Last week, I went to the Cincinnati Bengals’ final pre-season game. This was a treat, mainly due to the fact that I took my 11-year-old son, who’s a great kid. Because I have so many children – I’ve lost count, really – it’s hard to get one-on-one time with any of them. Plus, we had my company’s seats, in the “club” section, meaning I was waited on, hand-and-foot, as I so richly deserve to be.
The weather was perfect, the seats gave us a great view of the field, and there were surprisingly few drunks in our general vicinity. (Although, by the game’s end, two twenty-something women nearby who’d obviously tipped a few looked as if they were about to get into a little slapping and hair-pulling thing, and I regretted not bringing my video camera, but they worked things out. After three hours of $7 beers, they probably realized they needed to walk back to the ‘burbs together.)
My son is a bright, inquisitive person, and that’s a fine thing, of course, but there’s a downside: it can expose vast gaps in my knowledge of certain subjects. Football is particularly tricky, since I don’t really pay much attention to it. So we have this conversation:
SON: Dad, is a half back the same as a running back?He’d probably figured out some time ago that I don’t, in fact, know everything. Every day as he grows, I guess I know less and less. Pretty soon he’ll be a teenager, and I won’t know anything at all, but I hear once he’s in his twenties, I might know something again – probably just random trivia and nostalgic tidbits about how much better my generation was than these kids today – but something.
(At this moment, all 65,000 people in the stands fall
silent.)
ME: Hey, are you hungry? You look hungry. You should eat something.
SON: Maybe later. So, if the game is tied, and it goes into overtime and it’s still tied by the end of overtime, then what?
(Crickets chirping – and by the way, who knew there were
so many crickets in football arenas?)
ME: Aren’t these seats fantastic?
For now . . . well, hey, my 6-year-old still believes I can fly.
2 comments:
Halfback (or tailback)=old timer's term for running back
As long as it's not during play-offs, games can end in a tie. Or at least they could. Maybe they changed the rules on me.
Here's a list of tie games (which seems to indicate ties are still potentially possible):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NFL_tied_games
You never have to worry about tie games with the Bengals, or games where they win.
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