The Tao of Steve (1980s)

Sometimes, your team actually wins. Best to enjoy it.

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I.

Back in the paleozoic era of college football, before championship games and playoffs and NIL money and transfer portals—at a moment when this ridiculous sport still positioned itself as a bastion of false purity—I would, as a child, wedge my way through the tight spaces of an 80,000-seat college football stadium named after a Civil War veteran who shared a surname with a large rodent. There, in row 5, at the end of the aisle, I would squeeze myself into a perplexingly narrow slab of metal, in front of a guy who went by the name of Steve.

For several years, whenever my father—also named Steve—took me to a game, my shoulders were literally inches from this Steve’s knees, and yet I cannot tell you what this other Steve looked like, because I never had any reason to look back. The action was all ahead of us. But Other Steve was very real to me. Here is the way I remember it: People would ask Other Steve an interminable number of questions about the game, possibly because he was listening the broadcast on either a portable radio or a primitive Sony Walkman. People would joke with Other Steve about Joe Paterno’s inexorably conservative play-calling; people would call out and ask, Who made that tackle, Steve? Any update on the right tackle, Steve? We gonna run the ball up the middle here, Steve?

Other Steve was the centerpiece of our entire section. Other Steve helped me understand how fans talked about their teams, and how they vented their frustrations, and how sports could serve as a conduit to a deeper connection between strangers. Steve was, to me, kind of an unseen deity, driving me deeper into an experience that, as a small child, already felt inherently mystical.

Four decades after I first wedged into those bleacher seats, I have no idea what happened to Other Steve. But I’ve been thinking about him lately, because I’ve been thinking about how college football has changed, and how it’s stayed the same—and how, despite all the ways the world keeps changing, the feeling I had sitting in those bleacher seats, surrounded by a community of like-minded weirdos, edified by the disembodied voice of what might as well have been a higher being, still lingers in my consciousness.

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II.

Part of the essential experience of fandom is discontentment, but it feels as if the pitch of that discontentment among college football fans has heightened in the midst of the first-ever 12-team playoff. People angry about the seeding, about the selections, about the lack of competitive matchups; people are furious at largely anodyne public figures like Kirk Herbstreit, who appears to be rather angry himself at becoming a target for that anger. People are angry about everything these days, and as college football is a mirror of America’s complex tapestry, they are angry at college football, too.

Part of this is because there are much easier (and far more disembodied) ways to complain about both the state of college football now than there were back then. But at the heart of it, I think, is a natural human instinct: The fear of change. We’re at the dawn of an entirely new era in college football, and this is disconcerting for everyone, because they are concerned that it is changing so fast that it might somehow disrupt the essential nature of their nostalgic connections to college football itself. (This fear can explain a lot more than football, but we’ll save that for another day.)

And sure, every sport is fed by a sense of nostalgia, but college football’s nostalgia is literally built into its structure: These are young people living out some of the best years of their lives before our very eyes. (For those of us who grew up in a college town, that nostalgia is compounded, because we essentially grew up in a place that is inherently romanticized.) The concern is that now that the sport has essentially become professionalized, and that this feeling will go away.

But the thing is, I don’t think that feeling has gone away at all. The games themselves are still freighted with the same emotions. On New Year’s Day, a bowling ball of an Arizona State running back, Cam Skattebo, singlehandedly rebounded by a bout of “profuse vomiting” (to quote the television broadcast) and led his team to a comeback that forced overtime against Texas in a playoff quarterfinal game at the Peach Bowl in Atlanta. Even after Arizona State lost, it felt like one of those Tebow-esque performances that will endure through the ages:

There is still joy here, no matter how much we might forget to even look for it anymore.

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III.

In the aftermath of Penn State’s Fiesta Bowl win over Boise State, Athletic reporter Audrey Snyder wandered into a locker room rife with cigar smoke, in which a group of jubilant Penn State players were relishing the moment. “We tell all these kids,” said Penn State running backs coach Ja’Juan Seider, “don’t take it for granted.”

The childlike exuberance Snyder captured in her story reminded me of the Sports Illustrated college football articles (often written by Rick Reilly) that I used to consume as a kid. Snyder’s story captured the pure joy of accomplishment in a sport that has increasingly become a zero-sum game. It was a reminder these athletes were still so young, and it was a reminder that it had been a long time—decades, really—since anything like this kind of success had broken for my hometown team, and it was a reminder that there is no way of knowing when it might happen again. “Generations of fans in their 30s and younger have wondered what something like this postseason run might look and feel like,” Snyder wrote. “Fans of all ages have followed along.”

In the aftermath of that game, the complaints rained down on social media: Penn State, by virtue of wins over the SMU and Boise State, had an unfairly easy path to the semifinal. James Franklin, Penn State’s oft-ridiculed coach, still hadn’t proven that he could win a “big game,” however you define that term. There was a determined push from outside to prove that none of this is real, but in that locker room, it was very much real, and in my mind, it was real, too. I have seen how something as simple as a sport—for all its crass commercialism and ugly capitalistic bent and dispiriting scandals—can unify a community, and define a town, and shape the life of a young person, sometimes for worse, but also for better. That part hasn’t changed at all. Sometimes, I can still hear the people talking to that Other Steve, out there in the ether, giving voice to this moment.

Whatever your team, whatever your sport, imperfection is the default state. Games are lost; wins slip away; teams fall short of championships far more often than they win them. Maybe that will happen for my team in the next couple of weeks, and maybe they’ll fall short of winning a championship, but I don’t care right now. Things are ugly enough out there, and they’re only getting uglier. I’m not going to allow any of that to dull this moment of distilled joy.

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