Dear Esteemed Readers,
Back in the early eighties—when I was a little kid—my father used to take me to Veterans Stadium to watch the Philadelphia Eagles play.
It was usually just the two of us. I don’t remember my sister, baby brother, or mother ever coming to football games back then. As Dad and I made our way through the drunken concourse crowds, he would always hold onto my shoulder like he was worried that the great Kelly-green river of men would carry me away from him at any moment. I remember his grip hurting, but I was also terrified of him letting go. Once we were seated, the violence on the field—and even the violence in the stands—thrilled Dad in a way that also seemed dangerous. Dad screamed at the refs. He mumbled about the coaches being stupid. Over and over, he’d say the league rigged games against the Eagles because our TV market wasn’t as big as those of other league-favored teams. I remember his all-out hatred for the Dallas Cowboys, which he always called the Cowgirls; and I remember the stadium violence increasing dramatically whenever our opponents were wearing blue stars on their helmets. I remember hearing certain curse words for the first time in my life. Men would chant these bad words in unison. I never felt completely safe at a Birds game. But Dad seemed mesmerized by all of it. And I remember thinking that the Philadelphia Eagles might just be the most important thing in my father’s life.
I also vividly remember this feeling of being all alone at the games. I was a nerdy wimpy introverted kid with a tender heart and an aptitude for feeling the world strongly. While watching Bambi for the first time at the age of four—when Bambi’s mother is killed—I had sobbed so uncontrollably that my own mother worried there was something seriously wrong with me. But I knew my father wanted me to like the violent sport he loved. Why else would Dad bring me to The Vet? So I tried very hard to like Eagles football.
But the games were always long and were frequently played in extremely cold weather that froze my toes and made me shiver. And I often couldn’t see, because the men in front of me were too tall and would stand whenever the action heated up. Dad would get angry if I had to go to the bathroom or asked for more food from the concession stand. Because money was often tight back then, souvenirs were usually out of the question. And Dad kind of went into a trance during the games. It was like Eagles football possessed my father. He would clap manically when the Eagles made a good play. Sometimes he would squeal like an animal. He would cheer and sing and chant when they scored a touchdown. But no matter what happened during any particular season, Dad never ever allowed himself to be optimistic about the Birds.
“They’ll blow it in the end,” Dad would say. “I’m not sold on this quarterback. The stupid coach can’t manage the clock. This owner is too cheap to pay the good players. We’ll never ever win the Super Bowl.”
And regardless of the final score, he almost always left the games disappointed and angrily ranting to himself. If they lost, he’d be furious about wasting his time on such a lousy team. If they won, he’d be mad about all the drunks backing up the homebound traffic, or a player’s mistake, or a dumb decision the head coach had made. He’d turn on the local sports radio in the car and the men calling in would also be angry and disappointed and pessimistic.
My paternal grandfather and uncle—both war veterans—shook their heads at my father’s intense Eagles fandom. They said Dad had always taken the games too seriously. They laughed at my father and dismissed him as being absurdly childish, or just plain old odd. Sure, they, too, liked the Eagles just as much as anyone. But the wins and losses didn’t dictate their day-to-day moods.
When I was a child, I often thought, Why does Dad pay so much attention to something that makes him so unhappy?
But by the time I was old enough to formulate a meaningful response, I was already infected. My blood had somehow turned Kelly green. I bought gear. Wore the right colors. Listened to the local sports radio, WIP. And even became a season ticket holder. As a college student at La Salle, I started riding the subway’s Orange Line down from the Olney stop to Broad & Pattison. I attended games with my best friend at the time, instead of my old man.
We poor college students sat in the cheap nosebleed seats. The 700 Level. It was like climbing up into hell. Almost everyone was drunk and/or high. Violence routinely broke out in the stands and even in the bathrooms. I often saw fans of opposing teams attacked while they were using urinals. If there was someone wearing the wrong jersey, it was only a matter of time before the mob would start throwing beers and pretzels. Sometimes a drunken vigilante would attempt to forcibly remove the offending jersey off the back of the offender and then the crowd would erupt in a blur of kicks and punches. I marveled at the violence on the field and in the stands. And—while I wouldn’t say I approved of everything I saw—I was definitely thrilled by it. Taking a girlfriend to the 700-level seemed unthinkable. Eagles games felt dangerous back then. You never knew what was going to happen. I remember once—as I made my way into the stadium—walking past several cars on fire. Games back then often felt like Mad Max movies.
When a local sports radio talk show host said the new owner was changing the uniform color from Kelly green to midnight green, I was furious. What even was midnight green? I was a grown man. And some rich guy was changing the color of my football team.
