Football, the Fall, and Fitting In
Ahhhhh…fall. You know the feeling? The weather turns cool but not yet cold, the leaves start to change colors, hoodies and jeans replace flip-flops and shorts, pumpkin spice is everywhere, and Halloween decorations go up alongside general autumnal ones. You just feel happy, you know?
Yeah, I don’t get it myself. I’ve never been much of a “fall person.”
In fact, if you were to ask my family and friends who love fall, they’d tell you I greet their odes to autumn with, “This is a season of death. EVERYTHING IS DYING. Then it’s the cold depths of winter until spring brings rebirth. Who loves DEATH? Who says DEATH is their favorite season??”
But the plot twist is, I actually do like all those things. Granted, I don’t have strong feelings for pumpkin spice one way or another. But I love Halloween! I love having different seasons! I don’t even mind a chill returning to the air. I mean, you don’t own an 18’ scarf (alongside two 13’ ones) if you don’t enjoy wearing them.
The roots of my adversarial relationship with fall can be traced back to the anxiety I felt around going back to school as a kid. I hated it. I didn’t hate school per se and I’ve always loved learning, but I hated losing summer freedom for school schedules and rules.
Li’l Me refused to enter any store where the “Back To School” display was set up before I was actually back at school. My first boycotts! And whenever any adult asked me about going back to school I would shut that conversation the fuck down. The irony that I became a teacher is not lost on me.
Despite my love of most things fall, there is one iconic part of the season for which I do not care. I don’t love it. I don’t hate it. I just sort of…nothing it. And that’s football.[1]
I have never been a “sports guy.” Bill Watterson did a series of Calvin and Hobbes comic strips in the spring of 1990 where all the other boys in Calvin’s class signed up to play baseball at recess and he didn’t want to. I was seven years old at the time and this strip spoke to me.
April 18, 1990 / Photo Credit: Bill Watterson and Universal Press Syndicate
Calvin got it! Calvin got me! Honestly, I doubt Li’l Me ever felt more seen in a piece of art before.
Because who cares?! It is all rules and ranks and organization! Blaaaaaaah. Who wants any of that?!
When I took the Enneagram Personality Test years ago, I came up with a 90% match for #8, The Challenger. This was no surprise. My contrary part has always been a big piece of me so nothing about the joining-team-rules-ranks nature of sports appealed to me.
I played intramural basketball a few years in elementary school when I was a kid and that was enough. Though that didn’t mean I hated playing games in general, which Calvin also understood.
April 20, 1990 / Photo Credit: Bill Watterson and Universal Press Syndicate
Watching sports is almost as unappealing to me as playing them in a formal team setting. Sports interest me only insofar as snacking is concerned. Can I get a soft pretzel? Will there be ice cream? Is the ice cream in a little helmet, perchance?? That’s what gets me to a game.
I grant this puts me outside of a pretty stereotypical “masculine” sphere. Having no interest in playing, watching, and/or obsessively recounting and analyzing stats associated with sports in general, and football in particular during this season, leaves me an outlier in the realm of “what guys talk about.”
To be fair, it also leaves me outside the realm of American culture, too. As a Xennial kid who went to high school in that magical era of the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, football was no longer just a “guy’s thing” or even just a “sports fan’s thing.” As preeminent Gen-X cultural critic Chuck Klosterman observes in his book, But What If We’re Wrong?:
“Something becomes truly popular when it becomes interesting to those who don’t particularly care. You don’t create a phenomenon like E.T. by appealing to people who love movies. You create a phenomenon like E.T. by appealing to people who see one movie a year. And this goal is what the NFL has been working towards since the late 1970s…You can’t perpetuate a $7 billion industry without aggressively motivating the vaguely unmotivated.[2]”
Try as the NFL might, I’ve never been motivated to care. I come from a family of staunch Pittsburgh Steelers fans. Grandpa loved the Steelers! Dad and my brother, David, did too.
So I knew a lot about football, just by living in a house where games were watched, teams were cheered, and lucky items were arranged for the game. But, in the immortal words of Austin Powers, “That’s not my bag, baby.”
Interestingly enough, this wasn’t anything I remember grappling with. It wasn’t a choice I remember defending or explaining to family or friends. It was just who I was. It’s still who I am now. If I ring in fall at all it’s with denial binging horror novels or a Gilmore girls marathon.
