we had so completely overcome our fear we forgot to act surprised. If the Ritual was foolish before, it was now foolish and pointless. Breaking from the first huddle, I looked across at the Varsity squad to see what you get when a cocksure sense of entitlement transforms into an anxious resentment that comes from having to once more endure whatever it was that stole your cockiness in the first place. They knew we were about to rub their faces in it, in other words. Pity and compassion being the only alternatives, neither of which appeared anywhere in the Hawks’ playbook. But I threw the first ball at Kyle’s feet on first down anyway, and was glad to hand-off on the next play. On third down, Coach called the same play we scored with the week before, only this time Jurvis was supposed to run a Flag pattern instead of a Post. The idea being, I suppose, that poor Doug Machino would be a bit too determined not to repeat his previous mistake, leaving him ripe to bite on Jay’s initial sale of the Post. Sure enough, Jay was soon running all alone with the strong safety nowhere in sight. Did I wait to pass to see just how far I could throw a ball on the Varsity field? Was I hoping for the coaches’ sudden intervention, having made our point once again?
Part Five
If I am to make one thing clear here, it is not that DirecTV is a bad thing, but it is no small thing either. Trust me, I know exactly what it’s like to sell that most rare of products, the kind people actually want more after they obtain it than they did before. But so much has to go right for your team to win. Sacrifice and teamwork and effort are too small as words. The moment you truly understand just how wrong it can all go, the very possibility of victory, of seeing everything come together, well, after a while the best you can do is try and remember that for every loser someone else is a winner, so maybe this is the week. Maybe the Lions have learned this week how to bring their A-game, how to take it to the opponent, how to come up with the big plays, how to avoid the big mistakes, how to suck it up, how to play their hearts out, how to overcome adversary, how to grind it out, how to show some character, how to win one for the fans, how to earn the right to repeat the happy clichés and not the sad ones. But I’m doubtful, and more than that I just don’t want to know anymore. I’ve been a winner and loser, often in that order, and it’s time for me to hang it up.
I had learned to see from the pocket, but I still wore a helmet and all the poise in the world wasn’t going to provide me with much in the way of peripheral vision. What I could see was Jurvis receeding alone, a giant smile burning through the back of his bonnet. By the time the blitzing cornerback and the entire right side of their defensive line got to me I had run out of time to remember how to be sacked correctly. Which is a skill, as all Lions fans know too well. As horizontal became vertical, the very real dirty grass of the Varsity practice field replaced Jurvis. My collarbone was asked to do some things it could not and it cracked to tell me so. Between the sound and the pain I waited, deep inside the safety of my helmet, preparing myself for another loss, something I had already learned a thing or two about on Sundays with my three brothers, two of whom had to be removed from the pile before they could replace that pile of players with one composed of silent coaches and worried teammates and remorseful brothers and, eventually, a pair of medics. The clearest thing I’ll ever remember was that moment between the sound and the pain, because somehow I saw forward and backward, all of it, in that instant. Of what I had done and what I wouldn’t do again.
Somehow I knew this was it for me. The collarbone healed by Christmas, but my throwing motion was never quite the same. I got a bit caught up with being mad at myself and others, at the program and maybe even at Mike and Dave. I still played my Junior year, but my head was no longer in it, and I only got a handful of game snaps. Senior year, which should have been my year to take us to State, I didn’t even suit up. Delivered pizza. Tried to get down Katie Bowers pants. Watched a ton of TV. The thing I still can’t figure out is if that moment, the one between sound and pain, was a good one. Because nothing hurt then. I knew it was going to, but it didn’t yet. And though I knew things were about to get very bad for me, seeing my whole damn life right there was more than a bit of consolation. Truth be told, it’s the most alive I ever felt, right there all alone before the pain. You see, I don’t know that the Lions lost today.
Please do not suspend my satellite service completely. Though Jen claimed she got it for my benefit, I caught her more than once lit up opposite the screen on those nights I came back late from work. She’s can’t get enough of those reality shows. If I’m due any sort of rebate or refund, make the check payable to Jenifer Keller, or Jenifer Gelfand, I’m not sure of her allegiances these days. Regardless, that’s one ‘N’ and one ‘F.’
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Sincerely,
Robert L. Keller