Then they knocked down Veterans Stadium and moved the Eagles to the fancy, modern Lincoln Financial Field. I started hearing the words “family friendly” when I went to the game. There was a green recycling initiative and a big push to make the new stadium environmentally friendly. Players began wearing pink gloves and shoes to raise awareness about breast cancer. Rules were put in place to make the action on the field less dangerous. And, little by little, going to the Eagles game morphed into something more—well, family friendly.
With the exception of the uniform switch from Kelly green to midnight green, it was hard to argue against any of the changes with a clear conscience, but it just wasn’t the same experience I had as a child and a young man. It was safer, and saner. My wife, Alicia, and my sister, Megan, started coming to games. Friends brought their wives and daughters.
One other interesting change happened. And correlation absolutely does not imply causation here. But I started drinking much more heavily at Eagles games.
Drinkin’ at the Lincoln, we’d say.
We’d sometimes spike our a.m. coffee with vodka and sip on the way to the tailgate party. I’d switch to beer when I got there, which was usually three or so hours before kickoff. I’d drink steadily at the tailgate. Once inside, I’d get beers from the concession stand and then our section’s beer guy kept them coming until the league cut everyone off in the second half. At the more family-friendly Linc—for the most part—the violence was only on the field. I usually sat with my brother and sister. My father, who had moved on up in the world since the time of my childhood, usually sat in the luxury box owned by the bank for which he worked. And—with all that alcohol in my veins—I’d trance out at the games. I’d cheer when everyone else cheered. I’d sing the fight song when the Eagles scored a touchdown. I spelled E-A-G-L-E-S with my Kelly-green brothers and sisters. But mostly, I’d recede deep into some forgotten place inside myself. Sometimes my toes would freeze. Occasionally, I wouldn’t be able to see over some tall guy’s hat. And I would often feel so very lonely.
I’d take the subway home with my sister. We’d meet Dad at the Broad & Pattison stop. And we’d fight our way onto the trains, which would fill almost instantly. Often, to catch a ride, you had to push your way into the wall of drunken human bodies that had already stuffed the train and were currently blocking the doors. The wall groaned and cursed and pushed back, but you just had to keep pushing yourself onto the train. And when the doors finally closed and the train jerked forward, everyone would hold onto each other, just to keep from falling down like so many dominos set up with no spaces in between. Sometimes my father’s body would get smashed into mine and I’d think, This is the closest I’ve ever gotten to being hugged by Dad.
“What did you think of the game?” I would say with an entire day’s worth of drinking on my breath.
We’d be nose to nose. Close enough for Dad to get buzzed off my fumes.
“Let’s just get to the car in the city,” Dad would answer. He didn’t drink. He was always one-hundred-percent sober at Eagles games and elsewhere. He was our ride home. And he never ever said a single word about my drunkenness.
We’d ride the rest of the way in silence.
I began my overdue divorce with alcohol in my mid-forties and that’s pretty much when I stopped making the long dive home to attend Eagles games. I’d previously and religiously driven from Massachusetts and even North Carolina. But football was just too intertwined with drinking. Once I got enough sobriety under my belt, I went to the Linc one last time with my father, just to prove to myself that I could make it through an entire game without booze.
Here’s a picture from that day:
As you might have already gathered from the expression on my face, it was not an easy day for me. Slowly giving up drinking and taking better care of myself had resulted in the loss of sixty pounds. I remember our section’s long-time beer guy coming up to me and asking why I’d missed so many games and if I was okay. I asked what he meant by okay. And he whispered, “Do you have cancer?” When I said I was just getting sober, he said, “Oh, thank god. I was really worried,” and then handed me a bottle of water.
Everything in the stadium made me want to drink. The drunk people drinking around me. The ads for alcohol. Our beer man yelling, “Beer here!” The noise. Strangers bumping into me. The violence on the field. Being next to my father and not knowing how to connect with him, even after desperately trying for four and a half decades. The few people who recognized me as the guy who wrote The Silver Linings Playbook. The many people who did not recognize me as the guy who wrote The Silver Linings Playbook. I remember feeling so alone in my home city, sitting next to my father, rooting for the team I loved—that I almost couldn’t stomach it. But I made it through the entire game without taking a single sip of alcohol and then I never returned to Lincoln Financial Field ever again.
Maybe a half year after that photo above was taken, I officially gave up booze forever. Shortly after that, I gave up rooting for the Eagles, telling myself that it was a dangerous trigger for drinking again.
To my great surprise, the world did not end when I stopped paying attention to Eagles football. And I began to suspect that I was really done with football fandom forever.
Years passed.
Then my father’s dementia made itself known to us.
When Alicia and I moved to Beaufort, SC to help my mother care for Dad, I started watching the Eagles on TV with my father again. That was November of 2023. My watching the Birds with Dad started as a way for Mom to get a break. I told her I’d sit with my father during the games and she could go out with her friends or exercise or just get some alone time. And during the tail end of the 2023 season—even while regularly watching Birds games—I managed to keep my former Eagles fandom at bay. I’d watch with Dad, but I wouldn’t let myself join in too much with the cheering and caring and singing and spelling and moaning and complaining. The new sober me had transcended all that. I had turned a page.
