This past weekend was an F&F affair for me – friends and football.
On Saturday, I got together for an early lunch with my long-ago Texas A&M friend Joe Tindel, whom I had not seen in 10 years – and when I saw him in 2016, that was the first time since we graduated in 1983! We met up at Maple Branch Craft Brewery & Kitchen in Fort Worth (Joe lives in Euless and I live in Arlington), where Joe wanted to sample a beer that a friend of his from church had collaborated on brewing.
Then late Sunday afternoon, I spent several hours watching pro football with Jongwook Park and Jay (Liangjie Jia), two of my UT Southwestern Medical Center Conversation Partners, at Jay’s apartment near UTSW’s sprawling campus. The guys had recently mentioned wanting to learn some football – a sport they knew nothing about – so I suggested we watch either a college or NFL game so I could teach them the basics. I’m much more of a college football fan than NFL, but we decided on an NFL game.
Back to my meet-up with Joe. The Aggies’ game against Missouri had an 11 a.m. kickoff, so that’s when we met. Between catching up on our families, reminiscing about the old, old days in Aggieland and even talking some politics, we moaned and groaned about how bad the A&M football team is this season (the Tigers dominated the ugly game).
I’m not going to claim to remember everything from my college days, but I’m pretty sure Joe and I didn’t know each other until he joined the sports staff of The Battalion, A&M’s student newspaper, for the fall 1982 semester. I’d been sports editor since the previous spring, when we had a fantastic group of writers including John Wagner, Denise Sechelski and John Lopez – who went on to award-winning greatness at the San Antonio Express-News and Houston Chronicle and has been a big-time sports radio personality in Houston for years. And Wags has been writing news releases for our team at UT Southwestern for several years, doing an incredible job.
Denise abandoned us 😊 and moved to the rival University of Texas her sophomore year, so we had an opening on the sports staff – which I hired Joe to fill after he applied. I also hired another student that semester named Bill Robinson, so we ended up having a sports staff of five for the 1982-83 school year. Tragically, Bill was killed in a car crash in the summer of 1984.
Joe grew up in the tiny East Texas town of Frankston and met his wife Jennifer at A&M. I actually have a childhood connection to Jennifer’s family – she grew up down the street from us in the Oak Ridge North subdivision in Montgomery County south of Conroe. Although I didn’t really know her (we weren’t in the same grade), my brother Isaac and I delivered the Chronicle to her house when we had a paper route in the mid-1970s. As they say, small world.
Joe and I had a great time catching up, and we talked about Jennifer and Kay and I getting together sometime – maybe even back at Maple Branch, where the food and beer were both delicious.
On Sunday, I brought barbecue over to Jay’s, Jongwook brought snacks and Jay had plenty of beer, chips and dips and fruit, so we were set for several hours of football – with a tutorial mixed in. Jay is from China and Jongwook from South Korea, so football is definitely, ahem, foreign to them.
We started out watching the overtime of the Giants-Commanders game, in which both teams blew chances to win – one team fumbling, the other letting the game clock run out – while trying to gain a few extra yards for shorter field-goal attempts. That may be the most boneheaded thing I’ve ever seen two football teams do in one game.
Then we settled in to watch the 49ers-Seahawks game, matching up two of the league’s (supposed) better teams that had already combined for seven wins. Instead, they combined for SEVEN TURNOVERS that led to a total of 38 points scored off those giveaways in a game the 49ers ended up winning 32-29.
I spent much of the early part of the game explaining what was going on, the rules, which players were doing what – all without trying to make it overly complicated. I didn’t want to confuse Jay and Jongwook with too much detail about every penalty, the names of every position and a lot of strategy.
But I could tell they were really enjoying the game, and they were floored by how violent the sport is. Some of the hits delivered by defensive backs and linebackers on receivers and running backs were brutal, and I’m not sure they expected that. I could also tell they were impressed by the sheer athleticism of the players, especially when someone made a great catch or broke off a great run.
I don’t know if they’ll be watching a lot of football, but I think now that they understand a bit more, it’ll pique their interest and give them more motivation to catch some games. Who knows, maybe they’ll even end up having a favorite team?
And someday down the road when I’m not around, maybe they’ll remember Sunday and the crash course that helped them add football to the list of American pastimes they developed more than a passing (pun intended) interest in. 😊
