Evolution of a fan

Most of you know that I’m a big Gator football fan. But many of you who have known me for years also know that wasn’t always the case. In fact, there was a time when I didn’t care that much about football at all. So, as Cristina often asks, what happened to me? How did this happen?

Sounds like great material for a blog.

I’ve been giving this a lot of thought the past week and I’m ready to analyze my evolution as a Gator football fan.

First of all, it didn’t happen overnight. And it wasn’t just one thing, but rather a combination of many things (at least 6).

In high school, my friends and I went to football games as a social activity. We sometimes watched the games and enjoyed them. I especially remember a homecoming game when Dom’s now-brother-in-law, our quarterback Joe Kane, made a big play that electrified the crowd. I don’t remember the play, but I know it was a big deal. Maybe he scrambled and ran for a touchdown. Something like that.

But in high school, I didn’t watch much college football, and the only NFL games we watched were Super Bowls. Going to high school an hour from Gainesville, though I wouldn’t have called myself an outright Gator fan, I had a little bit of Gator stuff (a Gator sweatshirt and a Gator blanket). When I chose the University of Florida for college, the football program had no bearing on my decision. I got accepted to UF, USF, and UCF, and I picked UF because it had more prestige.

My first year at UF was coincidentally also Steve Spurrier’s first year as head coach. Throughout my 4 undergraduate years, I was mildly bewildered at the Gator football frenzy. I went to a few games, but usually just observed from a distance. In fact, I remember hearing the roar of the crowd in the stadium from my dorm room, less than a mile away.

So let’s break down the pivotal factors that transformed me.

• Being immersed in the culture

Living on campus during the excitement of the dawn of the Spurrier era didn’t immediately transform me, but it had an effect. In fact, I lived on campus for about 7 years total (1 year in Trusler Hall and about 6 years in Married Student Housing). Just through sheer osmosis, I soaked up a lot of Gator football.

• My father-in-law

When I married Cristina in 1993, I became a part of a family that included a major Gator fan. Ramon was a UF student in the late 70’s, so he was an old-school fan from that great run in the early 80’s. Cristina remembers her dad taking them all on a victory cruise down University Ave. in 1984 when the Gators first won the SEC (the championship was later taken away due to NCAA violations). Frequently throughout the mid 90’s, we would be at my in-laws’ house while a game was on and I would watch the games with my father-in-law. In doing that, I started to become more familiar with players, Spurrier’s offensive genius, and the storylines that transpired week to week. By 1996, I was pretty much hooked. Not yet a full-fledged nutso, but hooked to the point that I desired to watch the games. Or at least the big ones.

• National Championship 1996

Here’s one indication of how my viewing habits were evolving. I remember being in North Carolina for a funeral in November and watching the UF/FSU game in our hotel room. UF had been undefeated, and with agony, I watched our potentially-perfect season be tarnished by our arch-rival by a slim margin. I don’t remember whose funeral it was exactly (it was one of my grandparents, but 3 of them died within a short period of time, so it’s all kind of a blur) but I remember that game.

I remember vividly watching the Gators win the SEC the following week (which was almost a foregone conclusion by that point…we pretty much owned the SEC) and then the rematch with FSU for the whole enchilada.

Winning the National Championship, and all the hoopla that goes with it, further pushed me over the edge.

• UF vs. LSU, 1998

I was slipping further and further into my Gator addiction, but I was still somewhat of a closet fan. Cristina didn’t realize how serious it was getting. To her, I was still the disinterested non-fan that she’d met in 1992.

When we hosted an exchange student from Germany for 4 weeks in the fall of 1998, I decided it would be a cool experience to take her to a Gator football game. I mean, if you’re only in the States for 4 weeks, going to an SEC game in the Swamp with 90,000 crazy fans is an experience to remember. I got tickets from another teacher at GHS.

She had a great time, and though it wasn’t my first game, in a way it was. It was the first game I had attended as a bona fide fan. We had pretty good seats. I soaked in all the traditions in a way I never had before. I screamed till my voice was gone. Jesse Palmer broke his collar bone, but it was a great win. I wasn’t really sure how to get tickets, but I knew I wanted to go to more games.

• GHS football

By now, you can see that many factors went into my transformation, but this is the one that Cristina blames the most. In 1997, during my first year teaching at Gainesville High School, I was approached by the head football coach. He asked me if I’d sign on to videotape all the games. I would technically be on the staff as an assistant coach, and I’d be compensated as such, but my duties would only involve taping every game (including JV) and making 3 or 4 dupes right after each game.

I did this job for about 4 years, and it happened to be a stretch of time when GHS was extremely good. These were the Clinton Portis, Ian Scott, Vernell Brown years. I was exposed to a side of football that I’d never been a part of before. I shot the games from up in the coaches’ box, where I was often side-by-side with the assistant coaches. For certain away games, I would sometimes be in the locker room before and after games. I saw players getting taped up, getting treated for injuries, sometimes even crying after tough losses. I heard the usually mild-mannered coach’s fiery pre-game speeches during the playoffs. And of course I witnessed lots of the camaraderie and fun that goes hand-in-hand with a winning program.

As the team videographer, my duties extended to making highlight tapes for team banquets, as well as for players to send to colleges. I made Clinton Portis’s college tape. When Vernell Brown was the quarterback, he’d come to my classroom every Monday after a game and get his own copy of the game to study. I saw these young men not as faceless players on a TV screen, but living, breathing, emotional young men doing amazing things on the field every week. My respect for them, and the game itself, grew a lot during those years.

