And so it begins…

It’s Labor Day weekend, which can only mean one thing: Mike is consumed with setting up Fantasy Football leagues. This year looks a little light—he’s only going to run two teams.

I have a rudimentary understanding of baseball, though I’m usually only interested in it as far as my hometown team, the Houston Astros, keeps me interested (this year that was the approximately three days that we had a winning record).

And as a loyalist to the tortured sports Mecca, I understand enough basketball that I knew where to cheer when the Houston Rockets won back-to-back championships when I was in junior high —the only championships the city has ever seen.

But watching football has always been an experience that I can only imagine is similar to sitting through a Catholic mass in Latin: they’re using a language I don’t understand to pull people through rites and rituals that everyone knows and no one can explain to me.

If you think that’s an extreme comparison, you’ve never heard a Patriots fan talk about the helmet catch in the 2007 Super Bowl.*

I realize now, that with football season looming on the horizon, I made this resolution to learn sports and love sports culture at an inopportune moment, but now I’m publicly committed and I have way too much pride to back down. I’m a PhD candidate in freaking Chinese. I won a Fulbright scholarship. I will not be beaten.

Our first conversation begins, appropriately, at a bar. We’re having some cheap happy hour beers, when Mike points to one of the flat screens and says, “Lesson one: you can’t tackle a guy like this.” As far as I can tell, a big guy has grabbed the back of a green jersey worn by another big guy (I do know that the green jersey belongs to a player from The Jets, who I have gathered in seven years of knowing Mike are an annoying pestilence in Patriot nation).

“You can’t grab someone’s shirt?” I asked. That seems like an odd rule for a sport that features guys just under Sumo weight trying to clobber each other.

He’s very patient. “No, you can’t get under someone’s shoulder pads and use them to drag someone backwards to the ground.”

Oh.  That seems fair.

Unfortunately, that rule adds nothing to my understanding about how the game is actually played. Tune in next time for “How to Explain the Rudimentary Workings of Football to a Fulbright Scholar.”

*I actually watched the 2007 Super Bowl with Mike, in Shanghai of all places, but still had no idea what Sports Guy (Bill Simmons) was talking about when he tweeted: “Giant fans, admit it: the Helmet Catch is now the flukiest big play in sports history. Just admit it. Do this for my sanity.” Mike tells me that he was talking about this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-aKfTK2LiM, where David Tyree made a miraculous (if you're a Giants fan, at least) fair catch on top of his helmet. I still don’t know what a fair catch is, but I’m told that it has something to do with the ball not touching the ground.**

**On reading this post, Mike has informed me that a fair catch has nothing to do with the ball not touching the ground. Obviously, this will need to wait for a later lesson.