Preseason football has begun.  As I speak the Kansas City Chiefs are recording on the DVR.  My colts are playing tonight (actually they played on Friday and I have been trying to avoid the results until I can see them tonight).  I’m wearing my Colts t-shirt.  I’ve got my Colts Crocs on, and I even painted my toenails Colts blue.  I’m geared up. 

This fandom started late for me.  I never really cared much for football.  I went to school at a place that only had basketball.  Yes, they had baseball too, but I was a cheerleader and if we didn’t cheer for a sport I didn’t consider it a sport.  So basketball was my thing.  I didn’t want to watch pro basketball, although I did take the kids to a Spurs game once and I got just as tied up in it as I did in my teens.  I loved watching the Jayhawks.  My son and I would watch Jayhawk games together.  I just never got in to football.  Then I noticed something.  When football season came everyone in the family who cared about football was cheering for the Chiefs.  My son was the one and only Colts fan.  When everyone started talking smack about his beloved Colts he couldn’t say much.  Mostly because I had taught him to treat his elders with respect.  I figured I had done this to him, I would undo it.  So I started watching the Colts.  I learned the names of the players.  I learned the basics so I would know when to cheer and when to boo.  I went to the games with my son.  Little by little I started to bleed blue.  Now when the family starts to tease about the Colts there is a voice that resounds back.  Not that I have to very much…the Colts have pretty consistently done better than the Chiefs.  I like the Chiefs.  I have watched them struggle and I hope that they get it together real soon.  They are my second favorite team.  This is the way my loyalty goes: 1) The Colts 2) The Chiefs 3)Whomever is playing the Patriots.

Recently my daughter and I were traveling through Indianapolis and we had to stop for gas outside of the city in a little suburb.  I was sitting in the backseat waiting for my daughter to come out of the gas station, when Bob Sanders walked out of the building.  I nearly killed myself jumping out of the backseat.  I threw open the door and yelled, “Bobzilla!” (a name my son coined for the little power house).  He turned to look at me and smiled a rather shy smile.  I asked him if I could have an autograph, and he obliged.  I told him that we needed him to be healthy this year because he makes up the Colts defense.  He smiled again, and shook my hand before we left.  I never thought twice about what a scene we made…a young, muscular, long haired (braided though), little package of TNT and a diminutive white woman of middle age.  I was just a fan seeking an autograph.  Until my daughter said to her friend, “can you imagine what he must have thought when he saw my little mama jumping out of the Tahoe yelling Bobzilla?”, then the hilarity hit me.  I had to laugh with them.  I called my son to tell him that I got Bob’s autograph.  I told him I called him Bobzilla.  He asked if he was nice, and I said that he was absolutely as sweet as could be.  “Good” he said, “I always have thought he would be.”

So now I am ready for the game.  I can’t wait to see “Payday” throw the football again.  “Per” Diem, Bobzilla, Dallas Clunk (so named because his catches are eratic, and all the rest.  I’m sad that we lost Coach Dungy, and I wish we still had “Marvelous” Marvin Harrison, but as long as the new coaches help us win, and the new receivers can catch the ball, I’ll survive.  I can’t believe this happened to me.  I was never going to enjoy a sport that was so brutal, but here I am…itching for the game to start.  I am one step away from having a horseshoe tattoo with the number 18 below it.  GO COLTS!!!!!!

 

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