Idiots Write About Sports

Since the mid-to-late ’60s, my parents have had season tickets to Cal football at Memorial Stadium in Berkeley. For most of that time, the seats we’ve had have been in the same place: section FF, row 19. (That’s on the west side of the stadium, at the 35-yard-line.) I can’t remember when I started coming to Cal games regularly, but I seem to remember coming during the Roger Theder years in the late ’70s, so it’s definitely been most of my life.

After four years in San Diego for college, I moved to the Bay Area, and by 1994 a season-ticketholder transition from my parents to me had begun. By the time my parents sold the house I grew up in and became full-time motorhomers in 1998, the tickets were really ours, not theirs, and their visits to Memorial Stadium continued to drop in frequency. In 2002, my dad went to a single game (my mom stayed home with a cold). In 2003, they missed the entire season, a first since the ’60s. In 2004, I took my then-two-year-old daughter and my parents to the New Mexico State game, while my wife stayed home with our two-week-old baby.

My point at detailing the ins and outs of the Snell family football tickets is not to bore you to tears, although that might be a side-effect. It’s to try and paint an image of the scene in those four seats (okay, four spots on a metal bench — time for an upgrade, I think) over the course of time. A man in his late 30s and his wife in her early 30s appear at the games. Over the years, his hair begins turning gray. In the late ’70s they begin bringing their young son. He starts bringing his friends to the game. For a time, the man’s daughter and her husband also come. The son grows up and the parents age, the son disappearing for four years only to return with a girlfriend who rapidly becomes his wife. Then the parents begin appearing less often, replaced by friends of the son and wife. A new baby appears on the scene, clad in blue and yellow, followed in short order by a second.

The people who sit in section FF know us only from the kaleidoscopic series of football Saturdays, six or seven at most, each year. They don’t know our names, but they know our faces and they see our lives change over time. And we see them: in front of us, the man whose son would come to games with him. That son brought a girlfriend, too; their tiny baby, who began to cry loudly when the cannon would fire after a Cal score, is now a ten-year-old kid. The dad has finally, in 2004, passed on his tickets to the son, although he’d only been to one game the previous year — the time had come.

To our left, the paunchy man who sat with his granddaughter and wore an AM radio over his ears, and next to them, a thin older gentleman with a hearing aid and a huge amount of energy, always talking, saying things like, “We’ve really got to run the ball today,” or “We’ve really got to pass today,” or, “What do you think? We got a chance today?” (The answer to that question, this being Cal, was usually “no.”) When things got really exciting, he’d give us high-fives, but since the high-five was kind of a foreign concept to him, he’d grab your hand after the hand-slap. I have no idea what that man’s name was, but I can hear his voice to this day. It sticks in my mind, like that of the grandfatherly gentleman who used to sit near us, repeating, “Go Bears, go, go, go, Go Bears,” words we last heard him utter at the 1993 Big Game, the last game he saw before dying.

Because that’s the ultimate end of the story of Section FF. Sometimes they just don’t come back for the next season. If they came alone, without friends, you never even know whether they just tired of Cal’s losing ways, became too sick to come, moved to a tropical island to start a new life, or passed away. The man with the hearing aid didn’t come to the first few games this year. I admit I was worried, a little bit, but I held out some hope. At the Oregon game my wife talked to the paunchy man with the radio; it turns out that our friend with the hearing aid had died during the offseason.

This year’s Cal team, whether they’re bound for Pasadena, San Diego, or somewhere else, will no doubt contain numerous stars who will define the remarkable 2004 football season. Aaron Rodgers and J.J. Arrington lead the list. But for me, no matter how the season ends up, this one’s for the man with the hearing aid. Now that sturdy Golden Bear is watching from the sky, as the song goes.

And so life goes on, in those cold, hard, gold metallic benches. One handful of Saturdays at a time.

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