IRISHMAN FOR HIRE

Do you hear what I hear? Do you hear roars of jubilation, celebrations, singing and cheering?! Do you hear the frustration, the heartbreak, the disappointment and the angry outbursts?! Have you heard it lately? Well if you have, you are not alone; ‘Tis the season for the fantasy football playoffs! The time of the year that is filled with the “thrill of victory and the agony of defeat!”

Depending on the rules of the fantasy football league, the playoffs either started last Sunday or they kick off this weekend. It is the point in the season when an entire year of research, preparation and super fandom come down to one week, one match up and ultimately, one do or die situation. Win the game and continue towards a championship! Lose the game and end another year of one’s life dedicated to building the perfect fantasy football franchise.

I have been a New York Giants fan all of my life. I joined my first fantasy football league in 1987 and from that first season, I have been hooked on this extremely addictive game. But it wasn’t until the mid 1990s that fantasy football really started to grab the enthusiasm of the American public. And when ESPN created an entire gaming division around fantasy sports, fantasy football exploded onto the scene as the premier attraction for men, women and children of all ages!

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We bought our home back in May of 2001. Stephanie was pregnant with our son and we decided it was time to buy a larger home to prepare for our growing family. One of the major selling points of our home was the finished basement. It was a place that I could call my own and a place where I would be able to hang out with friends and know I wasn’t making a mess of the rest of the house.

When we closed on our house, it turned into a tough move. So once we finally settled all of the problems that occurred during the move, we did everything that first summer to make the new house our home. We decorated, we painted, we created a nursery for our first child and in the basement, I placed all of my New York sports paraphernalia on full display. It was my place of solitude in my home that reminded me of my New York roots!

A month after our son was born; I came home from work to find that my wife had painted a Wall of Champions on the door heading down to the finished basement. She pinstriped the door, listed every year the Yankees won the World Series and adorned it with Yankee emblems. It was the first thing that greeted anyone who went into the finished basement and it was awesome.

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This morning I rifled through my old emails and started to delete them when I came across an old one from my aunt after she attended the final game played at Yankee Stadium last September:

Dear Douglas,

Wanted to know your thoughts about the ’stadium’ closing? I went to the final game. It would have been better if this was October and the last game, but it was still a very special night. Unfortunately I was delusional to think that I was going to walk on the field. I got there early, but not early enough. So after three hours, and walking the whole stadium three times from top to bottom, and still on the top level I said ‘uncle’. Settled into my seat and just enjoyed the entire day/evening/night. It was great, talking to different people hearing their memories, and recanting my own. Here’s to the next chapter, and hopefully #27.

I was so involved in other projects at the time that I never had the opportunity to reply. But, in retrospect, I didn’t respond because I never had a chance to sit down and think about what the old Yankee Stadium had meant to me throughout the course of my life. I had been to so many games, spent so much of my life there and even when I moved away, I made the time and effort to take my children to Yankee Stadium annually to see a game.

Yankee Stadium was a special place. Whenever I handed the gate attendant my ticket and cascaded through the turnstiles, I was immediately overcome with an aura of magic and greatness that emanated throughout the skeleton of the building. As I walked through the inner sanctum of the hallways that connected the outside world to the majestic palace that Ruth built, I could feel the history of the stadium rise up and envelope me. It was hallowed ground.

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Football is a way of life in our household! Well, for me it is. My wife and kids humor me but they all know that we are supposed to eat, drink and breathe the New York Giants around our home.

My obsession with the NFL started out when I was a young child. On Thanksgiving Day, while my mother was preparing a late day feast, she and her boyfriend would watch football. It was an annual tradition to watch the football games on Thanksgiving Day and while the games were being played, her boyfriend would tell us stories about the players, the history of the NFL and about the game of football itself. My love for the game got passed on to me because of our Thanksgiving Day ritual.

I understand tradition. Our family has created some great traditions that have been passed on to us by our parents and grandparents. Each holiday holds a special connection between our past, our present and, hopefully, our future. I hope that one day my children will be telling their kids about Thanksgiving Day and how I shared my vast wealth of knowledge and history of the NFL with them as a part of our Thanksgiving custom. But, alas, I think the Thanksgiving Day tradition of watching, enjoying and loving NFL football may end up being a distant memory of my childhood that loses significance in my kid’s ever changing world.

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I poured a cup of coffee, walked to the front of the house, opened the door and went out onto the front deck to sit and bask in the sunlight. It was finally a nice day. The sun was shining. There wasn’t any humidity. And after a long weekend of rain, it was nice to sit and relax with a cup of coffee on a great summer day before I headed into the office.

I sat down in my chair and took a sip of the coffee. I was looking out over the marsh across the street from my house when out of the corner of my eye, I noticed it. I immediately put my coffee cup down on the table, walked down my front steps and out to the end of my driveway and stared in disbelief at what had happened; my New York Giants mailbox was lying on the ground.

