How am I to know when Super Bowl 2011 is?
It’s not like Christmas—every December 25. It’s not like my anniversary—October 25 (please send money). And it’s certainly NOT memorable for me.
I didn’t always feel this way about football. No, I take it back. I did. I was a teenager in a small Wyoming town. So small you wouldn’t have heard of it, unless you were from Kemmerer or Border or Sage. I grew up in the days that girls wore dresses to school and boys did ALL the sports. The girls’ options were cheerleading or the drill team—guess where that left me?
Football was the town’s entertainment in the fall. The only competition was three TV channels out of Salt Lake City which turned off at midnight with a flourish of patriotic music warning us to get to bed before Dad got up and found us lounging around, having been intellectually enlightened by Johnny Carson and his Tonight Show.
Every boy in the high school was on the football team. Well, I take that back, a couple of real scrawny brainy types served as water boys or kept stats or just went home and studied during the games.
We had a lush, green football field which took up more square feet than our downtown business district.
On snowy days, and there were plenty of ‘em in Wyoming, Gary Taylor cleaned off the football field with his tractor-mower-turned-plow, strategically placing the gigantic piles of snow at the ends of the field—there weren’t enough people in the hometown to warrant a good view from the end zones.
And I went to every game.
What on earth were those guys doing? Instead of bullying the scrawny brainy stat keepers this was their opportunity to bully each other. And the townsfolk cheered and the girls cheered and the Moms –always in dresses—cheered; and the Dad’s stuck out their chests; and Gary Taylor ran the chain thingy up and down the field with the assistance of some lucky devil, err—friend .
Where the ball was I do not know. I recognized it when it was on the ground before the ‘hut’ thing. Sometimes I saw it in the air and sometimes they caught it and sometimes they didn’t. But always there was a lot of smashing each other up, getting their white pants dirty, walking off the field looking like the Incredible Hulk (who must have been created by an inspired football player).
So why did I go? Maybe it was because my dad was the superintendent. Maybe it was because there was nothing else to do. Maybe it was because all the boys were there. That’s it.

This year, on that day when millions of people are gathered around the TV with their friends and favorite snacks, don’t pity me. I’m happy in my ignorance. And don’t worry, I have good memories from my youth, too, like when the Mets won the 1969 World Series. The universe does reward those who suffer.