I can’t think of a time when this made me uncomfortable. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say I can’t think of a time when any discomfort I felt from me sticking to my personal preferences wasn’t familiar, and there is always comfort to be found in familiarity.
Over the last decade, long hair for guys has been in vogue again. This wasn’t the case when I was a kid, yet I grew my hair out all the same—shaggy in elementary school and long enough for a ponytail from middle school onwards.
This meant having to answer the question “Are you a girl or a boy?” a lot…both from people who genuinely didn’t know and those who thought they were being clever (they weren’t). It annoyed me to no end…but never enough for me to cut my hair.
Once I could drive, I often found myself followed in stores by employees who thought I was going to steal something, given my long hair and usual style of a leather jacket and motorcycle boots.
I made a game of it, doing circular laps in the store and zigzagging through aisles. I figured if they wanted to follow me, I’d make ‘em work for it.
Again, I could’ve cut my hair, put on a pair of khakis and a polo shirt, and blended in…but I didn’t. (Though, to be fair, I’m not sure I could’ve, as I felt myself involuntarily retch while typing that idea just now.)
More than my lack of interest in sports or even the clothes I wore, alongside my hair, I found this sense of my own otherness most reflected in my music.
Going to high school when I did, everyone was listening to Dave Matthews Band, Radiohead, and Nirvana. I was happy with Billy Joel, John Mellencamp, Madonna, Cher, and Bruce Springsteen. I had a special affinity for ‘80s hair metal bands like Poison, Cinderella, Guns N’ Roses, Winger, Skid Row,[3] and Mötley Crüe.
Their long hair, leather, and makeup made me feel like I was home and I loved the countercultural nature of their (then already-dated) superficial party rock songs amidst the hyper-serious, somber tunes of grunge and alt rock.
Through my adolescent years, I couldn’t care less about a Superbowl Party. But if you had tickets to Poison’s Glam Slam Metal Jam ’01 (which I did), then I was THERE.
I went to some football games in high school, but that was to hangout with friends more so than being invested in the game. I’d certainly never go out for a team; I’d much rather sit around and discuss The Simpsons, thank you very much.
I was never much of a joiner. I had my family and my close friends and that was good enough for me. If I cared about what was popular, I certainly wouldn’t’ve been opining about “Piano Man” over “Wannabe.”
I’d wager my lack of interest in “joining” helped me find comfort in my outsider status. The people around me helped me find comfort rejecting those cultural norms, too.
I knew my parents loved me. My brother was always right beside me. I was raised with a healthy diet of Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. I had teachers who saw value in me as I was. [4] And I found my people as I grew up and ventured out into the world.
From high school to college to my adult life, I’ve always managed to surround myself with likeminded weirdos. There’s a line in the Doctor Who New Years Special “Eve of the Daleks,” where Sarah (Aisling Bea) tells the Thirteenth Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) and her companions Yaz (Mandip Gill) and Dan (John Bishop), “Good-hearted weirdos are actually the keepers.”[5]
And to that, I say AMEN!
I think that’s a big piece of the secret to true happiness. That’s who I want to be and who I want in my life. When you’re living as and amongst good-hearted weirdos, everything else seems to fall into place.
📚Want to dive deeper? Here are the studies and books that informed this article📚
[1] So obviously I’m talking about American football here…not soccer, which is football in the rest of the world…which makes sense because they actually use their feet in soccer whereas they use their hands most of the time in American “foot”ball. I digress…but footnotes are for digressions!
[2] Chuck Klosterman, But What If We’re Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past (New York: Blue Rider Press, 2016), 182-183.
[3] The fact that Sebastian Bach, the lead singer for Skid Row, would have a recurring role on Gilmore girls playing Gil in Lane’s band only made me love him and his metal music more.
[4] I’ve had many wonderful teachers in my life…though my ninth grade English teacher did not like me because of my long hair. No matter how often I raised my hand, she’d never call on me! And when she corrected my essays the ink from her red pen looked like she opened a vein and bled on the paper. But, to be honest and fair, I would not be the writer I am now if not for her. So I owe her one and do count her among the best teachers I’ve ever had :).
[5] Annetta Laufer, dir. “Eve of the Daleks,” Doctor Who, New Years Special 2022, BBC, 2022.
