“Super Bowl Loser”
I was so frigging scared I thought I might die. Anyone who
tells you they weren’t scared or nervous, anxious before playing the Super
Bowl, they’re full of crap. Everyone on the team was amped up. Our mouths were
dry. Our hearts were pumping. I must have pissed 5 times before we hit the
field. It was the biggest game of my damn life, everything I’d dreamed of since
I was a little kid.
I didn’t sleep a wink the night before. I was running on
fumes. It was pure adrenaline and passion. I was just so amped up…
But once I hit the field, it became another game. However, the
hits were harder. A lot harder. The intensity was certainly higher,
super-charged, really, but the game was no longer an idea, no longer a fear; it
was a game. It was the game I knew well, every movement, every formation, everything
was inside me, in a physical, damn near spiritual language. I was a cog in the
team machine. And we were in motion. We were grinding, and I was pushing and
moving as my body had for years.
Until the final drive. That was something else. I’d never
been so excited in my life. The rush returned. My mouth was filled with salt. My
mouth was like a damn desert, it was so dry.
And I felt alive, so goddamn alive! There was a divine power
running through me, a feeling like some sort of superhuman strength, like when
a mother can lift a 10,000-pound car to save her baby. This is how I felt. I
think I could have picked up a semitruck and thrown it across an ocean. That
was the energy I had. That was the voltage thumping and surging through me. A
force of God was pumping through my veins.
I remember trotting onto the field after that long Super
Bowl commercial timeout. I remember my eyes were squeezed to slits. In the
huddle, I was shaking, I was so fricking amped! The crowd noise was deafening. I
can still hear its hiss, like an airplane engine, I can hear it; it’s blurry,
but I hear it. Goddammit, when I have the flashbacks, when I have the dreams, I
hear… I hear the hiss...
We were playing in the Georgia Dome, and usually, for
Falcons games, that place was quiet as a library, aside from when they pump in
fake crowd noise, but for this game, this noise was real, and running like a
power saw in my ears. This was the damn Super Bowl, and on that final drive, my
ears were in pain. Dammit, I’m not lying, I think my eardrums were ready to
bleed.
We were fighting, pushing and scrapping, charging our way down
the field. I wasn’t letting their sack specialist DE have any piece of my QB. I
was pancaking his bitch ass like nobody’s business. They talk about the NFL
being a “family game,” but, let me tell you, the stuff that’s said on that
field would make a nun faint.
And, dammit, you should have heard the trash talk in that
game. Their superstar DE, goddamn, he was cussing, talking the worst trash talk
I think I’d ever heard. He was talking about my mother. He was talking about my
ugly horse face. He was calling me a fag and a bitch and a honky chickenshit
motherfucker and everything under the sun.
He was one to talk. He was one ugly sumbitch. A teen wolf
looking motherfucker, looking exactly like Michael J. Fox in that shitty 80s
movie. The dude looked like a fucking werewolf, with his big buckteeth. I think
he really was a goddamn werewolf. He was one mean man, a tenacious competitor.
Hell, I hated the shit-talker but respected his game. He was fierce.
But I kept him in check. I pushed him off on every play. I
was a wall, I was a man of steel, I was a barbed wire fence, I was standing
taller than a wall surrounding a prison or an army base, dammit. I was Fort
Knox.
Dammit, fucking dammit, I felt invincible that whole game. I
didn’t allow a single sack. We scored 28 points. 28 points. It should have been
enough. It should have been...
My senses were so heightened that game, that day. I’d played
football my whole life, but I never really noticed the stink of the game. I’d
never noticed the smell of piss, shit, vomit, sweat, farts, blood, any of those,
probably because I’d be so super-focused on the game. But in that game,
especially that final drive, my nostrils were flaring, burning with smells…
We were neck and neck the whole contest. Then they kicked a
52-yard field goal, right after the two-minute warning, and seized the lead.
Then… that last drive. It was magical, like it was in slow
motion. We clawed down the field. Our QB was throwing bullets. He was throwing
daggers. Precision passes. It was surgical. He was Tom Brady. He was Joe
Montana. He was cold-blooded, sweating buckets of ice water. He was stoic.
Methodical. Moving us like soldiers. Inching us forward, inching us forward,
yard after hard-earned yard.
I was feeling it. I was tasting the champagne. It was that
storybook ending. We were going to Disneyland. We were fucking going to
Disneyland, I kept ensuring myself. It was my mantra…
Then the last play, from the 15-yard line. Shotgun
formation. Then the snap. Then the throw. The catch and the dive. The receiver wrestled
down, the receiver reaching out his long wiry arm, touching the ball toward the
goal line. From my vantage point, I thought he made it, I jumped up and roared.
I thought we were going to goddamn Disneyland. I was there. I was on a float in
a parade. I was in fucking Disneyland!
