I attended exactly one football game during high school. It was the Homecoming game my Freshman year, back when I gamely “participated” in a doomed effort to sneak into a clique of sub-popular academic kids who never willingly talked to me at school events.
Maybe our team won, maybe we didn’t. My only memory is the Homecoming Court. The boys wore suits and ties, and the girls all wore dowdy skirt suits. They coupled off and perched on the back of convertibles that circled the football field, carrying flowers and waving. After a lifetime of seeing Homecoming Queens and Kings in popular culture, the lackluster crowning ceremony disappointed me.
The football coach was a Russian immigrant named Coach Marinkov, loved for being the easiest and most fun history teacher in school. But I’m glad that I never had him, because he ridiculed weirdos and was a blatant misogynist. The football team’s consistently dismal performance gave me deep satisfaction, because Coach Marinkov as well as every single football player was a jerk. Seriously.
The other day, I was web surfing and happened to come across a recent article about my alma mater’s football program: “Methacton savoring first win since 2004”, about how they snapped a 25-game losing streak under the tutelage of a new coach named McNally, who taunted them over the off-season by wearing a t-shirt with the No. 25 on it.
I emailed the story to my best friend from high school, snidely noting how “the Warriors ripped McNally’s oft-worn and sometimes smelly T-shirt to shreds.” Apparently, the sentence struck her and me the exact same way, as she replied: “I can see it all. And it makes me feel anxious.”
