Any serious sports fan not employed in the sports world ultimately leads a double life.
The fan spends part of their time living and dying with their team. Whether it is during the games themselves or exploring the myriad of opportunities in today’s world a fan can scratch their itch when the team isn’t on the field.
The rest of their lives are spent going about the everyday business of life – work, family, errands, etc.
I probably know this dichotomy as well as almost anyone. Not only do I stress through my team’s performances but then spend even more time in front of my laptop writing the many random posts that appear here.
By day however, I put away my PFB.com cape and tights (little known fact: I can really only write while wearing tights – which made the running commentary I did while watching football with Turner a couple years ago just a little awkward) and actually act responsibly. I have what some could call a career; would be considered a ‘professional’. In short, I have to be an adult.
Do my co-workers know I like sports? Of course. Do they know I am borderline obsessive about any and all sports; that my brain can’t remember the name of the client Vice President I just met because I need to remember the score by which FSU beat Louisiana Tech in 1999? (41-7)
Do they know that with the frequency that I adopt new sports during foreign travel or come up with ways to bet on everyday life I have occasionally worried this goes beyond obsession to addiction? Of course not. (Over/Under on number of foreign teams or sports I have adopted: 2.5)
Why? Because I have a made a conscious effort to build that Chinese wall in my mind. As single men say about single women – I attempt to ‘hide the crazy’ for as long as possible.
While I often worry what all of this sports-mania says about me, it also brings me comfort when I realize I am not alone on this journey. There are others out there like me.
Tom McAllister is one such guy. However his mental Chinese wall was ransacked long ago by the Huns that make up the Philadelphia Eagle fan base.
I was offered the opportunity to read Tom’s new memoir: Bury Me in My Jersey: A Memoir of My Father, Football and Philly. I accepted the offer, if for no other reason then I spend a lot of time on planes and am always in search of reading material – especially material that helps keep football fresh on the brain in the vast wasteland known as ‘baseball season’. But I also accepted because I like re-assuring myself that there are other obsessives out there. I am not alone.
Tom has been a full-on obsessive Eagles fan for nearly his entire life, the omnipresent failure of the local football team being his constant as he grew. While I constantly balance a sports mania from creeping in taking over my life, Tom is slightly less successful. He wears Eagles jerseys to neighborhood parties and barely notices weddings he is in when it coincides with a football game. When he moves to Iowa to attend the most prestigious writing workshop in the U.S. (like the girl from Hiding Out!), he can’t relate to any of the literary types in his classes (understandable and commendable) and instead goes into Eagle fan overdrive, essentially becoming more a characterization than an actual person: living in Eagles gear and talking nothing but football.
In short, Tom becomes to Eagles fans what Jimmy Buffett became to Caribbean ex-pats and Hunter S. Thompson became to drug taking, adventurous journalists.
With the sub-title of the book, I somewhat expected it to be a ‘Tuesdays with Morrie’-esque tear-jerking exploration of the final days of his father’s life (who died of cancer in 2004…actually I think it was 2004. My only real ‘literary critique’ of the book is that there is a fair amount of time jumping, so the timeline starts to get jumbled and you feel like Sam Beckett from Quantum Leap, never quite sure where you have landed this chapter) however being a sarcastic, cynical, card-carrying Gen-Xer, I was greatly relieved it didn’t turn into that. Obviously, his father’s death had a profound effect on him but how that changed him and how (or if) he was able to reconcile himself to that change remains unclear.
Rather it is really the story of a devoted football fan trying to reconcile his fandom with the rest of his life. Growing up, Tom seemed to seek out opportunities to stand out from the crowd: acting uppity around his blue-collar neighbors because he attended a private high school and then playing up his modest ‘street’ roots at the school itself. The Eagles are his one constant and he clings to them like a life raft when confronted with anything uncomfortable or painful.
Probably the most interesting part of the book is his look at Eagles fans themselves. Whether it is the over-the-top postings on his favorite Eagles messages board or the behavior of fans at games (beating up an older Eagles fan for correcting a chant that incorrectly blamed the Jews for killing Jesus) or in the near-riot that preceded the selling of playoff tickets one year, Tom never attempts to hide or make excuses for the notorious Eagles fans (best known for trying to hit Santa Claus with a snowball). Yet also freely admits (brags?) about some of his own actions – including picking fights with strangers as a visiting fan attending a Chiefs/Eagles game in Kansas City for no other reason than ‘that’s just what you do’ and going on destructive rampages after debating whose fan base was more tortured: Eagles fans or Bills fans.
I tend to assume one part of him recognizes the lunacy of the actions committed by fellow Eagles fans he witnesses: like a journalist reporting on what he sees and hears without making judgments. Yet, when he slowly starts to adopt some of their worse traits you almost wonder if that wasn’t impartial reporting on his part but rather a buddy telling you a funny story.
No matter what else you think of this book, if you don’t like Eagles or Eagles fans before reading it, you certainly aren’t going to like them after reading it. I imagine a Cowboys fan would read this book and have the same reaction I would when reading: A Gator’s Heart: the Tim Tebow Story as told by Urban Meyer.
If you, like me, sometimes struggle with maintaining a normal life while also feeding your sports addictions, Bury Me In My Jersey is an interesting view into the mind of someone who is also struggling with this internal conflict. Probably less successfully than you are.
By the very end, there is a hint that the hard-drinking, angry, sports-mad Tom may have finally buried that jersey. A little perspective seems to come with marriage and (possibly) the end of grieving for his father. Maybe it was time and maturity or maybe it was the cathartic experience of getting it all on paper, I don’t know.
Though, to be fair, a guy writing a review on his own sports-opinion website – a site built solely to feed his ego and let him pontificate as necessary – probably isn’t the best person to objectively review a guy writing about his life as an obsessive football fan.
Glass houses and all.
