NFL Road Trip
by Michael Graham
I prefer to travel by book. Paul Theroux has taken me from Cairo to Capetown in Africa. With Jonathan Raban aboard his 35-foot sailboat, we navigated the 1,000-mile Inside Passage from Seattle to Juneau. There was a memorable journey years ago with Bruce Chatwin to “the far end of the world,” as the restless Brit described Patagonia, the vast, rugged territory at the tip of South America. Travel by book is the way to go, especially these days. It’s cheaper, whether going by hard-bound or paperback. You don’t need to mask-up. You avoid the TSA lines that snake through airports, the ubiquitous orange barrels on the interstate highways. You kick back in your recliner while the author deals with the linguistic barriers and sweats out the nasty microbial infections in foreign countries. Annoying tourists always seem to find Theroux. Chatwin, in Patagonia, hitched a ride with a Chilean truck driver whose feet, he reported, “smelled like cheese.”
So, in January when my wife Linda said our daughter in Georgia had called, inviting us to join her and her fiancé in Nashville for the upcoming NFL divisional playoff game between the Tennessee Titans and our hometown Cincinnati Bengals, I was not properly enthusiastic. Instead, I began finding reasons why we shouldn’t make what would be a quick weekend trip, the game just four hours and fifteen minutes down the road. Yes, but you know people drive too fast on the freeway. It’s the middle of winter, we’ll freeze our septuagenarian asses off. Our seats are field-level, we’ll have to stand the entire time. You know pro football fans — the Dawg Pound in Cleveland, the Jungle in Cincinnati, it doesn’t matter where — they’re intolerable. Yada, yada, yada.
The more excuses I made, the less convincing I sounded. Even I didn’t buy my argument for staying home, not after the Bengals had just defeated the Las Vegas Raiders in the opening round of the playoffs, touching off a week-long end zone celebration, if you will, in Cincinnati. “Act like you’ve been there before,” the late Paul Brown was known to say when one of his players would do a touchdown dance or spike the ball after scoring. Yet it had been thirty-one years since the club that Brown founded had won a playoff game. Bengals fans were understandably charged up, my spouse included. Linda would be going to Nashville, with or without her complaining, worry-wart husband. She hadn’t been this excited since the last time we attended a Bengals playoff game together — way, way back at Super Bowl XVI in Pontiac, Michigan, where Forrest Gregg’s squad lost to quarterback Joe Montana and the San Francisco 49ers. It was bitterly cold in Pontiac, too, but the 1982 game was played inside, under a dome, and as the Bengals beat reporter for The Cincinnati Post I had a comfortable seat in the pressbox, far from the madding crowd. The Post folded in 2007, a casualty of declining readership in afternoon papers around the country. I folded too, leaving the business in 1989. There would be no press pass this time.
We arrived in the Music City on Friday, the day before the game, a cold front blowing into town ahead of us. The forecast for Saturday called for highs only in the mid-30s, sunny skies, and a 100 percent chance of Derrick Henry. “The King,” as his loyal subjects in Tennessee bow to their all-Pro running back, would be returning to the field after being sidelined for two months with a foot injury. Bad news for the Bengals. For us, the news was all good. Our weekend stay at The Joseph, a Marriott boutique hotel within walking distance of Nashville’s honky tonks and the Titans’ stadium, would be fully comped by our daughter’s fiancé — much appreciated after the valet who parked my car said the rate was fifty-six dollars a day. When one of the beaming clerks who checked us in at the front desk offered Linda and me each a mini teacup of chai latte, I decided maybe it was finally time to lose my shamefully bad attitude and warm up a little to this experience I’d be sharing with family and Bengals fans. (Just don’t ask me to wear stripes. Silly as it seems, I try to maintain at least the appearance of objectivity, even if it was half a lifetime ago when I covered the club. I still can’t look at the expensive Waterford crystal bowl Linda and I received as a wedding gift from Paul Brown and not feel compromised in some way.)
The staff at The Joseph treated us like visiting dignitaries, so willing to be of service that when I decided I needed a softer bed pillow, I told Linda that management would probably dispatch a valet to Cincinnati to pluck mine off the bed in our townhouse and drive it back to Nashville if I asked them to do so. As it was, they sent up three different pillows for me to try. What our friendly, eager-to-please hosts couldn’t provide, unfortunately, was a hard copy of a newspaper—not even a print edition of the local Tennessean. When I asked the concierge where I could find the New York Times (other than on my Android), she shrugged and pointed across the street. “Try Dunkin’ Donuts.”
