6 Things My 7-Year-Old Son Needs to Know Before His Team Either Wins or Loses the Super Bowl
1. Always Take Flight
How many flights have you taken in what has recently become your seventh year on earth? In one of your mom and my more questionable moves, you took ten airplane rides in your first year alone. By the time you were three, you and I would hear some version of this refrain so often as we walked through TSA: “Well, there’s no doubt he’s your son!”
You look like me. You’re in fact better-looking than me because you also look like your mother. You have my cheeks and a lot of my face; you’re a feral, full-of-life extrovert. Like your dad, you can talk to anyone. There is no doubt I had a substantial part in making you.
And when we cruise through the TSA next—each of us wearing all Philadelphia Eagles gear as we make our way from Columbus, Ohio, to Philadelphia—someone surely will say: “That must be your dad!” As we leave the Buckeye red of our adopted home for Eagles green in the place I grew up, you will be among your people. You will be with your tribe for the day neither of us, and millions of others, can believe has come: the Philadelphia Eagles are in the Super Bowl.
2. The Story You Tell Yourself Will Change
I thought I would have a daughter.
As you know, I am the middle boy between two sisters, your Aunt Susie and Aunt Saralee. I’ve always had as many and often more close female friends than male; I’ve always felt comfortable in the company of women. When your mother got pregnant I assumed it would be a girl, once again surrounded in zone I know well. My preference was not to learn your gender until your birth, but your more practically minded mom stated: “That just doesn’t make any sense.” When the doctor told us you were a boy I was surprised. Your mom says it was more like shock, and wondered if I was okay. Did I secretly want a girl? Maybe. Perhaps my very real and present fear of being a parent created a story in my head that went something like this: I am less likely to fail as the father of a girl.
What a silly story, right?
Still, nowhere in that story did I think a girl wouldn’t do all the things that a boy would do: throw snowballs, bake cookies, do yoga, devour books, make art, love sports. Maybe I thought the pressure to teach my child some of these things would be off if we had a girl. And here’s what you’re thinking now: Stupid story, Dad!
You are totally right.
Fandom came naturally to you, across most sports, and certainly football, long before you saw your first Eagles game in person. I don’t remember how it all started; surely you got some team tees or a onesie when you were a tiny baby. I know that when mom was out of town I eased up on our “no screens before you turned two” rule if the Eagles were on TV. Being just one and a half and finding your voice, you of course blabbed out that you got to watch television while mom was away. (Sometimes, my boy, in life we must ask for forgiveness rather than permission.)
I knew there was no turning back that day at the sports bar. It was Birds-Lions, and those charitable people from Detroit let you have their seats so you had a better view of the TV. When the Lions came from behind to grab the game from the Birds in the last few minutes you burst into a stream of tears. You were five. The game was meaningless. The Detroit crew gave me a look that said: Whoa! “Eagles fan,” I said. “He’s in deep.”
Your first game at Lincoln Financial Field was also Carson Wentz’s. It was September 11, 2016, Birds-Browns, battle of two teams of which little was expected. A few weeks earlier, Wentz was listed as the third-string QB, likely to spend the season on the bench. A few twists and turns in preseason meant a guy no one had heard of a year before, but who in the words of Eagles coach Doug Pederson was drafted for “his passion and his work ethic and his knowledge of the game,” was in the spotlight. He threw for 278 yards and two touchdowns. I told you that day that for the next decade — formidable years in a seven-year-old’s fan life — this guy could be your guy. I hoped so: there was a lot to love about him.
Admittedly, Mom and I were a little worried about your debut at The Linc: the game might be too long; the crowds too big; the f-bombs dropped too liberally among the salty fan base. And yet: You didn’t have your head buried in a phone (you don’t have a phone). You weren’t obsessed with the other games around the league to track your fantasy football team (you don’t play fantasy). You were right there in every moment, eyes glued to the field, high-fiving everyone in our section after every score. You could not have been a better companion that day.
3. Birthright Is (Not Quite) Everything
At your recent seventh birthday party, another parent looked at your cake turned to me with a smirk and said, “Did dad choose that theme?” I laughed with the slight condescension his comment required and replied, “If there was anything but a green-and-white Eagles themed cake, the birthday boy would lose his mind.”
And I knew you would love that your cake had an actual eagle on it, not a cheesy helmet or cartoonish football character. The woman at the bakery brought her game to this cake, confiding in me that it was her favorite one to make in months.
Dad didn’t choose your theme, the theme chose you. As it chose me. As it chose my dad. As it chose his dad, Morris “Smitty” Smith, a Russia immigrant who came to America at the age of four in 1914, landing in Philadelphia, and becoming a first-generation American in the land of the Eagles. And while your grandfather and his father never strayed more than a few miles from the harbor where Smitty first landed, I left as soon as I could. I went to San Francisco, Boston, New York, and now Ohio. Even through the Rich Kotite years, I did not become a Niners, Pats, Giants, or Browns fan. It’s just not what Philly fans do.
So it’s really simple: I love the Eagles because I love my dad, a dad with whom I don’t have a lot in common. We love running our own small businesses. We love our families. We love sports. That’s about it. Sports is our wholly unoriginal, unexceptional bond, and one that works. My father (your “Pop-Pop”), Lou Smith, Esq., never took me fishing or camping. We’ve never had a beer together. You and I have probably spent more time alone together in seven years that my dad and I did in my first eighteen. I don’t resent him for that, nor feel like a superior father. Times were different, you and I are different.