But when the refs waved it off... But when the refs shook
their heads, when they shook their heads and slashed their arms, when the
confetti fell and THEIR side ran hooting and jumping and dancing onto the field.
I stood in disbelief for a couple minutes. I was thinking there had to be more
time, one more play, just one play, just one more play, dammit, that’s all we
needed.
I was frozen in shock for a couple minutes. My body seized
up. Then the humiliation hit me, crashing over me like a wave of shit, like
somebody had scooped out shit-water from a toilet and dumped it over my head.
Goddammit, we lost the Super Bowl. We lost the fucking Super
Bowl. We’re the biggest losers in America. We’re the biggest losers in the
world. Everyone, even people who don’t watch football, saw us lose. Everyone was
at their Super Bowl parties, sitting on their couches, eating potato chips,
drinking beers and pointing at us. Everyone was laughing at us.
We lost. We were fucking losers. We disappointed everyone.
We’d have to go back to our city as losers. There would be no parade for us,
only an empty, cold airport. There would be no afterparty, just a depressing
hotel room. There’d be no champagne, no chummy interviews with the press. No
fucking trip to Disneyland...
Dammit, the way the media guys in the locker room were
speaking to us, sad faced and solemn, really, it was… as if we were at a
funeral...
The locker room after the game, it was dismal. You could
hear a pin drop. Barely anyone said a word. A couple guys cried. The whole
world saw us lose the Super Bowl. We were losers and we all knew it. Every
dream I’d had as a kid, growing up, playing football, it was to win the Super
Bowl, to hoist that shiny silver Lombardi Trophy, to kiss that trophy. And here
we were, in the game, fighting and scraping until the last minute, but we just couldn’t
get it done.
We were losers.
I can’t imagine how horrible and soul-crushing it must have
been to be on those Buffalo Bills teams that lost 4 straight Super Bowls. I
don’t know how those guys were able to show their faces in public again after
that. Honestly, just losing one had me thinking of checking into the witness
protection program or disappearing to a deserted island in the Pacific. I was
so ashamed.
My old man told me there is no second place. Only a first to
lose. He’d never played in the NFL, but he played D1 college ball at Army. When
I made the NFL, I thought, “at least I’ve done something HE never did.” I felt
so proud. When we made it to the Super Bowl, I thought I’d wear my sparkly
Super Bowl ring to every Christmas party, and then… maybe then… then... he’d be
proud of me.
Just once, I’d like to have seen him smile. The man never
smiled. Never. Not even on holidays. Weddings. Nothing. He’d never once
congratulated me. Not when I played D1 ball, not when I got drafted, nothing.
It pushed me to be better, and I won’t whine or anything and I love him all the
same… But it’s just… that I looked up to him, playing ball. I looked up to him,
when I was a kid. I mean, dammit, he was a colonel in the US Army. My dad was a
bona fide hero. He was my hero.
And I’d thought of him patting me on the back, hugging me
during our victory party. It’d have made him proud… It’d have made him smile…
He could’ve bragged about it to his buddies at the VFW, shown them my Super
Bowl ring…
But no. I lost the game. I was a loser.
I couldn’t look my old man in the eyes afterward. And I
never got a second chance at a Super Bowl. I never got back to the big game.
Not that I could really face my Pops, even before that game.
But after that, dammit, I never could really talk to him, not even when he was
on his deathbed.
Dammit, I made millions. I was an all-pro. I played 16 years
in the NFL. But the only time I got to the big game, I lost. Losing that Super
Bowl, being the biggest loser, having to face my old man, my family, after that
game, having to explain to my children that we lost, that was the worst moment
of my life. That was far worse than losing my money.
Goddammit, we let everyone down. And I have to live with
that. I lost my pride with that Super Bowl. I will never have a second chance.
That game, that drive will haunt me forever.
That game… The noise, the crowd hiss… That sea of camera lights
flashing… Me, shoving forward, beads of hot sweat burning my eyes as I was
looking up over the rows of helmets and knots of padded bodies… Me, seeing our
guy twisting on the turf, stretching his arm to the white chalk of the goal
line, and then… the whistles, the fireworks, the reckoning, knowing our guy came
up just inches, dammit, just inches short, that… that wakes me up in the middle
of the night... It fucking haunts me.
I only watched that game tape once, during the offseason
following the Super Bowl. Otherwise, I don’t ever want to see video of it. Not
like I need to, anyway, since it often creeps back, runs on a loop, in my mind.
When I flashback to that Super Bowl, that’s pretty much the
only time, really, these days, I think much about football. I don’t even watch
the Super Bowl anymore, unless I go to a party…
My wife’s been talking about this haunting crap. I don’t believe
in it. I believe in real ghosts. The past. Traumatic memories and lost
opportunities… The ghost of Super Bowl past. The ghost of lingering
disappointment and lost pride. Those, dammit. Those are my ghosts.
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