I really need to go back a few years to explain my take on SU football games. For years we were season ticket holders for both football and basketball. Now we only get b'ball tickets, and the main reason for our dropping the football tickets was the dpr ration in the section where we sat. If you're not familiar with the dpr, it's the drunks per row ratio. I'm pretty sure we had one of the highest ratios in the dome.
But the high dpr didn't occur until our second set of football tickets. For a couple of years, we sat high up in the northeast corner, and behind us sat "ObnoxiousMan." OM not only drank too much, but he was uncommonly loud and profane. When the Orange were doing poorly, he cursed them out. When they were successful, he barked like a dog through cupped hands so loudly that the entire section cringed. After two years of being seated in front of OM, we went to the ticket office and requested a change of venue for our seats. I relayed the story of OM to the sympathetic ticket lady who set us up with great new seats in the northwest corner and only 5 or 6 rows from the edge of the 3rd level.
The first day we went to those new seats, I was overjoyed. Our seats were wonderful, and Donovan McNabb was quarterback. True, the man who sat next to us on one side, had had a heart attack and died in his seat the year before, happily to be brought back by CPR. That's the first thing the people who sat on our other side told us about. So Linda told the story of the OM and how we had joyfully moved away to these seats. Several minutes went by, and I sat happily smiling in my new football perch. Then, up the steps came the OM and put his ample butt down in the seat directly behind us. He, too, had requested a new seat, apparently, and the sympathetic lady had put him behind us. Linda laughed at the irony. I did not.
For the next two years, everyone in our section grew to hate the OM. The lady to my left often turned around and scolded him for his antics. Finally, after two or three years, he gave up his tickets.
Things should have been swell, then, but we soon became aware of the DPR. To our right and one row in front sat the drunken teachers. Two guys who taught in a district that I will not name on the west side of the city came every game bearing flasks. They bought beer and spiked their beer with booze, and got obnoxiously but quietly drunk. This might have been OK if not for the yuppie drunks in front of them. Extremely well dressed lushes, the guys got loaded during each game until their wives got angry. But the saddest drunk was the old drunk in front of us. He drank four beers during the first half, two beers while leaning against the wall in the hall during halftime, and four more beers in the second half. On top of that, he always arrived at the game drunk, having come with his wife by charter bus. The poor fellow had such bad knees that he had to crawl up the six steps to where he sat and then back down at intermission.
On our final day of attending football games as season ticket holders, all three of these drunken elements came together. In the second half, the drunken teachers apparently said something nasty about the drunken yuppie's wives. This caused the drunken yuppies to rise in shock and threaten bodily harm to the teachers. I had had it! I put on my "only get mad a couple times each year" voice and told them to sit the hell down, at which point both drunk groups began pleading their cases to me like I was a judge. The crowning moment came when the old drunk turned to me and said in the most slurred, alcoholic voice you could imagine, "Forget about'em. There jush a bunsh of ashholes!" And you know, he was right. So, even though we had a couple games left that year, we stopped going and when our ticket renewal came, we did not renew it.
Linda has never been a great football fan. Even when we had season tickets she used to bring a book, and she believes that football games should have three fifteen-minute thirds and that baseball games should have only five or six innings. She did teach me one thing, though. If the game is slow or disappointing, you can always people watch. That's what I did yesterday, along with cheering on the Orange in what was a really classy effort.
Sitting right in front of me was a cute little family. There was a little dad, a little mom, a little girl, and a little boy. I knew they wouldn't get drunk. The little girl was darling and was wearing her new school glasses, which had frames like the kid from AMERICAN IDOL always wore. To my left was a man from Australia. He was with an American friend, and the poor mate didn't have any idea what was happening on the field. He plugged his ears when the cheering got loud. So did the little girl in front of me. To my left was a very nice couple who seemed very professorial but still very involved in the game. Behind me sat the doofus, a fellow who announced loudly from the beginning that he didn't like Greg Paulus or Doug Marrone even though he loved the Orange. He was just like a republican pulling for the president to fail. He said things like, "I don't care too much for this nickel package" to sound like he was experienced. He also could find no good in anything the Golden Gophers of Minnesota did. When the Gopher QB fired a beautiful pass to a barely open receiver who caught it, the doofus declared that it was all the fault of the SU defense, and that, in fact, he could have thrown that pass. I wanted to turn around and tell him, "No you couldn't you #@$%#$ idiot." But I didn't. When the little family left, the little boy had somehow removed his shoes and socks and the mom had to put them on.
This blog has gone longer than I thought. I'll have to continue when we come back from Lake Placid. I must explain the title of today's piece, though. When the game was over and I was walking back down Euclid toward my car, I was followed by an SU coed and two of her friends. She was cute, probably nineteen, and an orange-bleeding fan, and she was terribly upset. Like too many other people, she blamed Greg Paulus for the loss, but her reasoning was unique. She said, "What's he playing for anyway? He's a man. He's like twenty-three. A nineteen year old kid should be playing quarterback. Then we'd win. Paulus ought to hang up his cleats." So as I said in the title, never send a man to do a boy's job.
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