I hadn't been to a real live football game since just after I joined the Army. The last one was a school game that my only slightly younger cousin was playing in. It was pretty exciting, but probably mostly because I was related to one of the players and utterly surrounded by complete fanatics.
It's not the football, you know. It's the complete experience.
I'd been feeling pangs of mild jealousy over the past month or so because some of my friends have been going to FAU games. FAU is having their inaugural season this year. From what I hear, nearly all the players on the team are freshmen, and those few who aren't have never played college ball before. Add to that the fact that the team, being so new, hasn't got its own style or personality, customs or quirks, any of that stuff. Anyway, it sounded pretty exciting and fun, even if the team isn't all that great, because they are busy getting the hang of it, and it's historic. Plus it's a chance to hang out with your friends, and I have had precious few chances to do any of that with these particular friends lately.
Lo and behold, Napalm and I got invites to share on some free tickets a friend landed for last Saturday's game. Hallelujah! Jealousy, begone!
(Hm. I am thinking I should nickname this friend Hundred Watt Grin. Better ask him if it's ok first.)
Napalm was not at all interested, but I told him about the experience thing. It's about the cheerleaders. It's about the fans. It's about getting loud and rowdy and jumping up and down with thousands of other people. It's about seeing your own face on the jumbo-tron.
He finally caved.
I couldn't find my sunscreen, my yummy grape smelling pump action 50 SPF sunscreen. This was a disaster. I usually begin to sizzle at ten minutes in direct sunlight, and generate a faint wafting of smoke laden with a pork-like aroma at twenty. Sunscreen is crucial.
Aw, fuckit, I thought, and donned a big hat and long sleeved shirt. That shirt came in handy, because it was actually chilly in the stadium.
Ah the stadium, lovely stadium. It was a lot smaller than the Ravens Stadium in Baltimore where I saw the HFStival in '99, but still was very nice, with contoured plastic seating and cupholders and stuff, and quite a nice jumbo-tron arrangement.
Down on the field were a lot more video camera people than I expected, and most of them were hefty. You'd think people who have to run from one end of the field to the other toting a bigass video camera would be a bit more fit, either recruited that way from need or become that way as an end result.
(Before you get your down in a fluff, I am hefty too. I am allowed to talk about it.)
There were also some fascinating golf carts and similar small vehicles. What were they for? I saw them drive round and round, park, unpark, drive into the structure and back out again, but if they were actually doing anything, I missed it.
As it turns out, FAU fielded not one but three cheerleading squads. Ok, one of them was actually the dance team, but still, they were there to wear flouncy outfits and whip up the fans, so what would you call them?
I have a prejudice about cheerleaders. Part of it stems from my brutal rejection one year at tryouts. My very presence was so thoroughly offensive that I was laughed out of the gym without even getting to the tryout phase.
*wild eyed glare* THEY WILL PAY!!!
Ahem. Anyway, I probably need to meet and know some cheerleaders personally so I can get over the idea that they all look the same, don't contain much in their heads, have impossibly narrow minds, worship conformity (wait, that's redundant, isn't it?), and are completely superficial, cold, unfeeling mannequins.
However, my horrible bigotry does not stop me drooling at them when they prance about the field. So I did. So did Napalm, and I enjoyed every minute of it. We also found that many of them exhibited the kind of body type that our friend Mark just really, really loves. Unfortunately, he likes 'em a bit older than these. Ah well.
The fans were every bit as fun as I'd hoped. Two rows down from us were a couple who brought small children. One was a girl at the upper limit of diaper age, who was too shy to high five the owl mascot that came round. The other was a baby at seven months.
Oho! A worthy opponent! Time to bring in *da-da-DAAAAAHHHHHH* the reigning Supreme Champion of eXtreme Peek-A-Boo, Eastern Conference, Spring Dew!
Oh it was shaky at the start. I nearly got tears the first couple of tries, but then I rallied brilliantly with an off-tempo dash to the left and completely caught my opponent up into a giggle fit. Not one to let an advantage go, I immediately followed with the standard two-hand split, then rebounded with a pop-over from behind Napalm's right shoulder, thoroughly breaking up the baby into a hysterical tempest of laughter, securing one more ringing victory for my side.
In further fan action, across the stadium from us was the sparse contingent there to cheer on the fierce Peacocks from Saint Peter's College. One of these was a chick with a T-shirt that read "My Cock Rocks". Oh, I gotta love it.
Something I had not known about before was the net guys. There's these guys at either end of the field who stand there holding onto ropes. Their function is to hoist this big ole net up if the football starts to look like it's getting near the goal posts, thus protecting the people in the stands.
At halftime, this convocation of kids performed a largish hip-hop dance number. It was kind of an odd thing to watch, as members of the group of actual African-American descent seemed to be extremely rare. I found out later that this was a franchise thing, but more on that in another entry.
I can't say much more about the Hooters owl than Napalm already said, except that it seemed to be an inflated costume. As in with air.
The second half was much like the first, which is to say it consisted of FAU's pretty impressive defense fending off SPC, while their offense didn't manage to score against them. I did get engaged in the game from time to time, particularly during times of intense suspese (fighting off the one yard mark three times!) or exhilerating action. Sorry, I can't get that emotional when one guy hands off a ball to another who is immediately buried under bodies. I want drama, dammit!
The sun never did reach over the rim of the stadium to burn me, and it got downright cold in there. Thank goodness for the shirt. Poor Napalm, his thin little short-sleeve T-shirt was no help at all.
We also never did get loud and rowdy. As a matter of fact, an announcement on the jumbo-tron expressly forbade rowdy behavior. Darn the luck. However, I did take every opportunity to cheer the band, which was about a dozen people wearing ordinary clothes, seated in a section of fan seats way up under the balcony separate from the actual fans. Bless their little hearts.
Boy was that fun. Man did I get my money's worth. Oh, wait, that's right...
