I posted this on here last year and thought I would repost it

Yesterday the air had a scent of football

by Happy Elephant

It's never subtle. That first hint every summer that football is near. One day you walk outside and the scent of fresh cut grass rushes through your olfactory epithelium and football season is at the doorstep. Yesterday it happened. As I got out of my car, I took a deep breath and there it was. Football season. This off-season has been one of the most unsettling I can remember as a fan. The firing of Shula was awkward, the coaching search was confusing, and the hiring of Saban was like the lifting of a bitter curse. However, the jubilation felt with the hiring of Saban was met with bitterness and vile rebuke from everyone outside of the Bama Nation. Since January, it seems we have been doing the tango in bare feet on a slippery floor strewn with broken glass. When there is a victory, like the recruiting class, it is followed by a fiasco, like the Miami Herald's story about improper contact with recruits. The recent players' arrests coupled with CBS Sportsline's Mike Freeman crowning the Alabama program the most scandalous in college football was another ebb in the cosmic Saban joy flow. In January, when Saban got off the plane, it felt like General MacArthur had just waded ashore. The outrage that had taken place in Tuscaloosa was over. The losing was over. The lack of direction was replaced by singular focus. The weakness and feebleness was replaced with strength and intellect. When Saban took the podium at the press conference introducing him as the new coach, he opened his mouth and spoke without stumbling and bumbling and searching for words. He knew what he was doing. That day had the Bama Nation thinking of the back payments owned to the other members of the SEC and how sweet it was going to be to start the payback plan. However, since that day, the elation has been chipped and chopped at by other people and events. The experts have cautioned the crimson clad masses to brace for a 7-5 season with losses to the top teams in the conference. Patience. Saban will need time. Time. It took time for MacArthur to make it back to the Philippines, but Saban isn't fighting a war. War is serious. Football is pastime. In the last several years with all the losing I think I lost the knowledge that football was just that - a sport and a pastime. The winning might not return at a clip that would satisfy the baser parts of myself, but the better parts of me, which I hope constitute the larger part of me, are regaining the idea of what football should be in the context of the whole of things.

Yesterday, when the grass centered me to the season, memories of my father, at times too sad to recall, came back to me in waves. He cared as much for football as he did for the price of tea in China. It was a foolish endeavor in a world with too little time to do the necessities, much less to indulge in games. Yet, he never missed a single game of mine. No matter where we played or where he might be working that day, he would appear along the fence just before kickoff to let me know he was there. As a kid, I didn't realize the effort that took. As a man with a job and responsibilities, I see what a labor it was to work all day, drive a great distance, and then quietly lean on a fence in some out of the way town. All to watch over your kid as he began to learn how to navigate through the obstacles of a game that shadowed the obstacles of life. Quietly. He allowed me to play, to fail, and to win with nothing more than a watchful eye. My father and I never talked a lot. Some, but nothing more than a few sentences at a time. On a few dozen Friday nights more than a decade ago, we stood in front of each other, separated by a fence and the confusion and tension of me growing up and he not being able to stop time, and we conversed. Words so awkward at other times flowed easily and generously between us. He never cared about football, but somehow my playing the game allowed me to see how much he cared about me. He died several years ago. There are no words that encompass the loss I felt and still feel at times. Time heals to a degree. Time passes and distance from the day creates a sense of separation from the hurt. The hurt dulls and becomes something less sharp, but always there is this feeling of something gone out of the world. The smell of fresh cut grass brings me memories of my father. Football brings me memories of my father. A hundred different things do the same, but football opened a door for us that seemed closed in other situations. People like to say that football is a religion for Alabama fans, that we look at Saban as the savior of that religion. Football is a sport and a pastime. It is also a door that opens avenues that allow people to share in something, to find a common place to connect, and to share. Coach Saban is not the savior of Alabama football. He is the person who will remind us that it is a sport and a pastime, a joy that connects us across generations, social class, race, and religious beliefs. It is a gathering of old friends and new.
When I went inside my house, heavy with thoughts of the interconnectivity of everything, my eyes fell on my wife and all the sludge in my brain that was irrelevant disappeared. She looked up and smiled. I asked if she wanted to throw some football and she smiled even brighter. Yesterday was a good day. I think this is going to be a good season.