My boss has really good seats, and the Griefs have sucked so hard lately he had trouble giving them away when he couldn't use them. I was happy to oblige him, as I'm a live-and-die-with-the-team sort of fan. It would take a lot more than a shitty team and cold weather to keep me away when the ticket's free.
The ticket only came with two conditions: you have to be loud on defense and you can't wear KU shit. I don't know how not to be loud, and I don't own any Jayhawk type stuff, so this is easy enough.
So me and my Bro caught the bus in. I highly recommend this if you're not tailgating. I don't have a portable grill or any of the other gear associated with tailgating, and I reasoned (rightly) that the game itself would provide me with my fill of standing outside in the cold.
That game against Green Bay, some of the people around me gave me chemical hand-warmers, and it really saved me. But this time, the weather was supposed to be much milder, and when I didn't get to Wal-Mart yesterday to buy the things, I didn't sweat it. I layered up, honestly figuring that I had overdone it. T-shirt, hoodie, coat, stocking cap, scarf, gloves. I pictured myself peeling off a layer or two by the time it was over.
The temperature wasn't that bad, but the wind was brutal. The people who wear their Carharts out there, they have the right idea. Those hand warmers, they aren't optional.
I froze my ass off.
I was also thirsty, and I drank a big, overpriced Diet Coke and was hoping the ice would melt so I could drink that, too, but the ice wouldn't melt. I decided to go get another beverage at the end of the first quarter, and I bought a watery bear because it looked bigger than the bottle of water, though it was seven bucks. You don't really save money not drinking the overpriced beer by drinking the overpriced soda, it seemed, so what the heck. A $4.50 bottle of Dasani, too. Those 'free' tickets can get expensive, huh?
My brother bought me a big coffee at halftime, and I'm not much of a coffee drinker, but I'll say the coffee did me a world more good than the beer had.
The woman next to me was bitching that despite getting impossibly drunk on $12 cocktails, she was still cold. I thought about telling her what I'd discovered about the comparative advantages of the coffee, but I don't think she'd have gotten that message.
The game was tied at halftime, and we really looked like we might pull our heads out of our asses and win one. The stands weren't packed, but we did our best to be loud and seemed to be a fairly effective twelfth man at times.
The cheerleaders routines were impressive, too, and this is a thing I don't get about football. Watching it on TV, you could easily believe they, like baseball, did not have cheerleaders. But they do, and they work hard. Smiling and doing their precision dance thing with practically no clothes on in the freezing wind. Yet when there's a lull in the action, on TV they show you the players picking their noses on the sideline. I can't understand how TV networks, which normally don't miss a chance to inject sex into a broadcast, don't give the cheerleaders some play.
And of course, my camera got a workout. I don't have the grab to really cover the distance, but I did my best. I got Jared Allen's touchdown catch. Of course, since I bought my PowerShot 570IS, a 7 megapixel camera with a 4x zoom, they've rolled out a PowerShot with a 10x zoom and a 10 megapixel sensor for not much more than I paid for mine.
In the second half, we apparently outsourced our football playing to India or something. The team that put Jared Allen on the field on offense and threw a touchdown to him evaporated and left this weird scum that wore red but couldn't execute a play.
We intercepted the ball only to throw an interception when it looked like we were about to score. And people started bailing out as we got to be two touchdowns behind.
I'm thinking, all these people are bailing out, but if we make that big fourth quarter comeback, they're going to miss an exciting game. The drunk woman agreed, roundly proclaiming all of these fair weather fans 'fucking assholes.' But even the drunk woman and her husband left before it was impossible we'd tie it up (with a run-back for touchdown and onside kick with a touchdown in the final ninety seconds of play...)
*I miss Martyball, really I do. I miss going to the playoffs pretty much every year. The Bolts were visiting this weekend and I was gifted with two tickets to the game. The Bolts fired Marty Schottenheimer because he was only winning them games like crazy. The Griefs made the same mistake a few years back: they had a team in open mutiny and instead of back up the coach and making an example of some very arrogant players (including the late Derrick Thomas), Carl Peterson let his personal beefs with Marty rule the day. Of course, Peterson isn't going to get fired as long as asses are in the seats, but if we keep playing like we are now, those asses ain't going to be there.
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