It's hard to believe what an outsized role Tennessee football played in my life for so many years. By my count, I had season football tickets for 26 years, the majority of the time under cover in the second deck of the North End Zone after that sections was renovated. For well over a decade, I sat with Sarge (Jennifer), Corley (Mike), TB (Kristin), and Mark (Elizabeth). Before and after I began dating and, later, married Jude, my fall weekends were consumed with driving to Knoxville, staying with Sarge (or Jude's parents), tailgating on Saturdays, watching the Vols in Neyland, having dinner or beers at Old College Inn after the game, etc. I made the drive back and forth to Knoxville on fall weekends a million times or so it seems.
On many fall weekends, I drove with a group to Athens, Georgia, Birmingham (or Tuscaloosa), Alabama, or Auburn, Alabama, to see the Vols play on the road. So many happy memories of the days before kids or the days when my friends' kids were young and Jude and I had yet have our boys. I've written about this before but in the fall, it was football, football, football, even more so when the Titans arrived in Nashville. Often times, I'd pull a double header, watching Tennessee play in Knoxville on a Saturday, then rushing back to Nashville to see the Titans play at Adelphia Coliseum on Sunday.
As he approaches the week long gauntlet of exams - and believe me, it was a gauntlet for him - JP asked if there was any way we could go to see Tennessee play Ohio State in Columbus, Ohio, in the first round of the college football playoff. I called one of my high school classmates and close friends, Neil Lynch - who lives in Columbus - and everything fell together pretty quickly. Neil helped with tickets and graciously offered for us to stay at his house, which is 10 minutes or so from campus. He even dropped us off at the game and picked us up afterwards, at close to midnight. Now, that's a real friend!
Of course, I enjoyed the travel time with JP. It's not often, anymore, that I get six hours or so in the car wit him as a captive audience. It's a great way to try to do a check in and see how he's doing. Plus, like Joe, JP is a really good hang. We covered a lot of conversational ground on the drive up and back - school, sports, family, life. He doesn't talk a lot, of course, so I treasure all of the conversations I have with him about matters of substance.
It was great to see Neil and Cindy. They stayed up late and made dinner for us Friday night. JP and I drove over to campus early Saturday morning and braved the cold (below 30 degrees) to watch ESPN's College Game Day, live, and to tour Ohio State's campus on our own. It's a big campus but surprisingly bucolic, nestled in the trees and with the Oval seeming to be the center of campus life. I liked Columbus a lot, actually.
Saturday, for lunch, we went with Neil and Cindy to Katzinger's, a well known Columbus Jewish deli and had an excellent lunch. Well worth the wait, as the place was packed. Afterwards, we laid around, watched college football (Penn State-SMU and Texas-Clemson), and relaxed. The calm before the storm, so to speak. Then, we donned layers and layers of clothes, including long johns, and headed to Ohio Stadium to brave the 20 degree weather and watch the Vols take on Ohio State along with 102,000 + of our closest friends.
As was written often in the aftermath of a Buckeye bloodletting, Tennessee' fans showed up but the team didn't, as Ohio State pummeled the Vols, 42 - 17. It was never close, much to the disappointment of the 25,000 or so orange clad Vol fans who made the trek to Columbus for the game.
In the third quarter, JP turned to me and said, "Dad, the conversion is going to take longer than you planned." Nodding my head ruefully, I replied, "I know, bud. I know."
While the Vols laid an egg and a rather large one at that, I was happy that JP got to see a big-time college football game. Ohio Stadium was awesome. So much tradition. Rabid fans. Everything that makes college football what it was and, well, what it is at least for a few more years. I can't help but feel, though, that we're at the end of something, as we adjust to a world with NIL money everywhere and players entering the transfer portal year after year. If you believe what you read, Ohio State alumni paid 20 million dollars for the current roster and Tennessee alumni paid 10 million dollars for theirs. That can't be sustainable, right?
JP and I sat in the cold in Ohio Stadium, shivered in the cold, and had an honest to God father-son night, watching football in a stadium neither of us likely ever enters again. A snapshot moment and a memory I will never forget, for sure.
It's funny, as JP is set to begin the second half of his sophomore year, I find myself beginning to realize that it's all coming to and end too soon. By that, I mean, the ability to spend time together on a daily basis, something it's so easy to take for granted when you're raising a child or children. It seems like my hands-on, fatherly duties will never end, until one day it hits me that he's almost half way through high school. Soon enough, he will be off to college and it's all over.
I realize, of course, that our relationship will evolve and I will transition into being a different kind of father. Still, as a control freak of the worse sort, I am going to have a very hard time letting go, as JP leaves our home and goes off into the world to live his life. It's making me sad, siting in Dose and finishing my coffee on Christmas Eve's Eve, just thinking about it.
For now, though, I'll enjoy the last minute hustle and bustle of this Christmas, and be thankful for Jude and my two sons at home. JP, already off for a 7 a.m. run with some of his former (and current) cross country teammates, in town for the holiday, and Joe nestled in bed reading or watching Dude Perfect on his iPod.
Christmas is upon us.
"Joy to the world, the Lord is come."
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