But in the summer of 2024, I started once again thinking a lot about the Eagles. Then I was reading articles online about the team. And—as my dad’s dementia got worse—I began to realize that this might be the last Eagles season I’d be able to watch with my father while he even remotely understood what was going on. So I got Mom to buy the NFL Sunday Ticket and I committed to watching an entire season of Eagles games while sitting right next to Dad in his home—something I’m not sure we had ever done before. We’d seen plenty of games in each other’s company over the decades, but I don’t believe we had previously watched together every game of a single season start-to-finish.
And as I watched the 2024 Eagles season with Dad, I started to care a lot about the Birds again. I began yelling at the TV. I started complaining about the refs. I’d say that the league was trying to rig the games against the Eagles. I’d find myself wondering if our quarterback was good enough to take us the distance. Was Sirianni making the right decisions at crucial moments? Were we underutilizing the passing game? Shouldn’t Brown be getting the ball more? Just how fantastic will Mitchell and DeJean get? How well can Hurts read the blitz? Will Barkley break the big rushing record? Did we have the best defense in the league? Can Carter win games single-handedly? How much of a problem will Jayden Daniels be in the future?
During his good moments, Dad chimed in with similar questions and comments. But mostly he just sat next to me here in Beaufort, SC looking kind of lost. “Those guys on TV. They’re the Eagles playing, right?” he’d ask every now and then. “Are you and I in Philadelphia right now?” he’d sometimes say. And when I’d say we were in South Carolina, he’d say, “That’s right. I know that. But we used to go to the games, right?” There were times when we’d loudly cheer together, as our Birds marched their way through a winning fourth quarter—immediately after which, my father would look at me and say, “Are the Eagles playing today?”
And as my dad continued to lose the ability to follow along, I felt this overwhelming call to pick up the Kelly-green flag and care about football for him. I bought Dad a lucky Eagles Santa figurine for the mantel. I bought him lucky Tush-Push Eagles underwear for game days. I got him a Mitchell & Ness throwback Eagles sweatshirt. And I made sure we rooted together every single game. Then we started watching other teams play. Monday Night Football. Thursday Night Football. We’d do double headers on Sunday. Sometimes triple headers, whenever the Sunday Night game was a good one.
“Is there more football?” Dad always asked. And whenever there was, we’d watch it. It didn’t have to be the Eagles. It just had to be Dad and me. And it always was.
In the middle of writing this post, I rewatched Bambi. I hadn’t seen it since I was four and had that breakdown that frightened my mother. Here’s what I didn’t remember, but struck me hard this time around:
Right after Bambi’s mother is killed by the hunter—when Bambi is frantically searching for his mom in the falling snow—his father collects him and says, “Your mother can’t be with you anymore.” As Bambi takes this information in, he sheds a single tear. Then his father says, “Come, my son.”
It’s this initiation into violence and death that takes Bambi out of the protective feminine world of his mother and into the more menacing masculine world of his father, where he will have to fight other bucks for the right to mate, protect his love from hunting dogs, escape a raging fire, and dodge bullets, before finally taking on a paternal role himself. As the young grieving Bambi first leaves his mother’s world and silently follows his father through the snow, I suspect that his hooves are freezing cold, he feels all alone, and as though he will never be able to see over the taller bucks with their great antlers.
As my father’s dementia continues to kill him in slow motion, together we watch a violent sport played exclusively by men. Sometimes Mom sits with us, but she mostly scrolls through social media and plays games on her phone with the sound off. Recently, Alicia has been crocheting during the games. But Dad and I give our full attention to the men in football helmets who smash together like well-struck billiard balls, only to be re-racked and struck again, over and over.
Sometimes, when the Birds game is on and my father is close enough to touch, I’ll soberly think about all of the above in real time. Every now and then, something warm and bright will flutter in my chest. And before I know it, I’m on my feet and kissing the top of Dad’s bald head. He’ll look up at me, like, What the hell are you doing?
I’ll squeeze his shoulders hard and say, “Eagles, Dad! Eagles!”
Then I’ll lift my open hand.
When he slaps my palm, he’ll flash a boyish smile.
Before it gets too weird, I’ll sit back down next to him and then we’ll continue staring at the football on the glowing TV screen.
I’ll think to myself, If we didn’t have this, we might not have anything at all.
And then I’ll feel something I didn’t ever once experience when I thought about my father for the first fifty years of my life.
I’ll be overwhelmed with gratitude.
Your man in the Lowcountry,
Matthew
PS - Did you read the February 4th post? What About Jack Morris? (And Then I Do Not Yield)