Football games provide moments of sheer, utter joy and moments of utter, abject misery.
Game days were exhausting. When we won, they were exhausting and exhilarating and the best days ever. When we lost, they were exhausting and miserable and the worst days ever. After each game, no matter whether we won or we lost, I felt I aged in multiple dog years (more dog years when we lost than when we won). I have long said that I look okay for a woman who is many thousands of years old.
One game that provided moments of absolute ecstasy was the final game of the 1993 season. We were hosting the Denver Broncos, in what for us was a win-and-in game – the Broncos were in the playoffs no matter the outcome.
In the waning moments of the fourth quarter, our season on the line, we were down by seven points (we had been down by 17 points twice in the game). We were inside of the 5-yard line with time for one final play. The ball was snapped and our quarterback, Jeff Hostetler, was looking everywhere for an open receiver. He was looking and looking and looking – he bought time by moving around – it seemed to me that he was looking for an absolute eternity. As I watched, everything slowed down. It was like I was seeing the game in slow motion without any sound at all. I heard nothing, it was absolutely silent. On that final play in regulation, Jeff found Alexander Wright in the corner of the end zone. I saw the ball come out of Jeff’s hand. I saw the ball in flight. I saw Alexander leap up and bend backwards, very awkwardly, in what would be his effort to catch it. He had a defender right on him. I saw the ball in Alexander’s hands and I realized that he was going to land very awkwardly and very hard. I thought that the moment he hit the ground, the ball might pop out of his hands. Alexander caught the ball and although he landed hard and awkwardly, he held on and we scored. Only then did I hear the noise; it was deafening. Fans were embracing and cheering and screaming and crying. I remember frantically trying to quiet those around me and telling them, “No, no, we’re still a point behind, we haven’t tied, we haven’t done it yet, we still have to kick the extra point.” We did.
In overtime, the Broncos won the coin toss and drove right down the field, lickety-splickety. As they were preparing to line up to kick what should have been an easy field goal, I noticed that Pat Bowlen had moved to the sideline. Our crowd was still deafeningly loud. As the Broncos kicker, Jason Elam, approached the ball, I noticed that he took a little, tiny, almost imperceptible stutter step. The kick was up and I saw Pat (PB, as many called him) raise his arms to signal that the kick was good. But it wasn’t, Elam missed. We got the ball, drove down the field, kicked the field goal, and won. Elam attributed the fact that he didn’t make a clean approach to the ball to the noise of our fans. Home-field advantage.
That touchdown to Wright and winning the game in overtime was sheer, utter ecstasy – a euphoria that is hard to describe. Over 20 years later, I still get chills when thinking about this. I have chills now.
One game that provided moments of abject misery was our 1997 home opener. It was Monday night, September 8, and we were hosting the Chiefs. We were up by less than a touchdown with only a few seconds remaining in the game.
I had gone into the stands to spend some time watching the game with our fans, as I did whenever and as often as I could. I loved the time I spent in the stands with our fans. I never considered that a responsibility or an obligation. I considered it a privilege. In that moment, our fans were ecstatic – they were celebrating, they were sure that we had won this game. I remember repeatedly cautioning the fans with whom I was speaking that “this isn’t over” and “the Chiefs can still win this game.”
“Don’t worry Amy, we won,” many fans tried to reassure me. “Don’t worry, we got this,” they said. I knew that the game was far from over and that we could still lose, and I was terrified.
The Chiefs got the ball back on their 20-yard line with 1:01 remaining. With three seconds left, quarterback Elvis Grbac found wide receiver Andre Rison in the back of the end zone for the touchdown. Rison had gotten behind our defenders and we lost 28–27.
It was one of the most excruciating, most heartbreaking, most painful losses of my career.
A few hours later, I was home, and the phone rang. It was Al. He told me that he was calling to see if I was okay. I was overwhelmed. Al Davis called me, to see if I was okay. I was thoroughly overwhelmed. His call was more meaningful than he could ever imagine. His call told me that he knew how deeply I cared, how badly I wanted to win, and how devastated I was. It also signaled to me that he cared. He cared enough to call and check on me when he was in misery, too.
* * *
Just as Al called to check on me after that devastating Monday-night loss to Kansas City, he once called me to revel in a particularly delicious victory.
It was December 2008 and for differing reasons, neither Al nor I traveled to Tampa Bay for the season finale. I watched the game at home with my husband. Well, I was home with my husband and we both watched the game, but we didn’t watch the whole game together. I wasn’t an easy person with whom to watch a game. It was often better that I watched by myself, and we both understood that.
We were down by 10 points in the fourth quarter but went on to win. Michael Bush had 177 yards rushing, 129 of which came in the fourth quarter. We knocked the Buccaneers out of the playoff race.
The moment the game ended, the phone rang. I knew it would be someone calling about the game. I never for a minute thought it would be Al, but it was. He called chortling, to relish in and share the moment with me, which touched me deeply.
