I’m Just Going To Leave This Right Here: The Winter Doldrums Edition

Welcome back January. It’s nice to see your gray face. It’s nice to feel your icy fingers when the wind blows. Here you are the month brought in on the eve of the previous year’s final night. You are brand new but even so it is sometimes hard for some of us to really truly cozy up to you at first.

January can be exciting. It can be a time for a new start or a do-over. After the crush of Halloween candy, the tryptophanic-trance brought on by Thanksgiving turkey and then an overload of Christmas fudge and cookies some of us make a vow to do better with dietary habits and January seems like just the ideal time to do such a thing. Others may look back over the previous year, or maybe even further back, to evaluate how things are going personally only then to determine to make changes for the better. These are good things.

Still, January, you are a tough old bird. The weather is often cold and wet. Some who work leave their homes in the dark and when they return later in the day, daylight has pulled a ‘bye Felicia’ and escaped making folks return home in the dark. Football has pretty much ended. The bills from Christmas stuff the mailbox. A body writes the wrong year on things for weeks. A person's feet just never gets warm. Then prayers for a snow day from work seem to be answered with a predicted snowfall of a lifetime which somehow turns into an afternoon of cold, misty drizzle and finds a body with an overdue report still needing completion. Then, to finish it off, when somebody tries to sneak a snack at midnight all that can be found are the last remnants of a holiday fruitcake.

As I do from time to time I am here to provide you with a break, this time from the doldrums of winter. So, as you look outside gazing at the gray sky, if you are really feeling a chill from the wind, maybe you can be warmed and renewed by going to the beach. No suntan lotion required.

Three Hours At The Beach 

I’ll just leave this here in case you need it.

Missing the Magic

Early this past Tuesday morning the college football season ended. One team celebrated, another team lamented a loss. Now, the waiting for the next season begins. Soon, most every fan of most every team will realize that next season they just might win it all.

I remember those days. I look back in fondness on the days when college football was still new and passionate to me. I recall when every upcoming season was packed with anticipation for fall Saturday afternoons and the magic of college football.

Call me an old grumpy man but these days it’s just not the same. When the season ended back then the sport faded into the background. It didn’t totally go away but it hid itself enough so that from time-to-time one actually missed the college football season. Nowadays, we have so much leisure time on our hands, and the game has grown into such a moneymaker, that it never ever goes away. Ever. You never now have an opportunity to miss the game because it is always in your space somewhere.

Now, almost as soon as the final game ends, talking heads have to analyze the championship game from every angle, nook and cranny. We may even devise complicated mathematical schemes to tell us which teams lead in recruiting even though the young men being recruited have never played a down in college football yet. We have to breakdown every single play of the past season in agonizing detail just so we can squeeze some more juice out of it, and sometimes just to find more things to be critical over so that we don’t ever get over losing that one game in week six that ruined the season. We have TV networks and shows and radio hosts and their shows who won’t ever let any of it rest. It is constant speculation and what-if scenarios which may never occur but time has been dedicated to be filled by something and well, what-if coach so-and-so had done this in week three in the third quarter of the game against State, would the season have ended differently? And, then just to make it even more distasteful, some shows and networks choose to infuse some of all this with political overtones, as if we need more of that in today’s world. And, we get answers, or at least conclusions we can live with until the next controversy. It all pulls back the curtain just far enough that we see enough to know how the magic is performed. And between even the tiniest bit of mystery being removed and the over-saturation it’s just never the same again.

Yes, I can choose to turn it all off, and I often do. Yes, I know many of the players are incredible athletes and can do remarkable things. Yes, I know the technology used to broadcast the game is amazing. Yes, I still want my team to win. Yes, it hurts when they lose, and, it hurts really bad when they lose to teams I do not like. But, I miss it the way it was.

Now, I miss when there were only a handful of games on TV each week and when my team was on then it just seemed more important than the game played last week which wasn’t on TV. I miss the game when we trusted the referees to be competent enough to make split second decisions about plays and when we, as fans, were mature enough to accept the referee’s decision on some level without having to rely on the 36 cameras covering the game to have the correct angle to make certain the game is called right down the line via instant replay and second guessing. I am okay with a bit of a margin of error, both in my day-to-day life, and in a sport in which my only participation is in watching it. It doesn’t have to be as complicated, or as devastatingly serious, as it has become.

I am a lifelong Georgia Bulldogs fan. I have experienced the glory days of Buck Belue and Herschel Walker. I have also experienced inglorious days where winning regularly was a struggle. I know the stories of the famous coaches like Mehre, Stegeman, Dooley, Butts, Russell, Richt and others. I have agonized over why the defense can’t play better and why the offensive coordinator can’t seem to recognize his schemes do not match the talent he is putting on the field when little ol’ me can plainly see it. Sometimes, it is all a sweet agony but even then there is always next season.

What I miss the most though is the feeling it gave me then. I miss the static of an AM radio pouring out the voice of one Larry Munson. I miss his passionate pleas to the defense to “hunker down just one more time”. I miss his one-sided take on the game in how everything in this one game right now, and maybe, even everything in the whole wide world right now, was stacked against our team, so much so that a miracle was all it would take for us to pull out a victory. I miss how he painted the picture of the stadium on game day, left to right, east to west. I miss when he informed us our team was wearing "silver britches". I miss how he noted whether the flags in the end zone blew in or out and how he could describe the sloppiness of the field after a drenching rain. I miss how a simple third down and two yards became a "third down and a mile" on days when our offense just couldn’t seem to move the ball. I miss his enthusiasm over a big play yet how he then wouldn’t let himself celebrate that big play too long because, well, the clock is still ticking, and the other team still has the time and the talent to pull out the win. I miss hearing his call of a game, a call that was broadcast to many but yet still seemed like he was talking, sometimes in hushed tones then sometimes in an evangelical fervor, one-on-one with me, and how what he said was somehow exactly what I was thinking and feeling. It was these things that hooked me. It was these things which left me exhausted and exhilarated but excited for the next game and for the next season. It is the things that made me believe in the magic of those moments. And, it is the things I miss most when football season ends and it will be the things I miss most when it comes back again in the fall.

Listen to some of Larry Munson's greatest calls here.