Super Bowl Angst
Sunday, February 02, 2014
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| After a game of touch, Austin, Texas 1960- John Arnold, Mac Letscher, Alex Waterhouse-Hayward and Melvin Medina SEH class of 1961. |
The idea of this great anguish of living
between two worlds has diminished somewhat for many immigrant people…Not that
there is not some uneasiness, but it is no longer the single most urgent
anxiety of every immigrant’s life. And honestly, maybe it never was – except perhaps
in literature.
Edwidge Danticat
Last night I read Frank Bruni’s OpEd column in the NY Times
on Denver Bronco quarterback Peyton Manning, Muturity’s Victories. Bruni, is an
ex NY Times food writer and an avowed gay man. He is one of my fave columnists
up there with Maureen Dowd, in my estimation.
Bruni finishes this lovely piece on the
merits of aging athletes with this:
He’ll step onto the field at MetLife
Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., not as just one of the best quarterbacks in
the history of football. He’ll step onto the field, with his thinning hair and awkward
gait, as a poster boy for the march of time.
Of late after my three week trip in
September 2013 to my native Buenos Aires and
feeling alienated in a place I could almost not recognize, a place full of
ghosts from my past and then feeling the same out-of-placeness in Vancouver, I came to the
conclusion I don’t belong anywhere. My mentor Brother Edwin Reggio, C.S.C, died
this year in Austin.
I don’t have a desire to go back to the city of my 50s youth. My mentor Raúl
Guerrero Montemayor died early 2013 after I visited him at his bed in Mexico City in 2012. With
no friends or relatives in Mexico City
the city is just a geographical location in my head.
And yet Bruni’s piece has made me change my
mind about being the only male of the species who will not watch the Super Bowl
today.
I will.
I will.
His warm essay made me think of yours truly
sitting in the stands of the stadium at the University of Texas
in 1961 and watching running-back James Saxton outrun his competition as one of
the most successful “rabbits” in the football of his era. I remember that huge
bass drum (carried on wheels) and the giant Longhorn mascot of the University of Texas Longhorns. I remember languidly looking
to my sides at the beautiful bobby-socked UT girls, much more attractive than
those of St. Mary’s Academy that frequented the sock hops at my school, St. Ed’s
High School, up on the hill of
South Congress Avenue in Austin.
I remember eating steaks (rarely as I had
little money) in a café across the street from the school while listening to
Bill Black’s Combo on the jukebox.
I remember going to 6th Street, careful not to be
rolled by marauding pachucos (or spics) to get my haircut at the Barber College.
I remember having cherry vanilla floats at the Austin Hotel Drug Store before
going next door to see Raintree
County at the Varsity. But
not before buying a little jar of Top Brass green stuff to keep my flat top
neat. I remember, too pushing specially treated saw dust on Brother Hubert’s pristine
varnished floor before a basketball game. I was in charge in policing people
who just might step into the floor with their shoes. I have vague memories of
exciting games that have become blurred with time but I can still see in my
mind Judi Reyes’s legs and more as she jumped up for a Tiger’s cheerleading
chant. Right after we (I was in the school band, I played the alto sax) had finished
with that tune, Indiana.
Those memories do not quite clash but sort
of blend in with being 17 and going to Torta’s Armando on Avenida Insurgentes
Sur, in the same building as the Art Deco Cine Insurgentes and ordering a torta
de pierna with lots of guacamole and with a large chipotle for spice. I
remember going with my cousin Robby to a game of the Mexican League’s Diablos
Rojos play against the Tigres in a stadium that was not far from a cemetery. You
could see the crosses from our seats. On other weekends I might put on a coat
and tie and try to sneak in (they allowed me in most times) to watch jai alai
at the Frontón México at the Plaza de la Revolución. I loved watching my fave
player Chicuri who was deemed a fenómeno. I also frequented the bullfights. I
did not have enough money to buy tickets for sombra (shade) so I sat on the
sunny side to watch. I remember with delight watching the great rejoneador Álvaro Domecq fight bulls on his beautiful
white (and prancing) horse. I had no compunctions on the rights of the bull.
Those memories of Mexico (and baseball with
the Águila de Veracruz in the humid stadium of Veracruz) seem to be far away
from watching Boca Juniors play Club Atlético River Plate at the Estadio
Monumental while tanks rumbled outside on their way to yet another coup d'état.
On a different occasion River played Santos of Brazil. Santos was all dressed in brilliant white. One
of the players, called Pelé, dribbling the ball on his way to the goal area was
faced with three defense men. He kicked the ball up and forward with his heel,
and ran through the defenders in time to catch the falling ball which he then
deftly directed into the goal with his outside heel.
By the early 70s everybody in my block in Arboledas, Estado de México was a Dallas Cowboys fan. I opted for the Oakland Raiders because I loved George Blanda who had replaced the musically-sounding named Daryl Lamonica as quarterback. We would watch the Super Bowls with lots of rum cokes and tacos. My block friends shared my liking for the Oakland A's as we all agreed that we liked Rollie Fingers's moustache.
By the early 70s everybody in my block in Arboledas, Estado de México was a Dallas Cowboys fan. I opted for the Oakland Raiders because I loved George Blanda who had replaced the musically-sounding named Daryl Lamonica as quarterback. We would watch the Super Bowls with lots of rum cokes and tacos. My block friends shared my liking for the Oakland A's as we all agreed that we liked Rollie Fingers's moustache.
In Vancouver
I have watched hockey from the best seat in the house which is in the booth
where the CBC Hockey Night in Canada
directs (multiple screens in front of him) the action (his multiple cameramen
including the stellar Mike Varga). But that is almost equaled in being at my
first hockey game, perhaps in the early 80s with my friend Paul Leisz. It was
then that I smelled that peculiar smell the hockey arena ice seems to have and heard
(not to be heard as well on TV) the noise of the puck being hit or its sliding
on the ice. In the 90s sports writer Richard Dal Monte took me to see his
brother play in our local lacrosse league.
At about that time I photographed a poet, I
did not know at all at the time, throwing up a baseball into the air while
sitting on the home plate of Nat Bailey Stadium. Since then George Bowering and
I have shown a predilection for the Xalapa Chileros.
So I will be watching today’s Super Bowl,
not knowing where I belong but at the very least having some fun in between moments of confusion and angst.
For reasons that I do not understand I have never warmed up to the Vancouver football and soccer clubs, Lions or the Whitecaps.
For reasons that I do not understand I have never warmed up to the Vancouver football and soccer clubs, Lions or the Whitecaps.
