Ohiowa
My Buckeyes played Iowa last night in Iowa City. Night games on the road are a real horror-show for a visiting team, as the fans have had an extra 6 or 7 hours to tailgate beyond their normal kickoff, and the atmosphere is electric, loud. Night games used to be the exclusive province of LSU and a few other southern schools, but ABC/ESPN has, belatedly, begun featuring a nationally-televised Saturday night game. I think they had to await the passing of Lawrence Welk before the environment for ratings competition was favorable.
For us on the west coast, inured to being jarred out of bed at 8:59 am for a 9:00 kickoff, the night kickoff is downright civilized. Last night, for the first time, Mrs. Perils deigned - no, actually requested - to accompany me to the sports bar where OSU alumni gathered to watch the game. Perhaps she wanted to see firsthand her competitor for my passion; maybe she also wanted to ensure that it was only about the football.
Since OSU won, it was a congenial, if raucous, experience. Interspersed between plays, we had interesting conversations with our neighbors. It took Mrs. Perils a quarter or more to get the hang of this. Due to my long experience, I have an internal clock that somehow knows when the ball is about to be snapped, and I adapt the diction of my conversation so that I can apply a period to a sentence just in time to turn to the TV and watch the play. My interlocutors in these environs are similarly endowed, and respect and appreciate my reciprocation. Mrs. Perils, on the other hand, could have been flagged several times for compound-sentence violations extending through the snap. Our neighbors were very courteous, however, and applied the advanced technique of pretending to follow a conversation, even feigning eye contact, while actually being totally engrossed in the play on the television. The fortuitous placement of TV screens in every possible sight line in this sports bar greatly facilited this ruse.
One fellow we talked to graduated from OSU a year after I did, in accounting, no less. We compared notes about a couple of common professors and the highlights - highly expurgated in my case - of our careers. He had first worked for, then purchased a franchise of, a farm implements manufacturer, sold it, and seemed to be simply at loose ends. He had flown to Seattle the previous week from a midwestern city in order to interview outfitters for a prospective Kilimanjaro climb. This was sufficient entree for a substantive conversation with Mrs. Perils.
Another fellow next to us I’d seen at these gatherings before. He’d alway seemed sort of terse, wrapped pretty tight and not very tolerant of errant play by the Buckeyes. Here’s someone, your biases tell you, whose personal and professional life is a shambles and who places all of his need for personal affirmation on the backs of a sports team. Well, under cross-examination by Mrs. Perils, it turns out he has a PhD from OSU in something like solid state engineering, and works for a large local software company not known to suffer fools.
Fine. I’ll always have the ‘71 Rose Bowl. Oh, wait, we lost that one.
As the game wound down and OSU was busy killing the prisoners, the TV cameras flitted around the stadium focusing on the glum faces of the Iowa students. Each time the camera would alight on a crestfallen, Hawkeye-imprinted visage, the whole room in loud unison would say, “AWWWWWWWW!” While this was amusing, I turned to a guy next to me and said, “Well, when time runs out, those kids will still be 19 and screwing their brains out.”, a point no one could argue.
Later, after we’d gotten home, I was surprised (and maybe she was, too) to hear that Mrs. Perils was a little hoarse. Like maybe she’d been cheering. A good night’s progress for our football agnostic.
