The guy was obviously not in shape. He probably shouldn’t have been doing push-ups on concrete steps until his face was the color of the University of Louisville’s Cardinal Bird mascot and the veins in his neck stood out. He especially shouldn’t have had a few beers before agreeing to the stunt. But he’d made the deal, and if he broke it, the football gods would annihilate him. So now, every time the Cardinals scored a touchdown, down he went onto the steps as his comrades counted his push-ups -- one for every point UofL had scored. The Cardinals trounced their opponent, whose name is lost to my mind, and so the guy (his name might have been Mike, but I’m not sure) had to be helped up by the end of the third quarter. By game’s end, another equally-drunken friend was helping him complete the exercises, and the smells of pretzels, nacho cheese, and (of course) beer permeated the air.
I watched them patiently for a while, squirming in the bumpy, blue plastic seat and rubbing the smooth surface of its affixed metal plate with the seat number -- 22 -- painted on it. Then, I turned to my mother and said, "Mom, football fans are nuts."
"They’re not nuts, honey; they’re just loyal," she replied sagely.
Welcome to the Crunch Zone of Cardinal Stadium, former home of the UofL Cardinals, current home of oodles of my childhood memories. I spent almost every Saturday in fall at Cardinal Stadium even before I was born. That’s right; I attended college football games in utero. At first, I really didn’t care what was going on. I was there just because Mommy and Daddy took me and because I enjoyed toddling up and down the concrete steps, a novelty for someone who grew up in a one-story house. The pro-Cardinal football culture in which I was raised, however, is powerfully addictive, and soon I began to care about the actual game. What’s more, I think that to this day, I have only missed about three UofL home games in my entire life.
Two of those missed games occurred when I was hospitalized with appendicitis at age seven. I had just gotten home from the hospital the day before the game, and I was the only one convinced that I would make a miraculous recovery at the game. The doctor said I couldn’t take stairs for a while because my stitches needed to heal, so our front-row seats (accessible only by stairs, as my luck dictated) became a curse briefly, and I missed game number two.
Not only was I miserable because I was sick, but I was also depressed because at every game, I always managed to parlay my proximity to the action into a hug from the fuzzy-costumed Cardinal Bird. I had a streak of hugs at consecutive games that was as long as my consecutive-games-attended streak. Having both streaks snapped simultaneously made me very difficult to live with. My mother, in an attempt to cheer me, attracted the Cardinal Bird’s attention at one of the games I missed and got him to write me a get-well note that asked me to get better soon so I could "help [him] cheer." That note meant so much to me that it spent eight years tacked up on my bulletin board and even now resides with my treasures.
Perhaps you already think I rank with the drunken push-up guy as an example of loyalty to a college I’ve never attended. Perhaps you need more convincing. This is the story I use as my oath of fealty to the Cardinals. I sat through a UofL loss to ... um ... uh ... some team from Michigan. (I’ve apparently blocked some parts of this from my memory.) The whole thing. During the 1- 10 season. In the rain. Without rain gear. With only a University of Kentucky fan for company. (Don’t ask.)
The scariest thing about that loss was that I was not alone. Other people were just as loyal (some might say masochistic) as I and just as determined to prove it. Some of us were even cheering like we really thought the Cards could make up a ten-point deficit in three seconds.
Like many of these loyals, my family followed the Cardinals when they packed their bags and moved to the new Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium. Don’t get me wrong -- it’s a nice place, and there really isn’t a bad seat in the house -- but it just isn’t the same. It could just be the newness of the place -- it doesn’t yet feel like a tradition to have Cardinal football there -- but the Crunch Zone is also different. It’s still where it should be, in the endzone, but the sort of people in the seats is different. Most of the Crunch Zone seats that are close to the field were snapped up by wealthier fans, who tend to be more reserved, relegating all the working-class stiffs (read: all the fun drunks and I) who couldn’t outbid them to the so-called "nosebleed seats."
Even if we are higher up, we are still loonies. We are also still masters of all remarks beginning, "Hey, ref!" Real examples follow:
"Hey, ref! There’s a bus leaving for Omaha at nine-thirty. Be under it!"
"Hey, ref! How much money have you got on [visiting team]?"
"Hey, ref! Wanna borrow my glasses? You need ‘em more than I do!"
And, of course, there’s the classic sight gag wherein someone dressed in a black- and- white striped shirt wanders the stadium in dark glasses, ostensibly using a cane to find his way around. My mom plans to don the costume for the October 30 game against UAB. I’m only going to wear a red feather boa.
We’re not nuts, honey; we’re just loyal.
Back to Stuff I Wrote.
© Cynthia 2002.
