Sports and who we were
A new season and a new team. Years from now they’ll provide our future selves with a connection to the past and a return to this time.
I read the news on the verge of tears. It was the heat of August and I was at my desk, in the same seat I’d been glued to for the first five months of the pandemic, but I was finally unable to lose myself in my work. What I was reading was about to make me cry, for admittedly selfish reasons, but I felt unable to wall myself off and plug away like I’d done through the preceding months of chaos in the world. College football season was on the verge of cancellation and I was about to be put over the edge. I thought back to a text I’d sent to a friend in March on the night that everything shutdown: “as long as things are back to normal by TX/OU.” Now there might not even be football at all. With the loss of the season, I’d lose the collective experiences that make me love sports so much.
It’s not like I had high hopes for Tom Herman’s Longhorns last season, but in that moment it didn’t matter. I thought of the shared experiences I’d lose without football. Experiencing your team winning with people you love gives you that brief feeling of invincibility that you only feel during the most blissful moments of youth. The past few months had caused the whole world to stare straight into their own mortality and now there would be no escape. There wouldn’t even be the blistering pain of loss that would eventually give way to laughter on the car ride home from a game as friends play Johnny Cash’s Hurt on repeat. There would be no collective daydreams that maybe this was finally our year. I called another friend and said I’d take the worst of it, I’d take losing to Kansas, I’d take the blown leads and the bitching about refs and shitty play calling, just so I could have sports at all, any of it. In that moment I thought back to past teams and games in my life and how they provided touchpoints to past editions of myself, of my family and my friends.
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Our faces were red from yelling. Six of us yelled across the gymnasium at a legion of opposing fans whose faces were red too, but from rage. AJ Abrams had outscored their entire team. It was the third round of the playoffs, 2005. My high school notoriously didn’t travel well and we were the only non-parents in the stands. My friend’s mom and dad had taken us six freshman boys in their Mercury Grand Marquis to College Station to watch our high school take on a Houston suburb directional school. Abrams had gotten so white hot shooting the ball it had silenced a horde of fans who had come expecting to see their team win, but it lit a fire in us. We spewed a string of insults across the gym, drunk off Abrams’ incredible performance. Outside the game, we were confronted by the opposition’s entire varsity football team. Our lives were about to end and it would’ve been the way to go out, following a victory. But, my best friends’ dad, a beast of a man, with his booming voice and handlebar mustache scared the defeated bullies away. They tucked their tails and ran, jeering “The Beast” with shouts of “cut your hair hippie.” We got in the car, hooting and hollering that we’d survived. “Should I really cut my hair?” The Beast asked, a rare moment of insecurity. We laughed the entire way home. AJ Abrams, had been unconscious from three and he’d lifted us all with him. That group of friends would never be as close, but we were inseparable that night. The Beast is gone now, but when I need to remember him, that voice, that presence, I just have to picture Abrams and his inability to miss on that Friday.
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It’s dark on I-35, driving North back to Austin. I’m in the backseat of our Expedition with the overhead light on, cramming for a Spanish test I needed to pass. I looked at my dad through the rear-view mirror as he yawned. He’d been traveling all week and rushed home to take me to see a Spurs playoff game. We lived in Northwest Austin, yet he’d bought tickets for the entire playoffs and taken me to every home game. The Spurs just defeated the Kings in Game 2 of the first round, a Brent Barry rim bouncing three sent it into overtime. It was well past midnight, but if the late-night bothered him, he said nothing. I was unsure if he could afford the tickets, and hoped he didn’t regret it. We’d have countless dark drives up and down I-35 to see the Spurs play in their glory years. Despite anything else going on, it was our time together. Years later, we walked out of the AT&T Center on one of those cold Texas nights where the wet cold seeps into your bones and chills you. Tim Duncan has just had his jersey retired and we’d seen it together. “I’ll never have a relationship with an athlete like I did Tim Duncan,” my dad said. My teeth chattered on the walk back to the car, “Dad, thanks for taking me to all those games over the years, I know it was a ton of effort,” I said. “It was the best investment I ever made,” he replied.
