 |
Peter Hoey
|
my old college roommate, now
living in Atlanta, won’t
be flying out to the Stanford-Notre Dame game as
planned. Two other buddies were supposed to come, but they
had to
call it off, too. Now three tickets will be sitting
at the will-call booth unclaimed.
I’d like to go.
The boys on the team will need me there screaming
my fool head off as they take on the Fighting
Irish. But it’s also on TV. Should I drive four hours
to Stanford for a game that’s free on the tube?
The
answer, of course, is yes, absolutely. We’re talking
big-time grudge match here—thousands of fans railing
against the team that whomped us 31-7 last year after
luring away our winning coach. Our boys will need all their supporters
screaming their heads off at this game. It’s the least
we can do for them. I know; I was one of them. I’ve
still got the crooked finger to prove it. I dislocated
it in practice back
in ’59
when that fullback dragged me 10 yards, my left hand
locked in a death grip on his pants as my fingers twisted
into pretzels.
That was the day I finally quit the team. A state championship
player in high school, I had come to the Farm dreaming
of football glory; but in 3 1/2 years marked by a
succession of injuries, I never played in a game.
Is it because
my dream fell flat that I now live and die every
Saturday in autumn with the fortunes of the
Cardinal football team, experiencing vicariously
what I had hoped
to experience for myself?
I love going back to those
games, wandering among the hundreds of tailgate parties
surrounding the stadium,
watching people picnic under the eucalyptus trees by
Sunken Diamond
and Angell Field, where the same chin-up bar I used
in the Fifties still stands. (Maybe I’ll crank off
a few for old times’ sake.) A flood of memories overtakes
me every time I step onto campus. Fall and football
... then the winter rains, gradually filling Lake Lagunita
...
and
the warm, lush spring, with students lounging on the
boathouse deck, studying, sunning, paddling little
canoes around the
lake.
Before a football game, people line up along the
path leading from the gym to the stadium as the players
emerge from the training quarters for their traditional
quarter-mile walk to the stadium. Serious, the players
are, game
faces
firmly on. Warriors ready for battle. The tension is
heavy, like a typhoon building in the Bay of Bengal.
I try to sense
their mood. Is this their day? Can they do it? They
tower like mountains, monoliths. They look straight
ahead, concentrating
on business. Faces in the crowd project ancient visions
of glory onto the gladiators filing by in the lull
before all
hell breaks loose. The crowd is hushed. They respect
them, are in awe of them. Hell, I’m in awe of them,
and I was them. That was way back in the distant past,
and I was
way down in the depth charts (a foreshadowing, perhaps,
of my career as a deep-sea diver), but yes, I was there,
sacrificing
my pitiful little body. What is the power this game
holds over us? Is it some kind of holy crusade? An
offering of the self for a
greater cause? Is it saying I’m more than my body,
more than my limitations of pain and exhaustion and
fear of an opponent
bigger and scarier than my worst nightmare?
On those
warm fall days under pale blue skies, as crimson players
glide like ballerinas through the gilded afternoon,
we’re all cheering for eternal youth. Inevitably, shadows
darken and lengthen across the stadium floor, and the
game builds to a heart-bursting finale that either
vaults us into
ecstasy or tramples us into the dirt.
Let’s face it.
I will be up in the stands for the Notre Dame game, and I’ll
be up there when I’m 90 years
old, a total derelict, tubes and wires hooked into
every orifice of my body, intensive-care nurses hovering
around
my ravaged carcass like vultures as I hoot the boys
on one more time. That’s the way I want to go, right
there, midway up on the 50-yard line, my final whoop
dissolving into a death rattle as the boys upset the Irish—or
Trojans, or Huskies, or Bears—at the gun.  |
