For those of you who need the context, this is the final play of Super Bowl 34. The Titans, the team in Blue, only need to get into the Yellow area to win the game. (Please tell me I am over stating your sports ignorance.)
This game was one of many great super bowl games to open the decade. Two cinderella teams, both deserving, in a game full of new young stars that would come to define the first half of the decade in the NFL. It was one of the most exciting Super Bowls from start to finish, or at least I am told, I missed most of it to be honest.
Here’s why.
Prologue
10 years ago as of September, I started as a High School freshman at a new school. Having graduated the from the public middle school with a small collection of medals around my neck and awards under my arm, I was lucky enough to be one of 6 new students accepted into a local private school.
Having left all of the friends I had accrued since kindergarden behind and lacking in the skills, or personal make up to quickly make new ones, I dragged my feet around campus for the first couple months. Too meek and generally not wanting to impose on others I would occupy my free time looking as if I had somewhere to go.
During the first couple of days of school, I would make small talk with the other new boy, as the rest of the other new students were female. However we mutually, and wordlessly realized, it wasn’t in our best interest to keep hanging out.
Eventually, I found myself friends with a small group of girls who would eat in the marsh like environs behind the gymnasium, easily 40, 50 yards away from where any one else would eat.
The group was a kind of Dirty Dozen group of seemingly outcast girls and occasionally the one suspected gay guy. There was the girl who was a little too big boned, the girl who was painfully plain, the recovering goth, the girl who was too cheery, the girl in the wheel chair and the girl a little too interested in learning.
And so it was that we were friends.
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I believe she invited herself over to watch the Super Bowl at my house, which with my borderline autistic ability to read women, seemed like no big deal to me.
So her parents drove her over, and dropped her off. We got a bowl of chips or something equally appropriate and went up to my room to watch the game. My room at the time was massive. The previous tenants had taken down a wall turning two smaller rooms into one massive room. This was the general friend hang out spot, so it didn’t seem at all strange that she would be in my room. The game started, and the two of us alone watched, while talking and having fun and who knows what, whatever it is I remember that I don’t remember much of the game.
During Half Time we went out into the streets, as was tradition for any big game at my house, to the throw the ball around, and this day was no different. I rounded up my best friends at the time who lived essentially next door, and we began to throw the ball around.
What was meant to only be a 15 minute half time ritual turned into a much more extended game of catch, as we would run out patterns while attempting to avoid hitting parked cars at any cost.
Now you might think that this was in actuality just three guys throwing the ball around while a girl watched, but despite small hands and an unavoidable girly throwing motion she gave it a go. She didn’t back down, her commitment to playing football was extraordinary, it was something more fitting of an ideal female character in an Adam Sandler movie.
Eventually the sun began to get lower and lower, and we went back inside. I think the boys came back in with us as we returned just in time to see the last drive by the Tennessee Titans, and that historic play.
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There was a brief time when I would go over to her house on weekends. We’d watch movies, play board games, she would sing or play piano and some times her mother would bake and we’d help out.
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Eventually soccer season started, and I was released into the wild where I would run free with my kind, and make more friendships. Soccer had always been my social event, so eventually I began to eat lunch with other people.
However I would still remain friendly with her, and still occasionally see her outside of school. However as I acclimated myself to the social dynamics of school, what was once a good friendship slowly began to weaken. Those incredulous of my friendship with her, eventually began to persuade me, and I can’t say I was strong enough to completely ignore it. The status, and general social hierarchy slowly began to become apparent. It was just like the Indian Caste system we were learning about in school.
At first it was a slow transition, however I remember distinctly the day in my head that the switch flipped. Horrible enough as it was, she had recently gotten into a violent car crash that left her with some neck pains. For some reason, I was beginning to get irritated with her. It was an externalization of my own desire to break out, I guess. Like she was holding me back, as if it were her stopping me from being popular, having more friends or girlfriends. Or perhaps it was my new found “shame” for having ever been friends with her and her caste. I now saw her the way the others saw her, and no longer saw myself as one of them. She was now “Queen Nerd”.
One day she complained about her neck hurting, and it couldn’t have been more than 5 times total that she mentioned the injuries she sustained, however in my mind 4 was too many. Her complains seemed to me like thinly veiled cries for affection or at the least attention. And perhaps there was a small percentage of that sentiment in those comments, "my neck really hurts" could be 94% whiplash and 5%* “show me you care about me, prove to me your not one of them now”. But it was too late, I was one of them.