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2008, it was my freshman year of college at another school and I was trying my best to hate the Longhorns. But, I found myself back home in Austin for a weekend because I hadn’t found my place elsewhere. My mom, a Longhorn graduate, took me to see Missouri and Texas on a Saturday night. Colt McCoy hardly threw an incompletion that evening and the Longhorns smothered the Tigers. The metaphorical roof was blown off DKR and I’ve never heard it louder before or since. “I’m so proud of my school,” Mom said. I was silent, but I knew I wanted to be a part of it too.
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The 18 wheeler rolled to a stop in the end-zone, taking bodies with him. Fireworks exploded above DKR. We’d just beaten Notre Dame on a Sunday night. One of my friends twirled his shirt above his head like a helicopter, others hugged fellow fans whom they had never met, my sister-in-law was about to go into labor. I was somehow already hungover, but victory was the cure. Some of us were married, none of us had mortgages, none of us had kids. That win turned out to be a mirage, fool’s gold, but in that moment, it was a declaration to the world. We, like Joe Tessitore, all believed. Barely on the other side of our mid-20’s, we were still buzzed off enough youthful ignorance to believe there was immortality left in us and in our team. We were back.
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Football season in 2020 didn’t get cancelled, but it was a watered down, cheap impression of itself. In the spring, I’d jumped at the first chance I could to grasp ahold of what I had been missing and I said yes to tickets for a Tuesday night Texas baseball game. Now months later, I’m driving and a voice calls out from the backseat, “play it again Dada.” I look at my son in the rearview mirror and he smiles at me with a big cheesy grin. “Play Eyes of Texas baseball game, play it one more time.” It was a declaration of a budding fandom.
I’d taken my two-year-old son to that game and more at the Disch. I’d seen the boy with blue eyes and a mane of wavy hair don burnt orange and fall in love with a team alongside his Dad. I’d gone to the Omaha clinching Super Regional without him and took a video of The Eyes of Texas after the win. It had become a popular request of his when we drove together. On a wild hair my wife and I then took him to Omaha to see two games and watch him learn to say “Hit it Horns” and “Strike him out Horns!” It wasn’t like he had learned to consciously hate our rivals or memorize statistics yet, but in a way it was deeper. There was a rootedness to it. His fanhood was the associative one that serves as the seeds for loving a team the rest of your life. Going to baseball games meant time with his parents, plenty of hotdogs, the chance to scream and yell and it was because of some baseball team called the Horns. Associatively, he now loved the Horns, even if he didn’t know who Ivan Melendez or Zach Zubia were. Despite graduating from Texas, this was the first UT baseball team I’d ever really fallen in love with, because it was me and my son’s first team to love together. Lately, when we get in the car there are no requests for “Eyes of Texas baseball game.” In the silence I mourn the loss of the 2021 baseball season. Not because I’m furious that they were 90 feet away from taking out Mississippi State twice and didn’t do it. No, the loss of this Longhorn baseball team saddens me because it’s a loss of a moment in time, which means that moment of him is gone too, as is that version of us. But years from now, I’ll think of Zubia and Melendez’s heroics and that team’s resiliency and it’ll provide me a vehicle to picture that little boy, who was such a ham. I’ll see him clapping off rhythm to the ballpark’s music and yelling for the Longhorns.
As the last year has taught us, nothing is promised, even the eternal covenant of sports that “there’s always next year.” Sometimes, there isn’t. Despite all that’s happened, full stadiums and near normalcy looks within our grasp. A new season and a new team are here. Years from now they’ll provide our future selves with a connection to the past and a return to this time.
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I’m days away from taking my son to his first game at DKR. We’re on the verge of new memories. We’ll find out who this Texas team is and who we are too.
