For as long as I can remember, I have been watching football. Honestly, I was probably watching it in the womb. When I got old enough to understand what I was watching, my love for the sport didn’t fade. Football was always something that I watched with my dad – a bonding activity that we could argue about, but could also share a lot of memories with. As time has gone by, football has continued to play a major role in my life and will always be something that holds many memories for me.
If you’ve ever seen me watch football, my apologies. If you haven’t, that’s good! I’m loud, foul-mouthed and definitely obnoxious. My passion often comes out as anger (I’m a Jets fan – what do you expect?) and I always have a comment to make. Much of this has come from watching my dad interact with the sport since I was a small child. To this day, he still yells at the TV, claps when something good happens and could 100% be an excellent commentator. There is never a quiet moment in my house when football was on. When I was younger, I didn’t understand what I was watching and just wanted to spend time with my dad. I wanted to know why he was yelling and why the people on the screen were running around everywhere. The more I watched though, the more my dad would teach me about the sport. Soon, I was yelling as much as he was and was tuned in every week to see what happened.
I was so used to talking with my dad about football that I expected other people to talk to me the same way about it. I never received the same kind of feedback though. The girls that I talked to usually had no idea what I was talking about and the boys that I talked to didn’t want to hear my opinion. I found myself lost in a culture I had come to know so well. For so long, I had someone to talk to about football. Someone who listened to me and challenged me and laughed with me, but now I was stuck in a state of limbo. Who was I supposed to talk to other than my dad? Why didn’t they know what I was talking about? And more importantly, why didn’t they want to hear what I had to say?
I had grown up only watching professional football, but I’ve come to learn more about college, high school and Canadian football the older I’ve gotten. Even though I’m at college now and I barely have time to sleep, the football facts hidden deep within my brain still shine through. I haven’t dedicated as much time to professional football recently, but I’ve been expanding my football horizons. Still, I know a good amount of information about the sport in general and I tend to yell things because I know what I’m talking about. The opposition I have faced from guys specifically is frustrating and demeaning to the life I have always known. I’ve invested twenty years into the sport and just because I don’t have a penis, some people think I don’t have the right to say anything at all.