A Sports Fan Thanks Her Dad part one

On a Sunday afternoon sometime in the mid-60's my father spoke the words that turned me into a sports fan. He had three daughters; I was the one in the middle. We were all sports fans in that we rooted for specific teams, even if we didn't "get" all the nuances of the games. The teams we cheered for were his teams, of course, and since we lived in Rhode Island our hearts belonged to the Providence College Friars, the Boston Celtics, the Boston Bruins.
The Patriots were our team, too, but they were part of the fledgling league and their games weren't carried on television. Some network executive somewhere decided that since New England didn't have its own NFL team, we would root for the closest alternative--the New York Giants. Consequently, every Sunday throughout the Fall New England fans who wanted to see football on TV had to watch the Giants. Many New Englanders fell for this ploy, and some even today are fanatical Giants fans. My father, though he thought New York was a wonderful city, hated all New York teams on principle. But he loved football, so each Sunday he would settle down to watch the game and root for whichever team the Giants were playing against that week.
Throughout the afternoon one or all of us would join him for at least a few minutes--boys weren't the only ones who bonded with their dads through sports. We would make comments, ask questions, or just enjoy sitting with him and thrill at the level of enthusiasm he could muster for every play.
On this particular day I was alone with him--he in his chair and me across the room on the couch. I was still in the pre-teen stage and he was still the Ultimate Source of knowledge for me, the Final Word on all subjects. I had fallen madly in love with him sometime in infancy and as far as I was concerned he was the smartest and best man in the world. There was a time in my teens when that changed--it suddenly became clear to me that everything he did or said, even his mere existence, was calculated to embarrass and mortify me and that, in fact, he knew absolutely nothing about what really mattered in life. Fortunately, I snapped out of that a few years later.
That day I complained to him that I couldn't see what was so great about football. "Everybody just plows into everybody else, which takes two seconds, and then they take five minutes to get back in line and plow into each other again. And besides," I added, "I can't follow the ball--whoever has it is in the bottom of the pile."
And then he spoke the magic words. "Don't always follow the ball," he said. "You'll never understand the game if you're just watching the ball or the action around the ball. If you really want to understand what the game is about, pick out a man, any man on either side, and watch what he does for three or four plays. Then pick out a man on the other side and watch him for three or four plays."

(To be continued. This is going to be longer than I'd thought!)