The starting quarterback wore a bucket hat. I want to be clear about this. The man whose jersey costs $129 in the team store, whose face is on a billboard off I-94, who I drove forty-three minutes to see throw a football — sat on a folding chair in a bucket hat with a cup of fruit, watched the game like he was at a wedding he didn’t want to attend, and at one point appeared to be doing the crossword.
I paid ninety-four dollars for the ticket. Beer was fourteen. Parking was thirty. The quarterback threw zero passes. By the second quarter I was rooting for a long snapper from a school I cannot pronounce, because at least he was on the field, doing his job, justifying the cost of my soft pretzel.
Preseason Week Three used to be the dress rehearsal. Starters played a half. You found out things. You found out the right guard couldn’t pull, you found out the rookie corner bit on double moves, you found out who was going to start Week One and who was going to be standing on the sideline in a bucket hat doing the crossword. Now they all stand on the sideline in bucket hats doing the crossword and you find out nothing, except that a guy named Tanner from Eastern Illinois has a live arm and will be selling life insurance by Tuesday.
Coach DiMaggio used to say preseason was where you found out who wanted it. He said it the way other men say grace. The whole point, in his telling, was to put a man in a real situation with real consequences and see whether he flinched or didn’t flinch. He would have looked at a starting quarterback in a bucket hat eating cantaloupe and walked into Lake Michigan.
The reason they don’t play anymore, I’m told, is that the teams already had a