This next month will surely have all the cold winds, the long dark nights and all the 31 days of any given December. And yet it has none of December’s parties, lights, gifts and jingle bells. Worse, January is the month where we feel the sting of the debt we compiled in December paying for all those lights, gifts and jingle bells.
For the women of America, an added challenge this season is dealing with men watching post-season football on the only days we can be away from our workplaces, including those halcyon hours on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. However, I have known one woman I want to pay tribute to here who particularly loved this football post-season because she was fixated by important games.
Her name was Melva Peterson from Visalia in Tulare County, and she actually knew more about football than did her very supportive husband Mark or most groups of men at sports bars. Since Melva lived in a far-away time and place, I don’t feel I am betraying her privacy by citing her interest in football as a great example of triumphant female empathy.
Melva understood that the tough message of football was getting into her husband’s system every winter weekend. Then, as his business week began, her husband played out the emotional equivalent of blocking, tackling and open-field running before he brought home the bacon.
By watching football carefully, Melva was able to fine-tune her family’s self-preservation instincts. Sitting at a televised game with Melva and her husband and some other men, I noticed she could be the only one in the room who pointed out a quarterback changing a play while yelling signals at the line of scrimmage. When I questioned her about how she was able to catch an “audible” that was even missed by seasoned defensive linemen, Melva told me women have more experience than men in dealing with a man changing his mind.
Actually I have seen few marriages that have experienced the cheerful hours Melva and her husband spent beating the winter blues by watching football side-by-side. Instead football is often blamed as one of the breakdowns of a problem marriage, yet another wall that separates husbands and wives into different rooms on Saturdays and Sundays.
But as Melva proved, it doesn’t have to be that way.
Football surely is a game that can teach something to every man and woman in this nation. For example, in this time of greater economic hardship, I believe that the audible call at the line of scrimmage will need to be brought into family life with an impact that is big-time. Today, if we don’t now have the money now to take the family to some silly movie on the weekend, we may surely use an audible to go instead to … for example … the less expensive Norton Simon Museum of Art in Pasadena. What a great audible that is – the museum doesn’t even charge children with their student cards to spend a whole day there with its priceless Van Gogh and Degas masterpieces and its educational art films.
Most football experts agree that the greatest audible-calling quarterback in history was Broadway Joe Namath. Namath would characteristically step to the line of scrimmage with a play totally sorted out in the huddle, but then he might see something he didn’t expect – a different formation, or even the way someone was balancing himself on the other team. At that point, he would redirect a totally different play using only the signals he shouted as he hunched over his center. His success was tied to the fact that no one could communicate to teammates with number signals like he did.
So we find that in the New Year we are all stepping up to a line of scrimmage called 2009 with formations we are not accustomed to expect. In some counties in California, such as Riverside County, the unemployment rate is now reaching up to ten percent. There is a new poll that says that one out of five currently employed Californians is seriously evaluating unemployment in the New Year. Surely we haven’t seen so much resistance to our individual plans for success in our lifetimes.
Don’t worry – be happy.
But again football teaches us that when all the going gets tough, all the tough get going. This is why the greatest football game of all time – or at least one that competed with the classic 1958 NFL championship between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants as the greatest ever – was the 1962 Rose Bowl between the USC Trojans and the Wisconsin Badgers.
The game was played by two great quarterbacks – but USC’s Pete Beathard was more highly rated than Wisconsin’s Ron VanderKelen. Still, both quarterbacks ended up sharing honors as player of the game.
Going into the fourth quarter, Wisconsin was behind by 42-12 – considered a hopeless lead to overcome even by the broadcasters who were trying to keep young kids like myself watching the game on their black-and-white TV sets. But then something turned VanderKelen into a quarterback that he had never been either before or after his Rose Bowl moment. For one quarter, VanderKelen became the football equivalent of Superman.
By the end of the game VanderKelen had completed 33 of 48 passes for 401 yards. The most crucial of those yards were compiled in the fourth quarter, when he had simply become unstoppable against USC. He ended up leading Wisconsin to 23 unanswered points in the final quarter. USC won the game by holding on to their 42 points through tactics like walking extra slow back and forth to the line of scrimmage and running out the clock. But everyone saw that USC had only won 42-37 in the less important scoreboard contest. It was Wisconsin that had won the more important poetry, history and he-man contests.
We still have a lot of poetry in today’s football. Surely the Manning family – Peyton on the Indianapolis Colts, Eli on the New York Giants, and father Archie of the New Orleans Saints – has become the equivalent of the cowboy Cartwright family of the TV classic Western “Bonanza.”
In addition to winning Super Bowls, the Manning’s do a lot of things just to help ordinary folks, like the Cartwright’s. For example, they rolled up their sleeves and wet their shoes to help the people of New Orleans during the Hurricane Katrina crisis when most NFL players chose not to risk themselves in those dirty waters. And even when they have a rough outing on the field, the Manning’s have a family tradition of giving their TV audience a friendly send-off on the camera. They can look just like Hoss, Little Joe and Ben at the end of a rough episode of “Bonanza” – a little joke or a grin to say nothing was as bad as it might have looked. As for the mother of either family, I assume she must take after God. Just like God, she is never seen personally but her work represents her.
In the same way, football ever since the Great Depression – and particularly during tough times — represents all of us. Especially now!
Chris Sharp
Commentary
Chris Sharp is an Educator and a prize-winning professional writer. His commentaries represent his own opinions and not necessarily the views of any organization he may be affiliated with or those of the West Ranch Beacon.
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