Football and Daughters

Calling my mother a Cornhusker football fan might be a bit of an understatement.  She was more of a backseat coach, cheerleader, and archivist rolled into one lady.  The team won its first two national championships when she was in college, and her love of the game seemed to grow from there.

When my sisters and I were growing up, college football on Saturdays was an institution. My parents and their group of friends hosted viewing parties that rotated from house to house every game.  As the team moved up in the polls, more and more games were on television.  The team was good in the ‘80s, my mom would say, her eyes glazing over with memories of Johnny Rodgers running down the field, “but we could never quite get another national championship.”

About this time, the college began using a specific song to build crowd anticipation before the players ran onto the field.  My parents got a CD that included this song and several school songs played by the university marching band.  Thus, before each game, my mom, and later my dad, fired up the CD player.  When my mom was particularly excited about a game, the "tunnel song" rattled the house.

After each game, the coach sat down to discuss highlights and shortcomings with the local public broadcasting station.  Mom watched these religiously every Sunday morning.  VHS tapes of The Tom Osborne Show, The Frank Solich Show, and The Bill Callahan Show are still collecting dust in my parents’ basement.

As the team became an unstoppable powerhouse early in the 1990s, my mom approached this as a mixed blessing.  More games were televised on national stations, but Mom complained that the sportscasters focused more attention on our opponents and degraded our players and team.  She took their jokes about the fans and defensive lineman personally, and her response was essentially to say the onscreen guys were worthless.  As a result, any time we watched a game at home, my dad turned on the radio and muted the television (a tradition he continues to this day).  Some of my clearest memories are of my parents literally running around the room giving my sisters and me high-fives as Kent Pavelka shouted “touchdown!” through the speakers.

And during this era, being a Husker fan was very exciting, especially from the perspective of our small rural town.  A coach at the top of his game.  Three national championships in four years. The twilight of the Big Eight conference and creation of the Big Twelve.  This positive perspective from Lincoln -- especially in conjunction with the outstanding women’s volleyball team and the UNL marching band— gave the community something to cheer for and forget, for just a short time, that the town was still reeling from persistent depopulation and the loss of two major employers. “But,” my mom warned, “wait until the team starts losing.  Then we’ll see who the real fans are.  True fans support the home team because they are our team, not just because they win.”

The game was so ingrained in daily life that touch-football was a staple during recess at our elementary school.  Some girls stood along the perimeter to cheer, and a few played on the teams.  My sister was a player, along with a few of her friends.  They played because they liked the game and competition, and with fewer than 45 kids in their class, they were needed to fill the teams.  Sara and most of her friends had been in gymnastics for a few years, and their athleticism was an asset to the game.

During Sara’s fifth-grade year, her classmate’s father decided to start a flag football league, and all the boys in the grade were given a sign-up sheet.  Sara asked why she couldn’t have one, too, and her question was dismissed with a quick, “It’s boys only.”

My mom took this news, erased it, and rewrote it on her own terms.  Somehow, she found a blank form and then made copies.  Sara and her friends filled them out, though instead of using their own names, each wrote in the name of her father as the player.  This was the plan for getting Sara and her friends on the contact list for the practice schedule.  I imagined their strategy was to show up at the first practice and force the coordinator to turn the girls away in person or let them play to fill out the teams—betting heavily that the former would be much more difficult for the coaches than the latter.

However, since we lived in a town of 2,000 people (where everyone knew or knew of practically everyone), this deception did not get far.  When the coaches began picking teams, they were instructed to throw away any form that had a girl’s name or the name of men they knew in the community.  

As the league got going, schoolyard taunts that girls shouldn’t play football because of cooties or skirts were replaced with sneers that they aren’t allowed because adult role models said so.  In this moment, this group of eleven-year-olds saw their understanding of the world crack and then repair out of focus.  As the year wound down, players in the recess games divided more along the lines of those who saw themselves as slightly superior for playing in the league, and those who were constantly reminded that they were not included.

My mom and the other mothers were furious, but since our town had the largest population for sixty miles in every direction, they were keenly aware of which community battles to pick.  So, in response, the mothers started a volleyball club for anyone interested.

Twenty years later, Sara became a mother of her own daughter and looks forward to eventually watching games with her.  Recently, a local flag football charity game was being organized to raise money for Alzheimer’s research. Sara joined the board and became a team captain.  She even recruited her sisters (after much persuading) to join her team.  Sara's husband, daughter, and our dad cheered from the sidelines as Sara scored the first of our team's two touchdowns.  We did not win the game, but the crowd's support never faltered.  Once, I imagined Mom in the stands, free of her disease and excited to watch her daughters playing a game she loved.  Then I looked around at my sisters on the field and scratched that idea.  Knowing Mom, she probably would have signed up to play, too.