And, of course, my passion for Gator football grew exponentially.

• Gainesville sports talk radio

This last point may seem insignificant, but it isn’t. When I started getting more and more interested in Gator football around 1997, I started tuning in to AM sports talk radio when I was in the car. I’d never been a fan of radio (music stations) in Gainesville, so I usually listened to NPR. But on Mondays after games, I would listen to the local sports pundits break down Saturday’s game. Before long, from August through February, I almost exclusively listened to sports talk radio. Eventually, it became my year-round, dominant, in-the-car-alone programming of choice. And in Gainesville, 90% of the sports talk radio is devoted to college football. Gainesville is a college football town, plain and simple, and people who listen and call in to these shows just don’t care much about baseball or hockey. In the spring, talk would drift a little to Gator basketball (and my love for that grew as well) but you could always hear some Gator football talk, 365 days a year.

When you listen to sports talk radio, you naturally become a bigger, more-informed fan. It gets you thinking about things you wouldn’t have thought about otherwise. It keeps you updated on injuries and how practice went. It allows you to memorize players’ names (and how to pronounce them). It gives you insight on opponents and what the perceptions of other teams around the country are. Then it’s a snowball effect. You get more knowledgeable from listening to the radio, so you have a broader interest in other teams and games. And the more other games you watch, the more you want to listen to the analysis in the radio. It’s a cycle that gets bigger and bigger. So when something happens like Appalachian State beating Michigan, I don’t need a TV commentator to tell me how huge that is. I know it because I know about the different college divisions, the national championships of a school like App State, and the tradition of a powerhouse program like Michigan. I can look at that score and be flooded with the deep implications that the score evokes. And then, even more, I enjoy listening to the pundits analyze the bigness of it all.

The cumulative effect of listening to more and more sports talk radio is that it pushed me from avid fan to complete college football nut.

I remember when my cousin Eddie and I first “came out” to each other that we were both diehard Gator fans. I was helping him move to a new apartment in Gainesville, and I had sports talk radio on in my car. I sort of sheepishly turned it off and explained that I mostly listen to that. He said enthusiastically that that’s all he listened to also. From there, our relationship blossomed with a newfound commonality. And to this day, we still chat and text each other on game days. When I got an extra Gator jersey when the team was here for the National Championship in January, I sent it to Eddie. When we move back to Gainesville, I look forward to going to some games with him, even if I need to drive down to Tampa to pick him up. He’s my cousin by blood, but he’s my Gator brother.

When I moved to Phoenix, one of the big disappointments was how the sports talk radio shows here spend so much time talking about the NFL, the NBA, and baseball. That kills me the most. I can handle some NFL and NBA talk (in fact, it’s made me a bit of a Phoenix Suns fan) but they’ll spend entire shows talking about major league baseball. My eyes gloss over and I usually change to NPR. My apologies to my baseball-loving readers, but the only thing more boring than watching a baseball game is listening to people talk about baseball.

Phoenix is a big sports market. I guess it’s comparable to Tampa, in that it has the big 4: professional football, baseball, basketball, and hockey teams. But as such, college football gets little airtime. And even then it’s mostly Arizona State and the PAC-10. Yawn.

So I guess that’s it. I didn’t mean for this to get so long, but now hopefully you understand how I got to be the way that I am. And even Cristina has accepted the fact that I am a college football junkie. She still wishes I wouldn’t watch so much TV on Saturdays, because it causes the kids to be rowdy and sometimes keeps us from doing things as a family. But she’s gotten more and more tolerant of it. I try not to give her a hard time about her Oprah, and she tries not to give me a hard time about my college football.

It’s kind of funny, but I probably know more about the Gators now than my father-in-law. He lives in Costa Rica now, so he’s even more out of the Gator nation loop than I am here in Phoenix. So that’s weird sometimes. I’m not saying I’m a bigger fan than him (he taught me the wonders of Wilbur Marshall after all) but I probably know more about the team right now. For example, does he know who Percy Harvin is? I’m sure he does. But does he know how to get Percy Harvin’s autograph? No! Heh heh.

And though I didn’t give it a bullet point, having children has probably added to my fanaticism. As soon as Sofia was a few years old, I had a great excuse to go to Fan Day and get autographs. When she was about 6, I took her to her first game at the Swamp. In 2003, we had reached a new milestone: the entire family went to a Gatopr game together. It’s only happened once. This was before Bella, of course. All 4 of us went to the UF/FAMU game. It was pretty cool. When we go back in ‘09, I hope all 5 of us can go to a game. Hopefully it will be Tebow’s senior year (fingers crossed).

And one observation I must acknowledge (though Cristina might deny it) I’m slowly converting Cristina. Evidence? She went crazy buying Gator gear this summer when we went to Gainesville. She agreed to getting our annual family portrait taken in Gator gear. And she probably knows more about Tim Tebow than she ever knew about Wuerffel, or Johnson, or Brindise, or Palmer, or Grossman, or Leak. She’s the one that talked me into sneaking into the trophy room at the stadium this summer, for God’s sake. I love that woman.

Enough. I could go on and on. How else to end a blog like this but with these two words:

Go Gators!