My Interception

I am a 25 year old woman. If I had to choose an occupation at the moment, it would be homemaker(not by choice, I might add). have grown up opposed to anything that may be considered mainstream, popular, or mediocre. I am admittedly, a very against the grain kinda gal that may....or may not....have a little bit of a superiority complex about it, but enough of the psychobabble.

I married a wonderful man, who happened to have a very unfortunate football habit. Now, he didn't disclose the severity of this problem to me when we first began dating, but the signs were present. I remember him having a football jacket, and maybe even a jersey or two when we first met, but I just chalked it up to bad teenage fashion. Seven or so years later, I realized I had a tailgater on my hands. It started slowly at first, and then snowballed into this full blown passion. I struggled to acclimate to his new pastime, especially because I was the type of person that would trip football players or cheerleaders in the hallways at school.

After a year or so of fighting it head on, I slowly began to realize that these are the moments that can really define a relationship. I can either swim against the current, or find my way through safely. Thankfully, I chose the ladder.

It began with me, ever so slowly attempting to try to watch some games with him. Usually it would end with me staring at the wall, counting the seconds to end of my torture Even when I would watch it I had absolutely no clue what was happening. It was a lot of stop and go....people were running, and stopping, and tackling eachother, but that was about all I could piece together. I realized that in a country where one of the biggest sports followings is football I had managed to keep myself completely in the dark about how any of it even worked. I wondered how I had not even managed to catch minuscule chatter about the rules, or what teams were located where....I didn't even know more than two or three NFL teams.

The first couple conversations about it were me just asking things like, "how do you tell who has the ball?" or, "why are they giving the ball back to them?" I had no idea that they had sets of downs, or what determined how they got points, or how scoring worked.

The way that I finally did break into football is probably a funnier story, and probably a little more characteristic of myself. My husband's team is the 49ers. We were watching a game one day, and as usual, I chose to be a little cranky and defiant about the whole situation. I chose to cheer for the opposing team because it was the only way to make it interesting for me. That team happened to be the New England Patriots. It also happened to be the year that they nearly went undefeated(if you follow football at all you probably remember this). They totally annihilated. This is what they continued to do to all my friends teams until the end of the year. It is no secret that I prefer to be on the winning side of things, as I am very competitive in nature.

I managed to learn all the rules, and find things that I could be interested in about the sport. I now do not mind so bad watching football with my husband which is probably a good thing, because it may have gotten a little rocky early off if I wasn't able to find some sort of common bond to the sport. Moral of the story: Sometimes you gotta pick your battles. It is easier to give a little, to make your own life easier. Unless you like the Steelers. Then you suck anyway.