After I left for college, and no matter where I have lived after, he’s sent me the Sunday Sports section from the Philadelphia Inquirer (and selected columns from the Philly Daily News). It was with mixed emotions that a few years ago I finally told him that I could read it all on the internet, appealing to my dad’s deep pragmatism over whatever mild emotional tug it gave him to put these papers in the mail. (Your Pop-Pop, as you know, does not use the internet. And I can think of little he wants to do less than fish.) No matter where life has taken me in the three decades since I’ve left home rarely has a year gone by where I didn’t sit next to him in a stadium watching the Eagles. And, yes, he wears headphones the whole time so he can hear the local broadcaster calling the game, barely communicating with anyone else. Even when I traveled 3,000 miles to sit next to him at a game, those headphones were on. Your Pop-Pop is who he is; with enough yoga and meditation I have learned to accept that. (Your Pop-Pop obviously does not do yoga or meditate.)
4. Location, Location, Location
I also love the Eagles because they connect me to the place where I am from, and the people who live there. I love sports because it connects me to something larger, and the people in that larger world. Sports offers us a language that allows us to talk to almost anyone. And that, kid, will always be better than talking about the weather.
About these people. Our people. They are Philly people — including those who were raised in South Jersey like your Pop-Pop and me — will always be underdogs. We will always get a bad rap. Will always be hated on. They’ll mock our accent. They’ll make easy jokes about the NJ Turnpike. They’ll say we booed Santa. And sometimes they’ll be right. But you will learn that there are many sides to every story (e.g., Santa was actually drunk that day at the stadium). You will also learn that where you are from is not all that you are, and never should be; and yet where you are from is part of who you are, and always will be.
5. There Is So Much Gray in the World
Seven years ago, when you were born, we did not know what we now know about the National Football League. We knew American football was a brutal game, one quick to dispose of anyone no longer of use to it. We knew it was run by owners who largely value profit over people. We did not know how bad the concussion problem was, and how little a league making billions did to protect its players. We know that now.
One of the many reasons I fell so hard for your mom is because she too loves football. And I loved that even though she was raised in New England, she was so repelled by the sexism of the team’s then-owner Victor Kiam that she refused to become a Patriots’ fan then and all her days going forward. But she loved football, especially the underdog teams. When we moved to New York in the late ’90s, she produced half-hour specials for the New York Jets, a team with a woeful history, and one that we fell in love with together, sometimes viewing them from behind her video camera at the 50-yard line.
Yet now, here in the present of 2018, football is something different. A sport that I wish I didn’t love so much, and a presence in your life that is not entirely comfortable for us (especially mom). This team, in this year, is a little different. It was a year that was not supposed to end in Minneapolis. This team reminds us there is value, and sometimes great success, if you can roll with the punches, put your head down, and get the work down. My dad never taught me this or any other “life lesson” (your Pop-Pop is one for the grand “teachable moment”), he just did the work and let me watch.
You will also learn that defending your turf is important. The Super Bowl was never part of this season’s story, even if its promising young quarterback didn’t tear his knee up, an event you called “a heartbreaking injury” in your school journal entry, the page of text that began: “Drops back, Wentz in the gun, scrambles…”
This team is a “team” in its most trite-but-true sense of the word. It is also a team with an owner who has a doctorate in social policy, wrote his thesis on the depiction of women in film, and has photos of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, Jr. hanging in his office. He is a very rich man, one who was born that way, and also one who has been said to treat the janitor the same way he treats the star QB. It is a team led not only defensively by its star safety Malcolm Jenkins, but also morally. He was a leader in the protests against police brutality, and pushed the league to spend some $100 million on social causes. We like what Malcolm Jenkins and this whole team is about.
Football is a brutal sport, one you will never play under our watch. (And no, despite your penchant for debate and picking up on your father’s power of persuasion, you can’t even be a kicker.) When you are your Pop-Pop’s age football may not exist, or at least in a way that looks anything like it does today. And it probably shouldn’t. For now, because life is not black or white, and in this family is always green, we still love this game.
6. Life Is Not Promised
Your Pop-Pop and I went to the last Super Bowl, thirteen long years ago that have gone so so fast. The idea that thirteen years could pass before the Eagles returned to the Super Bowl is simply not within your grasp. The notion that in thirteen years you will be 20 years old is not within mine. When the Eagles lost to the Patriots in 2005—so closely, so tragically, so avoidably — I wailed. My father — gray beard dyed green — did not. At the time I thought that his decades longer of Philly sports heartbreak gave him the perspective of the long game, and perhaps it did. But now I know that he knew his job was to console me. He had to be the dad. According to Vegas and most of the free world, there is a good chance the Eagles will lose on Sunday. You and I both know it. If that happens you will cry a lot, I will cry a little, and I will hold you and tell you that I love you and that it’s only a game. And I will mostly mean the part about a game.
As the timeshare salesman said (again and again and again) last winter when I convinced Mom that 90 minutes in that sterile room in Orlando was worth it for the deal we got on the hotel, “Life is not promised.” And Philadelphia Eagles Super Bowl appearances surely aren’t either. But we will board a plane from Ohio on Saturday night, the TSA lady will remind me that I made you, and we will land in Philly, where your grandparents and cousins will meet us at an hour way too late for you or any seven-year old, and we will find our way to a classic Italian restaurant in South Philly. We will be with our family, in our city, among our people, sharing a story. We will share this story with people draped in green clothes and eating food drenched in red sauce. I will order a Manhattan, you will order a milk, and later you will ask for and receive the cherry.
And all the glasses in the room will overflow with the best feeling that this life in this world can bring: possibility.
