My grandson Cooper called me Thursday night to ask if I wanted to come over and watch the Wild Card games at his apartment in Mount Vernon. He said he had what he called a “setup.” I have been to Cooper’s apartment exactly once, when he moved in, and I remember there being a bean bag and a framed poster of a cartoon octopus, so I was curious what the setup entailed. Turns out it is a television the size of a garage door and four friends named things like Bryson and Jaxon who all work in what they described to me, with straight faces, as “content.”
I brought a six-pack of Schaefer and a bag of kettle corn. Bryson had made something called a “charcuterie board,” which as near as I can tell is a cutting board with meat on it, but with a French name so you can charge for it. The first game hadn’t even kicked off yet and I was already tired.
Here is what I want to say about Wild Card weekend, and I’ll say it the way my old coach at Ridgewood, Vince DiMaggio — no relation — used to say it to us, which is plainly and without what he called “lotion.” Playoff football used to mean something because the weather was trying to kill you. You played in a parking lot in Cleveland in December and when the game was over, somebody’s ear was black. You came out of it having learned something about yourself, or at minimum about frostbite.
Now they’ve got heated benches. I am not making this up. The camera did a cutaway during the Texans game and there was a lineman sitting on what appeared to be a warming drawer at an Applebee’s. Cooper told me they’ve had those for years. I asked him if anybody on his fantasy team had ever had to chip ice off his own face mask with a quarter, and he said he didn’t think that was a stat they tracked.
Dr. Alan Messinger, a sports kinesiologist I heard on a podcast my neighbor Denise forwarded me — Denise forwards me about eleven podcasts a week and I listen to none of them on principle, but this one came up while I was waiting at the DMV — said that “thermal regulation is one of the most significant performance variables in cold-weather postseason play.” Fine. Sure. I am not arguing that cold hands throw worse spirals. I am arguing that being cold is part of January football the way being wet is part of swimming. You take the heated bench out of January and what you’ve got is October with a calendar problem.
The kids at Cooper’s apartment were, to their credit, into the game. They yelled at the TV, they yelled at their phones, they yelled at something called a parlay, which as I understand it is a way to lose a small amount of money over the course of an entire afternoon instead of all at once like a man. Bryson had six different apps open and every time something happened on the field, one of them dinged. I asked him if he was watching the game or running air traffic control at LaGuardia, and he laughed in the way young people laugh when they have decided you are charming instead of correct.
Somewhere in the second quarter, Jaxon — or possibly the other Jaxon, there were two — informed the room that the quarterback had “a really cute podcast with his wife.” I put my beer down. I want you to understand I put my beer down gently, because I am sixty-eight years old and I have learned that reacting too fast to something a young man says is how you end up with a pulled oblique. But I will tell you, readers, that in my day a quarterback’s job during playoff week was to study film until his eyes bled and say nothing to nobody. Ken Stabler didn’t have a cute podcast. Ken Stabler had a DUI and a playbook and that was the correct ratio.
My buddy Ray Kowalczyk, who coached defensive backs at three different programs and who I have been arguing with since the Carter administration, called me at halftime. Ray watches from his recliner in Tarrytown and calls exactly twice a game: halftime and the two-minute warning. He said, “Duke, did you see that fair catch?” I said I did. He said, “In 1977 that kid gets cut.” I said, “Ray, in 1977 that kid gets cut, released, and possibly deported.” We enjoyed that for about a minute and then he hung up, because Ray does not believe in goodbyes, which is one of his better qualities.
Now, I will say something generous, because my editor Margaret has told me in writing that I need to. The football itself is, in many ways, better than it was. These quarterbacks can throw. Receivers run routes my 1984 Ridgewood squad could not have diagrammed with a week and a whiteboard. The speed of the game is genuinely something to see, and if you squint past the TikTok graphics and the sideline reporter asking a linebacker about his “mindset journey,” there is real, high-level football happening. I am not blind. I am just tired.
What I miss, I think, isn’t the cold or the mud or even the quarterbacks who looked like insurance adjusters. What I miss is the sense that these games were happening at the edge of something. You watched the Wild Card because you suspected somebody might get hurt in a way that would make the nightly news, and somebody else might do something heroic in a way that would be talked about at the body shop on Monday. Now it’s a show. A very good show, with very good lighting, and a halftime ad for a cryptocurrency that will not exist by Easter.
The Texans won, if you’re wondering. Cooper’s parlay hit on four out of six legs, which he explained to me meant he lost. Bryson wrapped up the leftover charcuterie and sent me home with it in a Tupperware, which was a kind gesture and which I appreciated even though I threw most of it out because some of the cheeses smelled like a locker. On the drive back up the Saw Mill I thought about Coach DiMaggio, who died in 2003, and who once made us run sprints in a sleet storm until a kid named Petey Corrigan threw up on his own cleats. Petey went on to become a periodontist. Character, is what I’m saying. You don’t get that off a heated bench.
I’ll be back on the couch Sunday for the next round. Denise is bringing chili. She says it’s from a podcast.