Approach to the Game – Philadelphia Eagles at New York Giants, October 19, 2003: When the Giants win, my week is made. I go to bed, wake up in the morning, go to work for the next five days with a smile on my face. Something bad happens in another aspect of my life? So what…it will pass…the Giants won last Sunday and that’s all that really matters.
But if the Giants lose…especially in a heart-breaking or disappointing style, my week is somber. I am apt to wake up blue and be as cranky as a crocodile. And there is that sense of dread…a returning feeling of impending doom as next Sunday approaches. God, what if they lose again? This isn’t fun…I’m getting no joy out of this. Only a masochist would put himself through this week in and week out. I look at my 4-month old son, resting peacefully in my arms, and think, “God help you if you grow up a Giants’ fan!”
So why do we do it? As I rode to work this week on my morning train, I read the following passage in a book that I just started reading, entitled “A Fan’s Notes” by Frederick Exley and it seemed to me as good an explanation as I can think of:
Cheering is a paltry description. The Giants were my delight, my folly, my anodyne, my intellectual stimulation…Why did football bring me so to life? I can’t say precisely. Part of it was my feeling that football was an island of directness in a world of circumspection. In football a man was asked to a difficult and brutal job, and he either did it or got out. There was nothing rhetorical or vague about it; I chose to believe that it was not unlike the jobs which all men, in some sunnier past, had been called upon to do. It smacked of something old, something traditional, something unclouded by legerdemain and subterfuge. It had that kind of power over me, drawing me back with the force of something known, scarcely remembered, elusive as integrity – perhaps it was not more than the force of a forgotten childhood. Whatever it was, I gave myself up to the Giants utterly. The recompense I gained was the feeling of being alive.
What about this weekend’s game against the Eagles? What about the match-ups? The strategy? The injuries?
It doesn’t matter. All the Giants need to do is go out there and play their game. Stop playing scared, stop making egregious mistakes, and have some fun. The rest will take care of itself. They will either be good enough to win or they won’t. If they don’t win, they have no one else to blame but themselves.
Either do it or go out.