I woke up Saturday morning and decided to grab a cup of coffee at the Starbucks in the hotel around the corner. Maybe I could get my hands on a newspaper there. It was 6 a.m. when I left our room on the 16th floor and walked down the dark hallway to the bank of elevators, not a soul stirring. Cincinnati fans and Tennessee fans wouldn’t be putting on their gamefaces until later that afternoon, trudging elbow-to-elbow across the John Seigenthaler Pedestrian Bridge over the Cumberland River for the three o’clock kickoff in Nissan Stadium. The half-mile-long bridge is named after the late editor of the Tennessean, who, as a young reporter with the paper, saved a suicidal man from jumping off the bridge — a leap the disconsolate might have considered taking after their top-seeded Titans were upset, 19-16, by the Bengals.
Waiting that morning on an elevator descending from the 20th floor, I stared at the video art on the far wall. A tree toppled over in a forest, begging the question that philosophers have debated for centuries. The video, however, ran silently in a slow-motion loop, this tree not making a sound while I stood there watching it fall through the woods, nor would it have made a sound had I been back in my room and out of earshot. In retrospect, I now see the video as a portent, the falling tree a foreshadowing of the calamitous events on the field that day, events the Bengals somehow managed to overcome. Joe Burrow, their second-year quarterback, went down again and again under the Titans’ fierce pass rush — sacked nine times, a playoff record the Bengals’ permeable offensive line shared with the Titans’ defensive front. Burrow’s so-called pass protectors could only help their unflappable QB to his feet after each hit and hope he would keep making plays when the team desperately needed plays to be made. The game ended with a Burrow pass that set up placekicker Evan McPherson, who booted a 52-yard field goal as time expired. The rookie called his winning kick before launching it—a la Babe Ruth pointing to the centerfield wall at Wrigley Field before famously hitting a home run in the 1932 World Series—and thereafter his moniker was “Money” McPherson as the Bengals made their unlikely pilgrimage to the Super Bowl.
What I couldn’t stop talking about, though, after returning home from this trip I didn’t want to make, was another startling moment, a spooky encounter that Rod Serling could have introduced in one of his monologues from his 1960s TV series “The Twilight Zone.” There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. … a dimension as vast as space and timeless as infinity … the dimension of the imagination …an area we call the Twilight Zone. That’s where I seemed to be when the elevator door opened early that morning and standing in the corner, all alone, was Mike Vrabel, the head coach of the Tennessee Titans. All 6-4 of him. No mask. Stubby beard. He could have been a ghost, a swirling hologram. The valet, the front desk clerk, the concierge who sent me across the street to the donut shop, had not said a word — there was not a peep, in fact, out of anybody — about the Titans being quarantined in our hotel, if indeed Vrabel and his players really had spent the night there, segregated from the public as mandated by the NFL while the SARS-CoV-2 virus remained on the loose. Yet there he was, the Ohio State All-American, the New England Patriots linebacker, the NFL Coach of the Year in 2021, looking directly at me. I’ve seen that look of apprehension before, when VIPs are afraid you might accost them and ask for an autograph, or worse, try to make conversation.
“Good luck today,” I said, getting on the elevator.
Vrabel nodded.
The door closed. We began going down.
Elevator rides with strangers are always uncomfortable. This one was uncomfortable and weird.
“I’m from Cincinnati. I used to cover the Bengals in the Munoz and Collinsworth days,” I said, a remark that surely made no sense because I had failed to identify myself as a has-been reporter.
Vrabel nodded again. We stopped at the 8th floor. What can I say before he gets off?
“I’m a big Ohio State fan.” Weak, Michael. Weak.
The door opened. With one last nod, Vrabel was gone.
When I returned to the room with my coffee, I told Linda I had ridden on the elevator with the Titans’ coach, just the two of us, and was so stunned to be face-to-face with him I sounded like a silly, awestruck fan. We joked about the one-sided conversation. I should have hit the emergency stop button, demanded Vrabel hand over the Titans’ gameplan. I should have told him I saw his running back in the hotel bar late last night and he appeared to be limping. (The King carried the ball 20 times, gained 62 yards, and scored one TD — yeoman’s work, but not spectacular.) I should have asked the question I’d been asking since I arrived. “I’m looking for a newspaper, Coach. Do you know where I can find one?”
Michael Graham is director of operations for Zeigler Financial, a financial services firm in Wilmington, Ohio. He resides in Cincinnati, where he was a staff writer for Cincinnati Magazine (1989-96) and a reporter for The Cincinnati Post (1976-85). His sportswriting portfolio includes five seasons as the Post’s reporter on the Cincinnati Bengals beat and a year as the paper’s sports columnist, traveling around the country to cover a wide range of events, including the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. At Cincinnati Magazine, he specialized in profiles of the Queen City’s major sports figures, politicians, media personalities, entertainers, and business leaders.