Week 1 Confessions of an NFL Addict

The Lake Charles Ravens Gang at Reliant Stadium in 2008

Ah, finally, the weekend I’ve been waiting for since January- the start of a new NFL season! Yes, I’m an addict, with a monkey that apparently doesn’t succumb to cold turkey, as you’d think seven months of withdrawl would be enough to cure any addiction. Maybe if I’d avoided watching the April draft and the preseason, I might be cured, but I just don’t want to kick the habit.

Transplants like me tend to remain stubbornly loyal to our old home town teams. We’re like old hippies who never left the sixties. It’s a difficult existence, since our games are rarely on local television. To get out fix, we march lemming-like to the nearset sports bar every Sunday to watch our beloved Ravens. For us, that means Buffalo Wild Wings.

My wife and I, along with another family transplanted from Baltimore, are there every week from September to December.

Here in Southwest Louisiana, it’s evident from the clientele at the local Buffalo Wild Wings that the Dallas Cowboys are by far the most popular out-of-town team, as about nine out of temn tables are filled with their fans. I firmly believe that this particular location would go out of business if it were not for the Cowboys.

I particularly hate it when the Cowboys game is on at the same time as ours, especially when they win, as happened today. When they lose, you hardly know that they’re there, but when they win, the restaurant takes the tone of a town hall meeting that’s being held by a congressman who supports heath care reform.

I suppose, however, that I am being a bit hypocritical here. We, too, like to make noise when out team does well, but there’s only five of us.

On this particular day, I happened to jump out of my seat on one particular play where the Ravens scored a touchdown to break a tie. I was promptly met by stares from the 10% of the patrons who weren’t watching the Cowboys. It turned out that the Ravens had scored at exactly the same moment as did the Saints’ opponent in their game. I actually considered myself lucky; I could have been the Cowboys’ opponent who’d scored. If that were that case, I would have certainly been greeted with a hail of chicken wing bones and little plastic containers of bleu cheese.

It’s amazing to me that our wives are as entheusiastic as my friend and I about football. The game has really attracted a lot of women in recent years. On this particular day, there were as many women as men at Buffalo Wild Wings. It’s possible that they tag along just to make sure that their men don’t embarass themselves in a public place, and if it wasn’t for the example of my mother, I’d believe that.

Yes, at 81, even she now makes it a point never to miss a Ravens game. In the old days, she used to berate my father and I for wasting out Sundays (and Saturdays, if you count college football) watching a “stupid game”. After all, we could be be engaged in more productive pursuits, like cleaning out the gutters. What she didn’t understand was that the very reason we parked ourselves in front of the tube all weekend was to avoid such tasks.

Nowadys, whenever I call my mother on a Sunday evening in the fall, the first words out of her mouth are, “Did you watch the game?” Then she launches into ten minutes of post-game analysis that I find to be amazingly on the money. She should take a seat next to Terry Bradshaw and Howie Long on the post-game show.

I think that she will outlive me if she ever starts talking about how her fantasy picks did. I’d suffer a heart attack right there on the spot.