I periodically opted out of traveling with the team to one road game each December. I remained back to work on year-end matters. I tried to select a game that was a two-day trip so I could enjoy and capitalize on the quiet of the office once the team left on Friday and again on Saturday. I watched those games from home. My husband and I never let anyone watch with us – this wasn’t for fun, this wasn’t relaxed viewing, and I didn’t allow talking during the game, not even during the commercials. It was my rule that only I was allowed to make or elicit a comment about or during the game. I was no fun during games. My husband and I would initially watch together, but it was a certainty that at some point very soon after the game began, watching together would come to an abrupt end. I would leave the room and we would watch from different spots from that point on. My husband always said that any decision to watch from different rooms would be mine, but I know that he was relieved when I would retreat to a far point in the house.
My husband also looked out for the neighbors. In one instance, this occurred when the team was in Pittsburgh to play the Steelers on December 6, 2009. As it was a December game across the country, I had elected to stay back.
We scored three late touchdowns, the final one with nine seconds to go – it was Louis Murphy’s second touchdown in a five-and-a-half-minute period. I watched that drive leading to that final winning touchdown, standing on the bed screaming at the television – every curse word I knew, and some I didn’t know I knew, spewing from my mouth. I am sure that I resembled Linda Blair in The Exorcist – the part where her head spins around in circles and green vomit shoots from her mouth. My husband walked upstairs from where he had been watching the game (at the television in the part of the house farthest from me), entered the bedroom, and calmly and silently began closing all of the windows. So, we got to watch the final, winning drive together, as I was standing on the bed screaming and cursing at the television like a crazy person, and as he was closing all the windows. After we won, I asked him why he would spend time closing windows during those final thrilling moments of the game. He responded that he had done so because he didn’t want to have to spend the rest of the day explaining to the police that although the neighbors may have reported a murder or a hostage situation, it was simply me, watching a game.
* * *
I always loved spending time with our fans. Whether in the parking lots before the games, in the stands during the games, at home or on the road, I loved it. It was important to me, it was fun, it was special, it was a highlight of my career. I considered this a real privilege – not a responsibility or an obligation, but a privilege.
The president of a division rival once asked me in a scornful tone: “Why do you always do that? Why do you always go through the stands, talking to all the fans?”
He went on to say that he had seen me do this at our home games and when we were in his stadium. As disdainful as he was, he was also sincerely curious. He just didn’t understand why I did this. I responded by asking: “Why wouldn’t I spend time with our fans? I love to do that. Why don’t you do that with your fans?” He didn’t answer. I didn’t stop spending time in the stands. He didn’t start.
Seeing and interacting with fans at games confirmed my views about the power of sports. There can and should be reasonable debate about the role of sports in our communities and about the level of commitment, if any, that municipalities and states should make with respect to sports venues. We should engage in discussions about whether public money should be used for stadiums and arenas, whether sports organizations should be subsidized in this manner, whether expenditure on infrastructure surrounding stadiums and arenas is a good investment, whether stadiums and arenas are environmentally appropriate, and more. Reasonable minds may differ, but these topics should be debated.
I do not believe, however, that the powerful, unifying impact that sports has on communities is open to debate.
For almost 30 years, at every game I saw people who might otherwise never interact with one another embrace in moments of joy and commiserate with one another in moments of despair.
To see men and women of all races, ethnicities, ages, religions, socioeconomic strata, and political persuasions erupt in collective ecstasy and embrace in utter jubilation was very powerful. When I saw people who may never have believed that they had anything in common with one another share moments and experiences together in a stadium, it was my thought and my hope that they would realize that they actually did share at least something in common and that this realization would permeate other parts of their lives.
Perhaps the next time a disagreement, a dispute, or a conflict arose, the octogenarian who lived in a rural area and the teenager who lived in the inner city might recall the instance in which they embraced and they both might understand that people do have, and can find, more in common than they might otherwise have believed.
The value of that can’t be quantified.
* * *
Very early in my career, I was told in no uncertain terms not to “act cold” when around the team (whether on the practice field or on the playing field prior to a game), no matter how cold I was. No hands in pockets, no arms around oneself, no suggestions or hints by body language or otherwise that one was cold. Al didn’t want anyone to act cold, he explained, as he thought that if we acted cold, the players would then – and only then – realize that it was cold. Okay, that’s dumb, I thought. People know when it’s cold; they don’t need to be told that it’s cold to know it’s cold. But I was careful not to act cold – even if I was freezing.
We were in Green Bay to play a game on December 26, 1993, and it was cold – really, really, bone-chillingly cold – a veritable polar vortex by my standards. At one point, and perhaps still, the Packers website listed that game as the fourth-coldest game ever played at Lambeau Field. The wind chill was minus-22 degrees. I can’t fathom what games No. 1 through No. 3 on that list must have been like. Certainly, that day was the coldest I had ever been and that remains the case to this day.
