I'm a Loser

I watched a TV show called "The 10 Worst Football Teams of All Time" today. I was looking for a diversion from studying and paper-writing.

Number five on the list was the 1968 Philadelphia Eagles. I found myself transported back to my childhood.

Children start developing conscious memories they retain into adulthood around age three or four. These tend to be random and when recalled are like grainy video with scenes missing. By the time I turned seven, however, the video was high def. And my passion was the Philadelphia Eagles.

My father spent many Sunday afternoons either watching football games on TV or listening to them while raking leaves in the back yard or doing other chores around the house. As an seven year old boy eager to connect with my father, I decided to follow our hometown team. I had learned to read that year, and I now had a consciousness capable of following from week to week the events on the field. With each Sunday's game and each Monday morning's sports section, I experienced misery and tears.

The Eagles lost their first eleven games. They were a miserable team.

Several things stand out in my memory; many others were forgotten until the TV show. I remember developing a hatred for Joe Kuharich, the Eagles' head coach. Even as a seven year old, I knew he was incompetent. He also mangled the language, a sin I have a hard time forgiving as an adult. I don't remember how I felt as a child. Explaining during a press conference why the team looked so different in the first and second halves of the game, Joe said "Well, we had a horse from a different firehouse in the second half."

What I didn't remember is that fans hated Kuharich so much that he received death threats during the season. The Philadelphia police ringed the stadium and stood on the roof of Franklin Field looking for snipers. Players refused to sit or stand close to Joe when on the sidelines. They worried the assassin might be a bad shot.

The only redeeming aspect of the season was the potential that the Eagles would perform poorly enough to get the first-round draft pick and gain a star for the next season. Of course, the Eagles went on to win the next two games, blowing their chance at the top pick. Eagles fans were so angry, they booed Santa Claus when he appeared on the field in the game before Christmas. To this day, people talk about Philadelphia fans as so mean that they would boo Santa Claus. What the reports fail to mention is that Santa was clearly drunk. He meandered around midfield and almost lost his footing several times before he was yanked off the field.

Oh, and the player the Eagles lost out on in the draft? OJ Simpson. OJ would go on to become a dominant running back in the NFL before being acquitted of murdering his wife. Of course, OJ would then go on to participate in a spectacularly stupid robbery attempt. He was sentenced to 9 - 34 years in prison today.

I wonder how all of these events shaped my young tender psyche. Certainly, when friends ask me why I root for the Bears and am not a bigger Eagles fan, I flinch reflexively at the memory of that 1968 Eagles season. It is fitting that one of the players on that team was Mike Ditka. Ditka hated Kuharich, too. I consider Ditka my football redeemer. Ditka was the coach of the Chicago Bears in that magical 1985 season, when the Bears went to the Super Bowl and I watched each game on the couch in the apartment of my new girlfriend-to-become-wife.

I know it's just a game. Today, football is a pleasant distraction. For a seven year old boy desperate to connect with and impress his father, football was a lifeline. That is, until it turned into a toxic mix of murder, drunkeness, incompetence and hopelessness. As I learned, though, these are the characteristics of all Philadelphia sports fans. It is the only NFL team in the league that has a prison in the stadium so that unruly fans can be sentenced and jailed during the game.

My early Philadelphia fandom prepared me well for my current vocation as a Cubs fan. Without the threats of assassination.