Gridiron Glamour
by Alice Lowe
You went to football games in high school to hang out with friends. You cheered when they cheered but didn’t know a first down from a fumble. Still ignorant and indifferent years later, newly married, you and your husband joined two of his former college buddies and their wives to watch a championship game between the Dallas Cowboys and Green Bay Packers. “It’ll be fun,” your husband said.
Locked down with five football-crazy Texans, you decided to stir things up and cheer for the other team. Your husband looked at you quizzically, “what the …?” reflected in his eyes. His friends feigned annoyance, called you a traitor.
Green Bay scored first. And again on a fumble. “Go Packers!” you yelled. You got into it. “Didja see that run?” Your companions scowled. Green Bay won, and you declared yourself a Packer Backer, cheering them on to victory two weeks later in the Super Bowl.
The following year, housebound with an infant daughter, you did temp secretarial work, intermittent and undemanding short-term jobs as a bridge until you were ready for full-time work again. An assignment with the San Diego Chargers Football Club came as a refreshing change from your last two gigs, a bank and a defense contractor. And maybe there would be free game tickets.
The club’s headquarters inhabited the old Lafayette Hotel, once a popular getaway for Hollywood celebrities, now in seedy disrepair. You worked for the business manager, whose secretary was out on medical leave, handling leases, travel arrangements, and other practicalities that had little to do with football. The coaches’ gruffness, the players’ bigger-than-life physical presence—like buffalo lumbering down the halls—and the sheer otherness of it all were intimidating at first, but after you got to know everyone you thrived in the supercharged atmosphere. And you got tickets.
When the temp assignment ended you were hired fulltime as secretary and minion to the assistant coaches, a bunch of foul-mouthed, chain-smoking, beer-guzzling, pot-bellied, salt-of-the-earth, mostly southern, mostly lovable, over-the-hill former jocks and good ole boys. Typing rosters, play notes, and scouting reports meant decrypting six varieties of illegible handwriting. When the coaches were on the field or out of town you emptied overflowing ashtrays, washed muck-encrusted coffee cups that multiplied in corners and on windowsills, sprayed woodsy air freshener into their dank windowless caves. A year later you became executive secretary to the new head coach/general manager and gained privy to contract negotiations and top-secret game plans, moved into an office with a window in the new stadium offices.
You attended every home game, knowledgeable about the strategies and nuances of the game as well as the team’s inner workings, personality rifts, last-minute crises. There were road trips, social events, celebrities, envy and admiration. The glamour of the job and an excellent rapport with your boss kept you going for five years, but when he exited under a fog of defeat and scandal, you were ready to move on. The glamour was gone. The brutality of the game, the big egos, and the second-class status of women now cast a pall on what once had been so thrilling.
You went back to school and into a challenging career. In your new incarnation—educated, professional, feminist—you suppressed your stint with the Chargers as you would a criminal past. It was years before you could look back on those days and your former self with acceptance and humor. Now you like to surprise people. “No!” they say. “You?” And often, “How cool!” You’ve lost all interest in football, but yes, it was fun. And very cool.
Alice Lowe writes about life and language, food and family. Her essays have been published in numerous literary journals, recently or forthcoming in Burningword, Anti-Heroin Chic, ellipsis, Epiphany, and Gold Man Review. Her work has been cited in the Best American Essays and nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. In addition she’s had two essays published in Hobart’s annual baseball issues, one of which was included in a “best of” anthology. Alice lives in San Diego, California and posts at www.aliceloweblogs.wordpress.com.