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It’s amazing and wonderful that the Bengals have reached the Super Bowl. In recent months I’ve been falling prey to the pandemic, gloomy and listless because of our restricted and uneventful lives. Then, suddenly, the world became filled with magic again, and I have Joe Burrow and teammates to thank for the transformation. All the excitement has reminded me that football is one of the very few things that have been a continual part of my life since middle childhood. I grew up fifty miles north of Green Bay, Wisconsin, and, of course, all my home town residents were and are avid Packer fans. Star receiver Don Hutson was my first athletic hero when I was seven or eight. We kids spent a lot of afternoons playing football at Triangle Park, and my brother Steven and I practiced passing, catching, and kicking in our front yard. My parents bought me a leather football for my eleventh birthday, and, because I was the only kid in sixth grade with his own football, my associates urged me to bring it each day to play at lunch hour. I was more than happy to do so. However, the principal appointed me Captain of the Safety Patrol, charged with arranging for the sixth grade boys to take daily turns as crossing guards. My peers immediately made it clear that, since I got to wear the badge of Safety Patrol Captain, I would have to do their turns as crossing guards while they played ball. They also made it clear that if I disagreed I’d get beaten to a pulp. It was one of my early lessons about the hidden burdens of being in charge of stuff.
Being in a small town in a rural environment, high school football was one of the main local attractions. In junior high we raced down the hallways when the bell rang to be first in line at the cafeteria and get out quickly to play ball on the lawn. I think I had my clearest sense of having grown up was when I started going to Friday night football games on my own with my junior high friends. The biggest local event of the year was the annual M&M game in late November between the Menominee Maroons and the Marinette Marines, the high school in our twin city across the river. This was the oldest interstate public school rivalry in the nation. Emotions ran so high that as teens we were cautioned not to drive to Marinette with our Michigan license plates because our cars would be vandalized.
When I went to college, phys ed was required of all freshmen, and at the first class the coach asked us to divide ourselves into three groups, based upon football experience: The “Advanced” group was for skilled players who had been on their high school varsity teams; “Intermediate”, those who had played football but were more who average in skill; and “Beginners” who barely knew the rules of football. My non-athletic roommate Bud, a brash New Yorker from the Bronx, assigned himself to the Advanced group, even though he’d never touched a football, confident that he would pick the game up easily and deserved to play with the best. I, on the other hand, not certain whether I knew all of the rules of the game, assigned myself to the Beginners group, despite having played thousands of hours of football. It was an interesting lesson in the vagaries of self-evaluation.
My college didn’t have inter-collegiate sports team, but instead had an extensive intramural sports program, and my freshman hall fielded a football team in our first quarter on campus. One of my friends, Arnie Projansky, was captain of the team, and he assigned me to the role of kick returner on punts and kickoffs. I was more than reluctant since several other hallmates were faster runners, but Arnie was insistent, deciding it would be good for me. I wasn’t very successful in gaining yardage, but I felt good about never dropping a kicked ball.
After college we went off to graduate school at the University of Michigan. Having gone to a small liberal arts school, I was completely skeptical about going to a large public university, especially a Big Ten school with all the implications of Greek life, partying, and big-time sports hoopla. However, we did get free student tickets to U of M football games, and, out of curiosity, my wife and I went to the first game of the season. Caught up in the crowd of 100,000 crazed fans, cheerleaders, the marching band, etc., we became immediate converts, and we never missed a home Michigan game. During those same years my parents arranged for tickets to Green Bay Packers games when we returned home during Christmas vacations. We got to see several Packers games during the Vince Lombardi Super Bowl era. Bart Starr, Paul Hornung, Jim Taylor, Jerry Kramer, and other legends. We practically froze to death at Lambeau Field, but I still count those Packer games among the highlights of my life.
We came to Cincinnati in 1966, and Paul Brown founded the Bengals a year later, so we’ve been Bengals fans from the start. Tight end Bob Trumpy lived in our apartment complex, and he did several question-and-answer sessions with residents which gave us a more personal connection to the team. We moved from Finneytown to Clifton in the early 1970’s, and I started tossing footballs in the back yard to my son J when he turned six. I’d step back one yard with every toss, and he’d never miss, catching the ball at 25 or 30 yards or more. When our backyard got too small we moved across the street to the bank parking lot. After a month or so we came out one day and the bank had erected a steel fence so we couldn’t get in. I thought it was an unnecessarily expensive way to keep fathers and sons from throwing footballs in the parking lot. Now it’s fifty years later, our son is tossing footballs to his own teenage kids, and we’re still following the Bengals. Lots of ups and downs with the home team over the years, but the 2022 Super Bowl is the pinnacle. It’s been worth the wait.
Love,
Dave
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