Wearing what constituted my winter clothes, I had only to make it from the lobby of the hotel to the team bus and then from the team bus to the visiting team staff seating area in the press box. As I started out the door of the hotel, I was blasted by the cold, but I kept my coat over my arm, so as not to “act as if” I was cold. As I walked out the door in my lightweight sweater and slacks, a player shouted from the bus: “Amy, put on your fucking coat; we know it’s cold!”
The new reality that a woman now traveled with a team came into focus on that cold day. Just behind our staff seating area was a restroom – the sort of restroom that accommodates one person at a time – and that therefore had no gender demarcation on the door. Before kickoff, I used that restroom without incident.
At the break between the first and second quarters, I tried to use it again. As I approached, a guard standing beside the restroom shifted his position to the front of the door, and said, “Men’s room.” I looked at him. Huh? “No, it’s not,” I said. “It’s for everyone.”
“Men’s room,” he responded. I explained that I had just used that restroom right before kickoff. “Men’s room,” he responded.
“Sir,” I said, “only one person can use it at a time.”
“Men’s room,” he stated.
“It doesn’t have a ‘men’s room’ sign on the door,” I countered.
“Men’s room,” he intoned. I wasn’t going to win this argument. I needed to use the restroom and the second quarter was about to start. So I asked him where, precisely, I should go to use a restroom. I listened in disbelief as he explained that I had to go outside, walk to an upper deck, and use the public restroom there. I wasn’t at all bothered by the prospect of using a public restroom – I did that all the time in stadiums and, as noted earlier, believed that it was important to do so. It was the going outside part that stunned me. I walked outside, went upstairs, and found a restroom. It had walls and a roof, but the walls didn’t reach or join the roof; they stopped about two feet below it. As I used the restroom, my only thought was that I might very well freeze to death and none of my coworkers would know where I was.
* * *
In the days leading up to a game, and on game day itself, weather was a topic I discussed quite frequently with Al. I learned very early in my career – about the time I started exploring the organization (literally and figuratively), that I should always know the weather forecast for our upcoming game. Starting on Wednesday, he would often ask me, “What’s the weather?” I knew what he meant was: “What’s the weather going to be on game day?” Had I responded, “Let me look that up,” or “I don’t know, I’ll check,” he would never have asked me again. So, I made sure to know the weather forecast for each upcoming game. I’d check it frequently so that no matter when he called, I’d have a current forecast, and also because I was interested.
Al would frequently call me at home on the morning of home game days. He was very tense, as I was, and he was curt. He would express anger about something that he had heard or read; he would express frustration or disappointment that a certain player couldn’t play (or “go,” as is said in the business); he’d want to know who was singing the anthem, the anticipated weather at kickoff, or some other detail about game day.
I was extraordinarily tense on game days. My husband likened me on game-day mornings to a “hummingbird on speed.” When I shared that with a colleague at another club, she laughed and told me that her husband likened her on game-day mornings to a “cat on crack.”
On one occasion, Al called me at home early on a really rainy, stormy game-day morning and asked me to call the president of the visiting team at his hotel and get him to agree that we delay kickoff. Huh? “Teams can’t delay kickoff,” I told him. “The networks pay a lot of money to televise the games and we can’t just change the time of kickoff.” He wasn’t impressed. “Try to get kickoff delayed,” he instructed me, and hung up. We kicked off in the rain and the storm.
* * *
The same season in which I made my first road trip with the team, we advanced to the AFC championship game. Roughly a month after that, Al told me to come into his office to “work on playoff bonuses.” I didn’t know what that meant. Playoff bonuses for players are collectively bargained and thus standard throughout the league. Sometimes, a coach or a general manager has a playoff bonus clause in his contract. Nonplayer bonuses and bonuses for those to whom the organization is not contractually obligated are left up to the discretion of owners (or someone to whom the owner delegates such decisions).
I joined Al in his office and he handed me a copy of a staff list he had front of him. He read down the list, and as he said each name aloud, he stated the amount he planned to give each person. At this point in my career, he didn’t want any input from me; he simply wanted me to implement his decision. When he came to my name, he stated an amount I was to receive. I was shocked. I was speechless. Never – never in a zillion years – did I think I would receive a playoff bonus. That I was included in Al’s thoughts was worth more to me than any amount of bonus.
When I shared this news with my husband, he suggested that we use that unexpected bonus to purchase a horse that I had been riding and had fallen in love with. So we did. And since we were only able to do so because of this playoff bonus, I chose Championship Game as his show name. A number of years later, when we (the horse and I) hit a really bad patch preparing for and in competitions, my husband dryly asked: “Did it ever occur to you that naming a horse after a game you lost by 48 points might not have been such a good idea?”