Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [35]
It Isn’t Whether
You Win or Lose,
It’s How You
Watch the Game
Gabbing with O’Reilly
When O’Reilly was at last awarded his seat at RFK Stadium, I had already been sitting in the one next to it for eleven years. He arrived at his first game carrying a seat cushion and blanket, though it was a warm September afternoon. He was in his fifties, if my memory serves, but ruddy-faced and as excited as a little kid. How long he had been on the waiting list I’ve now forgotten, but seats rarely came open, and the pace was glacial. The time he put in was measured in decades.
When he saw me, a hippie wearing buckskin, he was crestfallen. It was 1972. George Allen was coach of the Washington Redskins and had them winning for the first time in twenty-five years. Vietnam, Nixon, and the private war between generations and lifestyles in America were raging.
The first couple of years he sat next to me, O’Reilly and I never spoke. He ignored me completely, and that’s hard to do in close quarters when everyone is excited and there’s so much going on. Harder still with someone like me who gabs constantly about players, stats, and game situations with everyone else around me. If I asked him a direct question about a player on the visiting team, he wouldn’t answer.
It was called D.C. Stadium when it first opened. I was eight years old and already a huge fan. My dad took me to the games. His company bought a box of season tickets and he purchased two. Since my birthday is in the third week of September, he would give me the tickets as a birthday present, and he did so for forty-two years. He wasn’t a big fan and, as soon as I was old enough to go by myself, he let me have both seats, and encouraged me to go alone, scalp the extra ticket, and use the funds for hotdogs and bus fare.
A couple of years earlier, I had sat crossed-legged on the floor in the basement in front of our black-and-white TV watching Johnny Unitas of the Baltimore Colts beat the New York Giants in overtime during the championship game. I had run upstairs, where the adults were having cocktails, several times, saying, “You need to come down and see this, I think what’s happening is really special,” to which they smiled and sent me on my way, maybe coming down one at a time, drinks tinkling in their hands, to see what I was up to. Oh, a football game, how cute.
Our seats were in section 115, at the one-yard line, nine rows from the field. It was a crazy catty-corner angle from which to view a game. The field was almost at eye level. A team with the ball moving toward the opposite end zone slowly marched away. Years of watching at last educated the eye to accurately gauge the distances traveled through the jungle of moving legs and falling bodies. But oh, when a team had the ball marching toward my end zone, what a state of escalating urgency would fill the crowd! Our bodies could feel the collective thrill. If Charley Taylor, Paul Warfield, Art Monk, Bob Hayes, Jerry Rice, or Joe Morrison were running one of those tricky corner patterns, the ball would come rocketing skyward in my direction before the receiver ever made his break to the outside, seeming as though the pass were coming right to me. I could see the whites of their eyes as they looked for it coming in over their shoulders. I could hear the slap of the leather on their hands. I could hear the air leave their bodies as the players collided with one another, and then the ground.
The goal line was directly in front of me, and when a team was marching in close, and the defense would dig in, a goal line stand resounded with the thunderclap of pads and grunts and rebel yells.
I remember Jim Brown carrying Sam Huff on his back, and Tony Dorsett cutting so swiftly through the line that he would already be standing in the end zone while behemoth-sized linemen were still falling in upon one another like a collapsing house of cards. I saw Franco Harris, Larry Brown, Walter Payton, Tom Matte, Leroy Kelly,