...[my family and]...I have been going “holiday lite” (as opposed to Holiday Lights!) for years. I’m bothered by how the individual holidays have lost their religious distinctiveness, and instead become kind of a stinky amalgam of shopping, consumption, gluttony, overindulgence, and other such nonsense. An annual Holiday letter, two or three gettogethers with friends and family, and the traditional Xmas/UU holiday services such as I find them: here a Cider & Cornbread Communion, an annnual pageant (created by Vincent Silliman, a former minister of this church, and now in its 80th+ year), a candlelight service, and an annual New Year’s burning of regrets. In years past I’ve bought food baskets for my relatives, buts, but may do something different this year reflecting my disease.
The one thing I miss is a good annual Holiday football rivalry! Whether it’s been Harvard - Yale,or the Ducks and the Beavers, or the Cougars and the Dawgs, for me Thanksgiving in particular has traditionally been about food, family, and football…a trinity deeply grounded (if you read up on these things) in the historical evolution of the holiday itself.
Comment by The Eclectic Cleric — November 26, 2008 #
Last week's "Apple Cup" did little to feed the hunger. Apparently this was only the fifth time anywhere that two college football teams with a combination of 20 losses have met since the formation of the NCAA, and the fact that it took overtime for the two teams to settle the result (since neither seemed capable of losing it outright in just four quarters) simply seemed like "par for the course." And the Seahawks v. Cowboys Thanksgiving Day showdown wasn't much help in taking the edge off either. But at least I could tell it was a football game going on, which was some comfort.
The best thing about Washington football has always been the opportunity to "tailgate on the poop-deck," which is to say take your boat to Portage Bay, raft on to the huge FLEET of boats that assemble there on game day, then make your way across the raft at gametime and enjoy. Hell, now that I think about it, I wonder whether you even have to ATTEND - just join the raft, enjoy the party, and then when the games starts put on the radio and go down in the cabin and write. Something to think about, in the HIGHLY unlikely possibility that I ever move back to Seattle, am living on a boat, still serving a church, and decide to become a local Husky football fan again. I mean, once you were actually PART of the raft, it would be awfully hard to get you out again...
THE Game last Saturday, which featured Harvard's 10-0 domination of Yale (on what I believe was the 125th iteration of their competition) was apparently respectable enough. But still, it had none of the makings of the classic 1968 game featured in a recent documentary on the subject, where a til-then undefeated home team (Harvard) came from way behind to score two touchdowns and two two-point conversions, which eventually lead to the headlines: "Harvard Beats Yale 29-29" and "Old Schools Tie." And don't get me wrong. I really enjoy Ivy League football, and if I could have simply disciplined myself to get my sermons written before Saturday I would have bought season tickets and enjoyed EVERY game the Crimson played (Hoop too. Probably even Women's Hoop.). But now it's a little late for that.
The real problem with IVY league sports (not that it's really a "problem") is that very few of those kids have ever really played on a field like this. This is Ratliff Stadium in Odessa Texas, home of the Permian Panthers MOJO and scene of the book, film and (presumably) television series "Friday Night Lights." Below is the empty parking lot as you see it in the daytime, just to give you a little different sense of the place. A lot of these Texas Schoolboy Football teams could blow undefeated through the Ivy League without breaking a sweat (OK, they would sweat. That is, perspire.).
I recently saw an interesting article by a former Harvard student who was talking about how difficult it is to get in to Harvard (in terms of the competitive admissions ratio, at least), and wonder what was he going to do with his life now that he had already accomplished the most difficult thing the most difficult thing in it at the age of nineteen...only to discover that admission to Harvard merely opened the door to all SORTS of other interesting and even more difficult challenges.
But many of these West Texas High School football players really HAVE seen the best years of their lives by the time they turn nineteen. That was the whole point of the book (Friday Night Lights) -- how do you BACK to being an oil roughneck after you've been worshipped like a God?
At least this year's Oregon/Oregon State game (I can't bear calling it "the Civil War." Maybe "Warfare on the Willamette?") has some meaning. The Beavers are undefeated this year at home, and if they can beat the Ducks there in Corvallis they will be going to the Rose Bowl for the first time in a long time (1965: Michigan 34, Oregon St 7). If they don't, then USC is playing in Pasadena (yawn. just another home game), and both the Ducks and the Beavers are bargaining for bowl bids somewhere else. So sorry Mike Belotti -- I'm pulling this year for the kids from the Heart of the Valley. And since I have degrees from both schools, I can't be wrong in that either. I know it's been a long time for the Ducks too (1995: Penn St 38, Oregon 20). But at least that's more recently than New Years Day, 1920, which was the year Harvard handed the Ducks their tailfeathers, 7-6.
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