A Sports Fan Thanks Her Dad part two

Although this sounded extremely boring to me (wasn't getting the ball and scoring the whoe point of the game? and therefore wasn't it crucial to follow the ball?) I did what he suggested for the next few minutes. And of course it turned me into a sports fan for life. Because I saw how all the action on the field was designed to further each team's goal: score or prevent the score. No matter how remote from what I had thought of as the center of the action, each man was performing a specific task that enabled (or didn't, if he didn't do his task well) the entire team to succeed.

"Hey," I said in wonder to my father. "I see what you mean!"

He beamed at me. "But what's the 'down' business all about?" I asked. "I mean, I know as long as they keep making ten yards they get to keep the ball, but what's a down?"

"A down is, is--OK, a down is a try," he said. "The team that has the ball has four downs, or 'tries,' to make ten yards. If they make four yards in their first try, then they have a second try to make the remaining six, and so on."

Oh. So simple. I even figured out the fourth down punt on my own. I was actually beginning to enjoy this. Football was strategy and logic as well as huge behemoths pounding into each other.

Warming to this new-found appreciation I was exhibiting for one of his passions, he gave me the key to all team sports.

"Don't watch just football this way," he said. "Basketball is a great game to watch when you occasionally take your eyes off the ball and see what the defenders are doing, and what the rest of the offense is doing to set up the next basket. You can tell how good a player is by watching what he's doing away from the ball."

The Red Sox were my father's favorite team. He lived and died with them each season. Watching them on TV was OK, but you couldn't really see the whole field, he told me. The beauty and symmetry of it. He couldn't take me, because a few years earlier he'd lost a leg to arteriosclerosis, and while the prosthesis was fine for getting to work and church, it really was an ungainly thing which he found difficult to maneuver in crowded situations. Someday you'll go, he told me, and you'll see what I mean.

The Red Sox game was always on the radio, the background to whatever else was going on. If he was working in the garage or mowing the lawn, the game was blasting from a transistor radio on the back steps. Driving the car: there was the game. Frequently, on hot summer nights he'd turn off the TV and he and my mother would retreat to the small sun porch with a beer and the radio. Their conversations about life, work, kids, etc., would punctuate the night air, accompanied by the whispery crowd, the announcers' murmuring, the cracking noise of a bat making contact. My Dad died very suddenly, having just gone to bed, on just such a night. He would have said it was a perfect way to go--Mom by his side, the two of them turning in after an evening of contented conversation and listening to the summer night sounds of crickets and the Red Sox game.

(To Be Continued. I will wrap this up in the next post, I promise!)