The Day My Wife Became a Football Fan

Don’t believe in payback, eh?

Well, my darlings, like they say: be careful what you wish for, because there’s a price tag on everything.

Like every other virile young married man, my fondest wish was always that my wife enjoy the same things I enjoyed. You know, the Togetherness Syndrome. She loved movies, which was great, but didn’t much care about either beer or football. So, through the first couple of decades of our marriage, I followed football accompanied only by my growing tribe of ugly little children, while my wife occasionally wandered through the living room when an exciting game was on the tube, only to shake her head in sadness over our moronic devotion to a bunch of big apes running around knocking each other down.

But, as the Fundamentalist Rightwing Conservative Republican Religious Fanatics constantly assure us, miracles do happen. Indeed, they do. Because sometime between the day we moved to Pittsburgh in 2003 and the dawning of 2006, my wife became a football fan.

Like all well-bred, reasonable, highly-intelligent humans, she fell in love with the Pittsburgh Steelers. (I will not belabor the reasons for this. They are self-evident.)

My wife began to recognize which player was which from their photos. She began asking questions about the game itself. Like all women with so much as a beating pulse, she lusted after Troy Polamalu. And when the 2005 season began, she started actually cheering for the team and talking about them and most-importantly watching the games with me.

She was succumbing to a general malaise that runs rampant amongst the surrounding hills, one known as Steeleritis. She began to wear Steeler paraphernalia and came to the realization (as did all of America, after the Football Writers Association voted him Mr. Nice Guy) that, along with Mother Theresa and the Social Security Administration, Jerome Bettis is on the brink of canonization.

“The man is a God,” she solemnly intoned, “and Hines Ward is his Moses, leading his Chosen People to the Promised Land, across the desert, to the shores of the Red Zone.” Her words seem to have been somewhat prophetic, considering the outcome of the apocalyptic Super Bowl XL, known hereabouts as “The Rapture.”

Could I possibly ask for a wife more wonderful?

Here it comes, dear reader, the other shoe dropeth.

When the Winter Olympics came along, my wife casually mentioned that it might be fun to “watch some of it.” Such nonsense generally leaves me cold, but I nodded in pleasant agreement. After all, this most perfect of all women, sent down to me as a reward for an exemplary life, had become the girl that all male football fans (and probably some female ones as well) dream of marrying. For her wholehearted embrace of my own passion, I owed her big time. No big deal.

And. Then. For. Seventeen. Agonizing. Days. We. Watched. The. Winter. Olympics.

Poor idiot-boy that I am, I thought perhaps I could live with it for four hours a night, during prime time.

But it was being telecast a lot more than that. On NBC. And CNBC. And USA. And some other toady little network, obviously also owned by Satan himself.

So we did nothing else. We neither ate nor slept. We sat, fixated, while princesses (some actually wearing tiaras!) and princes as well, pranced about on ice and snow like a demon pack of precious little Tinkerbell fairies.

In my dreams, during those few scattered moments that I dozed off in front of the relentless tube, grown men rode sleds down mountains pretending it was serious stuff – sometimes even on top of one another – and warlocks with brooms swept frantically at perfectly-clean ice while huge rocks drifted willy-nilly. Curling, they called it. It curled my toes.

I could not get away from it. People with unpronounceable names, each following the last, skied and tumbled and snowboarded and jumped in identical patterns like a pointless short film on a loop playing over and over and being carefully timed down to the zillisecond.

The only fun was on those rare occasions when someone either crashed through a fence or plopped unceremoniously on their butt. I always woke up for the instant replay.

You may be suspecting that I am not a big fan of outdoor winter sports. Anyone with more than a dozen brain cells is indoors watching television while snow snows, temperatures drop, icebergs form, winds whistle, and blizzards bliz. There are only two legitimate reasons for being out of doors during the winter: either you do not have indoor plumbing, or you are delivering pizza.

The Winter Olympics went on and on and on, my wife’s enthusiasm and love for the most ghastly events of all – the figure skating crap – never flagging. Through endless hours of triumph and heartbreak, of women wearing dinky little dresses (but also clad in little-girl bodies that would quicken the pulse of pedophiles only), we sat while they swished and twirled and spun without end, interrupted only by flouncy pair-skating couples reenacting vague mini-dramas about as subtle as characters in a Japanese Kabuki play.

My wife loved every moment of it.

While I, as puzzled and woozy as a White House Reporter after a Bush press conference, longed only for the final Gold Donut to be awarded to the final foreigner-with-an-unpronounceable-name. And when that came, the God of Revenge had one more cruel trick to play on me.

All the ice skating was done.

Except, of course, for the Figure Skating Champions GALA. (Which must stand for Gawd-Awful-Long Act)

I felt like the guy who had rowed a paper raft across Hell, only to hear someone yell, “One more time!”

In this world, some people win the lottery and some people get runned over by a beer truck. There’s no logic, there’s no justice, there’s no rules – except for payback.

For seventeen days, I staggered across a Sahara of Hurt, all because of my love for my darling wife, and in appreciation for her devotion to football.

Clearly, a man such as I should ascend directly into Heaven without having to go through the inconvenience of dying.

My only regret is that, alas, I can never reclaim those seventeen days.

24,480 endless minutes.

Enough time to watch, from opening kickoff to final whistle, the next 136 Steeler victories.