A Day of Beer and Piling on

For years I have played the indolent macho game of watching football all day on Jan. 1, but I think I’ve finally outgrown it.

The thought flashed into my head as I was lying on a couch watching one of the games, I don’t even know which one.

My form of repose was beyond couch potato. There is no vegetable to describe it: One foot propped up on the back of the couch, one foot on the floor, mouth hanging slightly open in the manner of a man whose synaptic connections have been suddenly severed.

It was in this mode that I experienced an epiphany not dissimilar to the one realized by Bernadette at the Grotto, though no vision was involved. Well, maybe there was a sort of vision involved, because I caught a reflection of myself in a window, an unshaved and uncombed primate sprawled on the couch, and I thought, Dear God, what have I become?

Until then I had been in a comatose state and, as I said, had no idea what event I was watching, whether it was the Pizza Hut Pepperoni Bowl or the In-N-Out Burger Onion Bowl, or whether either of these bowls even existed.

The sound wasn’t on because sometime during my twilight state my wife had apparently walked through the room and muted the mindless cheering. As I came to and focused on the screen’s silent images, I realized I could have been watching a game of dog pile, which is played by little boys when one of them falls and the others leap atop him.

Football, I decided, was nothing more than that, a game of dog pile that included occasional kicks and passes, and I had long ago ceased finding it either amusing or entertaining.

*

I arose slowly from my sofa-sprawl and straightened my clothing as much as possible in an effort to regain some small form of dignity. I felt like a wino sitting up in the gutter, wondering who’d won the Cotton Bowl.

There was a can of beer and a half-empty bowl of Fritos on the table next to me, both elements of the ritual that men take part in on Jan. 1. I somehow knew there would be salami and a cold pasta salad later on. But I don’t even like beer! I can’t eat salami! What’s going on here?

I’ll tell you what’s going on. America’s manhood, us guys, suffer from an addiction that is specifically linked to the first day of the year. It is far more intense than the seasonal Monday night compulsion due primarily to its duration. Monday night football is over and gone in three hours. In terms of comparison to Jan. 1, it can only be described as foreplay.

New Year’s Day football, like a horse parade in Hell, never seems to end, though the hours are skillfully divided between the sport and the beer ads in a perfect commercialization of what is essentially a child’s activity.

But children, at least, are able to articulate their feelings--”I’ve got an ouch on my toe, daddy”--while football players speak a language best described as Yaknow-Huh. I may have missed the announcement, but has English been dropped as a course of study at the major universities in America? Huh?

*

I came to realize as the day passed amid clumsy runs and stupid fouls that mine was an isolated spiritual evolvement. I telephoned friends, smart, literate people, and found that 87% of them were doing what I’d been doing.

Mostly the wives answered the telephone. One of them referred to her husband, a decent and loving man, as a pig. Another said her guy “was asleep watching football.”

But the biggest shock came from an educator I have known for 25 years, a Phi Beta Kappa whose classroom lectures on the moral obligations of the Etruscans have been hailed by scholars as major milestones in the definition of humanity’s quest for ultimate self-atonement.

I said, “John, I hesitate to ask, but what’s your major activity today?”

“Oh, you know,” he said in a preoccupied manner, “I’m relaxing.”

“No,” I said anxiously, “I don’t know. Relaxing how?”

“I’m watching television.”

There it was, the most intelligent and erudite man I have ever known, dragging us all a little deeper into the Jan. 1 effluence.

“Tell me,” I said very slowly, “what exactly are you watching? Take your time, John. Think about it.”

“You sure you want to know?”

“I must know, John. It is a debt I owe my craft.”

He hesitated for what seemed like hours and then said, “ ‘Space Ghost.’ ”

“Huh?”

“It’s on the Cartoon Channel. What’s important about ‘Space Ghost’ in terms of moral alignment is that it represents a pragmatic approach to. . . .”

The day was saved. Thank God for scholars.

(Al Martinez can be reached on line at [email protected])