Virtual Femme

Football season has started, so this seemed like a good topic for a blog.  Okay, I really don’t have the perfect advice to make your wife love football because I honestly don’t know anything about you or your wife.  Maybe she knew someone who died in a football game, so she’ll always hate it.  I won’t be able to help you there.  In fact, I’m just going to tell you how I came to love football, much to my husband’s joy.

My husband is a huge college football fan, and we actually used to live in his favorite team’s hometown.  I think that if we hadn’t moved away, I’d probably never come to love his team.  It was just way too in-your-face anywhere we went, and honestly, I didn’t understand the game.  If I’d stayed where I was, I probably never would have wanted to learn the game.   Part of the problem with football, at least for me, was that there was simply so much dead-time, and none of the positions seemed to make sense.  It really looked like the ball got snapped, and everyone ran around until someone got knocked down.  To me, it was just a chaotic mess of men, a ball, and some grass.  How did it all change?

You guessed it!  My husband got me sucked into a console game - NFL 2K1 on the Sega Dreamcast.  He and his friend were playing, and they decided they needed someone to just catch the ball.  So, they briefly explained to me that I just had to run the plays they picked and catch the ball.  Thanks for the tip, guys!  As we kept playing, though, I started to see a pattern to the plays and figure out what I was supposed to do.  The offensive line became valuable to me for protecting our quarterback from being squished.  (I’m not allowed to say “squished”, though.  We’re protecting him from being “sacked”.)  And my sole purpose in life was to shake my defenders and get open for the pass.  Every now and then, we’d fake and do a running play.  I was totally getting the hang of things!

So, once I learned the game by actually playing it (safely on the couch, of course), I started to enjoy watching the games and calling out plays.  Suddenly, the cute little soft footballs that I bought for my husband as a gag became vital to watching each game because I could throw them at the new offensive coordinator when he kept calling the same running play that was getting us pushed back 3 times in a row.  I found myself praising the head coach and the players for being able to actually fake me and the camera guys, and suddenly, football became so much fun to watch.

So, now my husband and I happily watch games together… except when our team loses.  Then we lament and rant together.  It’s been great fun, and we’re hoping we make it to the national championships this year!

Trackback URI | Comments RSS