The Super Bowl, and the NFL in general, are near and dear to my heart, so I really like this week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun topic from Randy Seaver.
(1) The Super Bowl is on Sunday, 4 February 2018 in the USA. The New England Patriots are playing the Philadelphia Eagles for the National Football League championship up in Minnesota (an indoor stadium!). The winners get to go to Disney World.
(2) Predict the score for this game. You have to predict the winning team and the closest to the actual score (point differential summed for both teams) to be the winner. The winner of this contest gets announced next week in a Genea-Musings blog post.
(3) Tell a story about your experiences playing football or watching professional football games. Did you go to football games? Who in your family was the real fan of the game? What were the pregame routines? How do you, or your family, react to good plays or bad plays, or wins or losses?
(4) Provide your entry in a comment to this blog post, in a blog post of your own, or in a Facebook or Google+ post. Be sure to tell me about your post in a comment to this post.
1. Well, I do love football, but I don't like who ended up in this year's Super Bowl. I was rooting for the other two teams in each of the conference championships. I've been a Vikings fan for more than 40 years, and they would have been playing at home. But such is life. And Disneyland is so much better than Walt Disney World anyway.
3. I've been to several professional football games. For Saturday Night Genealogy Fun last week I wrote about the two Super Bowl halftime shows I have performed in. During the five years I was in the USC Trojan Marching Band, we also performed at halftime during several regular-season games for the Los Angeles Raiders and Anaheim Rams. We were never permitted to actually sit in the stands and watch these games. At least with the Raiders and Rams we walked onto the sidelines a few minutes before the half ended, so we were able to watch a little bit of the game (and I remember always feeling very, very small while standing next to the pro players!). For the Super Bowls we didn't see squat except on television monitors before we went out to the field.
I have splurged a few times on attending NFL games. While I was still living in Los Angeles, one year I went to a Raiders postseason game, and it wasn't even that expensive. In Oakland, some friends and I went to a Raiders game when they played the Pittsburgh Steelers, because one of the friends is a huge Steeler fan. I think I have been to one or two additional Raiders games over the years. And once I went to a San Francisco 49ers game with some sort of group deal, but I was rooting against them.
Both of my parents watched football, so I grew up with it. My second favorite team, the Raiders, was one of my mother's favorite teams. My dad's favorite teams were the Rams, whom I don't like at all, and the Eagles, which makes another good reason to root for them this year. I don't remember any pregame routines, but I do remember my mother would react loudly to plays she liked or didn't. She's also the person who taught me about "football tushies", yet another reason to enjoy the game.