Some of my fondest childhood memories revolve around my extended family traveling to Husker football away games inside a Buick that was pulling a camper.
This was back in the halcyon 1970s a few years after the Huskers had won back-to-back national championships and it was all but impossible to score tickets to home games without paying a guy on the street named Guido $400 for a pair of seats that may turn out to be fake. One sign you’d just purchased fake tickets from a scalper: there was a photo of Guido on the ticket. Another sign your tickets were fake: you’d buy nine and all nine would read “Row 22, seat 7.”
It’s back. I’m referencing a recent list of “Most Popular Toys” which to my surprise and delight included electric football, perhaps the greatest game ever even though it has, let me double-check - yep, it has almost zero in common with actual football.
For the uninitiated - and never having played electric football is sort of like never having watched a sunrise - electric football is contested on a tiny, tinny board made to look like a football field. Electrical vibrations cause the ball carriers and defenders to move up and down the field. It’s somewhat less realistic than a 1950s Japanese-made “King Kong” movie.
I’d like to issue a plea to TV football play-by-play personnel and analysts to work on their grammar game. Or, to put it into football commentator vernacular, please talk good.
I’ve been on a crusade for several years now - mostly conducted on Twitter which is to proper grammar what the Taco Bell jingle is to Pulitzer Prize-winning non-fiction - to get football commentators to stop saying “Michigan is on their own thirty" and “Look at Notre Dame - they’re ready to make their move.” This is fifth grade English, guys. Michigan, Notre Dame, USC and even Florida State are “its” not “theys.” “Michigan is on its own thirty" is correct. Or, “The Wolverines are on their own thirty" is correct.
I’ve never played fantasy football. But I’m thinking of joining a league next year because I’ve always wanted my life to revolve around something silly. Since I don’t play cornhole, I don’t plank or own a selfie stick, that leaves FF.
Don’t get me wrong. I envy the escapism of fantasy football. I’m using “silly” in a complimentary sense.
In the early 1970s my big cousin Denny wrote letters to numerous Husker football players. Denny wrote to star players, scrubs and incoming freshmen. He wrote to coaches. I’m pretty sure he wrote to equipment managers and trainers and even to the mascot, a surly type who was too busy to respond. In fact roughly half the players replied with an autographed photo. The signatures on several looked eerily similar.