*1% my own narcissism?
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One of my last encounters with her, came months later. It didn’t seem unusual as I was still friendly with her, and never made an outward gesture of contempt, or betrayal, it was just that we had “moved on”. However we still academically stood out in class, and often would interact with in the class room setting. She once again invited herself over, which as my friends know is customary when hanging out with me. (Note: I am a near shut in.) This time we watched a movie, I can’t say I remember what it was. However I do remember that relatively early something happened that usually didn’t. She sat next to me.
On my futon in my room, she sat right next to me. As we watched the movie, I was tense.like.rock. I don’t think I remembered much of the movie for this reason. By the time I relaxed a bit, she began to lay down, and encouraged me to lie down next to her, still on the futon. So we lay side by side watching the movie, me with my arms rigidly by my side, in my best impression of a bundle of 2x4’s just waiting it out.
Now to clarify, I would have been as equally as stricken no matter who the girl had been, it wasn’t that she was an “untouchable”, it’s just my complete and total emasculation and fear of intimacy… don’t get me wrong.
Then she took my arm, and with her hand outside of mine with fingers interlocked, brought it to a caress around her waist, just below her breast. And there I lay like Forrest Gump, when Jenny shows him the comfort of a woman for the first time. And like Forrest my eyes must have been wide, and distant, and my jaw suitably slack, as I waited in a state of panic for the movie to end.
And thankfully this movie ended up having an ending.
Early in the many stages of her leaving, the one that involves smoothing out guilt wrinkles while her parents drive over, we found our selves sitting face to face, and her far more mature than I, looking me in the eyes with a slightly sad look as she asks me a question she feels she already knows the answer to.
Here’s a girl, sitting across from me, who finished at the top of all her classes, was the best singer in the school, someone whose best friend was confined to a wheel chair, and who lacked any of the bland fashionable cynicism all of the other girls aspired to have, and I said, in a shifting round about way, “I don’t have feelings for you”. Of course I could never be that direct and lord knows what I really said. But whatever it was, she left defeated, and gave me a big hug and again, like Forrest Gump dumbfounded I stood there like a retard who can run really really fast and starred into space.
It’s not like I was lying, love isn’t empirical, and even then I’m not sure our alchemy made all that much sense. For whatever reason, I didn’t love her/want to be with her, but, if one has to be honest, perhaps it came down to that one magical undefinable thing, she wasn’t “in”. For whatever reason, one that I’m sure includes many of the things I listed above, she wasn’t “cool”. And I a closet nerd, so desperate to be “in” couldn’t risk it. While intellectually now I can understand that “coolness” cosmically earns few points, I still emotionally am so desperate to be “in” that I find myself unable to divorce the two.
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NOTE FOR NON SPORTS FAN: In Super Bowl 34, Rams QB Kurt Warner went from working as a Super Market Stocker to Super Bowl MVP in just the span of a year. His rise to the top was meteoric, however just as quickly as he rose, he suffered a hand injury and a series of concussions that would leave him "scrambled". After being cut by the Rams several years later, he was signed by the Giants, and mid way through the season benched. He was suddenly washed up and his career seemed over. Too many fumbles, too many turn overs. In a last ditch effort, the Cardinals signed him and now at the close of the decade Warner has lead the Cardinals to a super bowl, and is considered a possible Hall of Famer.
Meanwhile the Quarterback the Tennessee Titans Steve McNair would go on to have an MVP season and lead the Titans back to the AFC championship game, but never back to the super bowl. Steve McNair was always well know for his charity, and his involvement with "at risk" youth, and it was in this capacity that he met and tutored a young Vince Young. Vince Young went on to play QB at the University of Texas and set many records at Texas while also defeating the mighty USC trojans in what many consider one of the best National Championship games of all time. Vince Young who openly called Steve McNair "like a Father to him", was then drafted number 3 overall by McNair's Titans, only to have McNair cut and Young essentially take his place as the franchise quarterback. McNair signed with the Ravens and two or so years later retired. Then in July of 2009 McNair was murdered in uncertain circumstances involving a mistress of his who it is believed then turned the gun on her self.
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