Sunday morning and breakfast. I want another and the nurse is nice enough to bring it to me. I drink several cartons of milk. The floor is busy with activity, carts clanging, good mornings trumpeted loudly. Today is the Super Bowl. I tell the nurse I do not want my pain medication.
"Today's the Super Bowl," I tell her. "I want to be awake."
"OK. Just let me know if you change your mind," she says, and she is gone.
Super Bowl coverage starts early. Of course, there is the run down, the history of Super Bowls and pre-Super Bowls, the All-Star games, the beginning of the American Football League. I had always loved that league. It's games were covered by a different network than the games of the NFL. After the last NFL game on Sunday afternoon, I'd switch over to the other network. It came from a town sixty miles away and was always full of snow and ghosts. It would be the second half somewhere in a western city where it was still light, but here at home, it was very late afternoon and the sun was sinking, the light turning blue then purple. And there on the ghostly screen in black and white, men would play out the drama as if it were real before small crowds in small stadiums, men with strange names like Abner Haynes and Lance Alworth and Keith Lincoln. There was actually a team with lightning bolts on their helmets. Who would not like that? And so, like a dream, the images would flicker out the final half drama, some team coming from behind on an incredible play that no one would dare to call in the other league, some double handoff lateral pass to a guard who would throw to someone all alone in the end zone, me straining to identify the real images from the ghosts squinting and sitting close in the last purple moments of the day.
And of course, there was the inevitable segment on Joe Namath who the AFL signed for more money than anyone had ever made in football before, $300,000 right out of college. And he wore long hair and white shoes and was sexy and outspoken and had changed everything when he had "guaranteed" a win in Super Bowl III and had delivered. No, there was nothing not to like about the AFL.
And today, my team, the team I had watched all season win game after game after game, was playing for the title and for a perfect season. If I had been older or smarter, I would not have had a surgery this week but would have waited one more so that I could watch the game at home with my father as we had watched all the games that season together. But I was not, nor were my parents. We took what we got, I guess, and made do.
Though I had declined my pain medication, I was still slow, still muddled. People came by, the boys all talking about the game. Lunch came as my mother arrived, but she did not stay long, uncomfortable around my friends, perhaps, uninterested in football. My father came and stayed for the game's first half. It was a late afternoon game with a longer than normal half time show, and he thought to leave in time to see the second half at home. I was struggling to stay awake.
When I woke up, the game was on. My team was winning and it was getting dark, and it was all perfect in its own way. A team from the upstart league was beating a team from the establishment, a team coached by a man who always looked like Nixon's younger brother or Bogart in "The Cane Mutiny." We were winning, and outside the air was cooling, the sky deepening. In a bit, I would take my medicine and sleep. It had happened. It had been a perfect season.
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