Looking back, even now after so much life has passed, I don’t think there could be a day as perfect as Saturday, November 20, 1993.
I had just turned eleven, but when I close my eyes, I can still look back and see leaves dressed in their boldest reds, yellows, and oranges under a grey sky. I feel the cool air that barely breaks forty degrees and hear the battle cries that still play. So, too, do valiant victory marches atop an open field one-hundred yards long.
Miracles matter any time of year, but where I grew up they count a little more when made by heroes in autumn.
Thinking about that Saturday makes me think about the Friday morning before it and about my dad. The football gods had dipped him in their golden honey and blessed him not just with great speed but also a rare, special toughness—the type he didn’t need to go around proving because everyone knew it was just always there.
Dad had reddish-brown hair, cut a devilish grin, and there was a time—brief and fleeting as it so often is for matinee idols whose greatest glories come then they’re still young—that he raced to touchdowns and soared alongside cheers while wearing wings painted in maize and blue.
“Number 41 in your programs. Number 1 in your hearts,” they said as he finished third in voting for the 1976 Heisman Trophy.
Only later, long after the adulation had ended, would he limp off into football’s sunset a wounded Bronco full of longing for one more play in the game he loved.
I stood spellbound in Dad’s home office watching him dip into his storytelling bag of tricks. Michigan played Ohio State the next day, and Dad reclined his chair behind a hulking oak desk regaling Michigan sports radio about…
“… that time in ’76 when we beat Ohio State 22-0 my senior year… that game… that day… that was my favorite moment ever playing football. The Horseshoe was so quiet, you could’ve heard a pin drop.” Dad paused there, like he always did, to let the silence sink in. “It was beautiful. A perfect team win.”
Dad smiled and motioned for me to toss him the football I’d been spinning in my hands. He’d set records and scored touchdowns, but when he talked about his past, he never mentioned his individual highlights. Football, for him, was a team game, so that’s what he talked about when he talked about football.
“My prediction?” Dad flipped the ball back to me, and I tucked it under my arm as I’d learned to do long before I’d learned fractions or division. “Michigan wins tomorrow 28 to 7,” he said as a little devil danced inside the sparkle in his eyes.
“You think so?” I asked when he’d hung up.
“We’ll see,” he grinned and swiped at the football. “Now come on. Let’s get some McDonald’s before you go to school.”
I smiled and walked into the day alongside him with a heart full of hope and wonder.
Dad’s Michigan team beat Ohio State on Saturday, November 20, 1976.
He later died at fifty-six on Saturday, November 20, 2010.
I don’t know what it means that this day I so often remember—Saturday, November 20, 1993—happened exactly seventeen years from each of them, but I do know that game-day butterflies rumbled in my belly for every one of the eighty miles we drove north from Fremont, Ohio, to Ann Arbor, Michigan early that morning.
Grandpa parked his station wagon on a big grass field near the Big House. We stood and stretched our legs. The grass was wet and the air crisp. The wind swirled smells of nearby chili and cigarettes and whipped fallen leaves against our feet. Fight songs played from car speakers off old cassette tapes.
Grandpa popped open his 4-seat card table with “Block M’s” on it and set out a bucket of chicken, some potato salad, these awful tasting coconut bars nobody touched but him, crackers, dips, and a block of Swiss cheese Dad mostly claimed for himself. Grandpa, a friend of his, and Dad sipped off the foam of their first morning beers and smiled. I clutched a can of Coke, too nervous to have a good time.
The three of them stood and laughed and talked about the season that had passed, and the game Ohio State and Michigan would soon play. Dad and I played catch off and on, but mostly I tossed the football by myself, content to disappear into my imaginations of all the games I hoped to play.
First on Friday’s where people from the town I grew up in would come to watch my best friends and I battle for our school clad in our purple jerseys with white trim. I was a kid, then, but I already knew those Friday night lights, with a whole town watching under them, cast a special type of magic.
If I were lucky, Fridays would give way to Saturdays, and I’d be fortunate enough to run out from a tunnel onto a field of real grass while the sun and clouds tangoed overhead. Stands filled with nervous fans on a November Saturday, hearts all hoping to have their wishes granted.
I imagined practices and repetition after repetition after repetition. I pictured games won and games lost, and I hoped for my chance to one day make it all real. To play these games the way my heroes did. The way my dad had once done.
Kickoff approached, and our tailgate ended. A team in scarlet and gray played one in maize and blue, and while I cherished the game on the field, it never held a candle to the ones I spent the afternoon imagining would one day happen for me.
Michigan won 28 to 0.
Dad’s prediction had nearly come true, and his s**t-eating grin never left his face on the drive home.
I think about fall, that mix of months when the nights get dark before dinner and leaves raked into big piles can become perfect backyard end zones, more than is usual for someone my age. When I do, I always picture this day in 1993 and how it faded into a night I didn’t want to let go.
The movie ended around 10:00 pm, and Mom, Dad, and I stepped outside the theater. They walked casually while I kept pace a step behind. The night was dark, and streetlights paved our walk three blocks to our house. The temperature felt like snow could be around the corner, and surrounding us the bells of the neighborhood churches waited for their turn to play the next morning.
Dad mumbled something about the movie and Rudy being an annoying try hard. Mom chuckled and told him to be quiet. I smiled, thinking less about the little kid from The Goonies who seemed a better pest than football player, and more about what I was feeling as we walked home.
There was that cathedral in South Bend, and while it wasn’t home to my team, it still housed the ghosts of past champions with the hopes of young dreamers like me chasing a chance at gridiron glory. I felt the drums building and the horns rising, swelling passion and excitement in me.
I was a kid who loved football with a heart full of fall’s greatest dreams.
I fought sleep as long as I could that night, knowing—even then—how much I never wanted the day to end.
Fall Saturdays can be perfect for a kid who grew up where I grew up, one who learned about offensive line splits and the trinity of the veer option from the same person who quizzed him before social studies tests.
A father, first, who happened to also be the first football player to score a touchdown in the Rose Bowl and the Super Bowl.
Which is why every year, when it becomes sweatshirt weather outside and the scent of bonfires seems everywhere, I travel back in time to places and memories impossible to separate from football.
I close my eyes and feel November’s chill.
I think about days that feel too fresh to have happened so long ago.
I hear strings, a piano, and a flute play a soundtrack made for the fall, and one more time I feel the smack of a leather football against my bare hands. Dad grins, and I see this, too, as I run route after route in a perfect picture where dreams and hopes and games of catch never need to end.
If you close your eyes, what do you see? What do you feel?
Damn, I love football.
See you when we see you
Friends, football is as seductive as it is violent. Which means with love comes devastation, death, and heartbreak.
Soon, I’ll talk about the other side of the football coin.
We love you, and we’ll see you when we see you.