My day was ruined! I was angry; pissed off would be a better way to describe it! As I bent over to pick up the beat up mailbox, I looked around at every other house on the street and my ire at the situation grew even more. My mailbox was the only one on the entire street that had been smashed. I picked up the main part of the mailbox, brought it back into my yard and propped it up on the concrete wall next to the front steps and went back into the house.

It is no secret that I am a New York Giants fan. I have been all my life. I also realize that I live outside of Boston where the fans are extreme supporters of the local sports franchises. I understand that and if this act of vandalism had happened back in the first week of February, then I might have been a little more understanding of such a targeted attack on my personal property. It would have made sense. It would have still been wrong but it would have made sense. But there is no rational explanation for this type of vandalism to take place in August. It is six months after the Super Bowl and for my mailbox to have been damaged now defies conventional logic or explanation because the argument about it “happening in the heat of the moment” has long passed.

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I have to apologize for sporadically writing lately. The kids have been sick and life has been extremely hectic but on the bright side, I have been able to watch the Yankees and the Red Sox play on television.

I have also been looking on Ticketmaster and EBay for tickets to Yankee Stadium this summer. Taking my children to New York City to watch the Yankees is a rite of passage in our family. Since we have moved to Boston, it has been difficult to see the Yankees play in person because tickets have been difficult to come by. So, a few years ago, I decided to initiate my children into the fellowship of the Yankees fandom by taking my kids to the stadium when they were old enough. In the summer of 2005, I took my son, Josh, to his first baseball game in the Bronx. It was the type of trip that makes a father think that he is passing on a great legacy to his son.

But before I get ahead of myself, let me digress and tell you why this newly created tradition is so important. You see, growing up as a Yankee fan in Boston has been hard on my son because every one of Josh’s friends is a Red Sox fan. They have Red Sox days at school, his friends wear Red Sox hats and shirts, and his friends talk about how horrible the Yankees are. And if that isn’t bad enough, the Red Sox are everywhere on television, in the clothing stores and in the toy stores. It’s Boston, I can understand the rationale but it doesn’t make it any easier for a father and a son to enjoy being fans of the greatest baseball franchise in history.

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(This is the second part of the story. The first part was posted on Tuesday, April 8, 2008. If you haven’t read the first part, click here to start at the beginning.)

The ball was loose and sliding across the ground. When the ball had been snapped, it went right through Pat’s hands and hit him in the chest. As he was moving his arms in an attempt to recover the fumble, the football bounced off his knee and shot forward toward the line. I saw the ball in front of me just gliding across the ground when I dove for it. Everyone dove into the pile and grabbed for the ball; the fight was on! I was jabbed, poked, punched and grabbed and yet, I fought as hard as I could to get my hands on the football. I didn’t care if we had to punt the ball away but if we gave it back to the other team at midfield, our ship might finally be sunk!

Somehow, Mark came out of the scrum with the ball securely tucked away under him. We had retained possession but we were looking at fourth and five. We had to make a decision about what to do next.

“I don’t want to punt,” I said as I took a knee in our huddle.

“They have the wind at their back. If we don’t make it, we give them a short field,” Mike said as he looked around at all of us. I took a deep breath as I contemplated our options.

“Go for it, Doug,” Dave said. I was stunned, Dave never said anything. He just waited for the play and did his job. “We’ll give them nothing, go for it.”

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“Well this is another fine mess we’ve gotten ourselves into,” I said as I stepped into the huddle.

And it was. We had let the football roll because we thought it would have trickled into the end zone and we would have been able to take the ball out to the makeshift twenty yard line, but it didn’t. The ball took an awkward bounce and rolled out of bounds about five feet in front of the end zone marker and we were pinned down inside the mouth of our own goal line.

I looked around at my teammates as steam rose from our sweat drenched foreheads. Hot mist was pouring out of all of our mouths as we fought for oxygen. With each inhale, the cold breeze created little tiny icicles in our mouths and noses. It was painful to take a deep breath but because our work wasn’t done, we had to put everything in the back of our minds. The pain could wait.

“We got the wind in our face and the ice under our feet, we have to be smart,” I said as I caught my breath. “Anyone got any ideas?”

The gusts of wind were smacking us in the face. If we tried to air the ball out and go for a deep pass, the wind would knock the ball down or hold it up long enough for anyone from either team to grab it. It was a risky proposition and one I wasn’t willing to consider this late in the game and this deep in our own end. We had to be methodical but more importantly, we had to protect the football at all costs.

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I am a life long New York Giants fan! As my schedule proved, I had very little time for writing this past weekend as I soaked in the aura of the Super Bowl and prepared for our annual party in honor of the big game.

As I woke up yesterday, I had time to reflect upon the Super Bowl that had been played on Sunday. I still don’t think my feet have touched the ground yet. The New York Giants achieved the impossible and did it in incredible fashion. But as I sat on my couch, recuperating from our own football game that we played earlier in the day, I had an inspirational thought; “Why am I taking a paid vacation day when today should be a Holiday?”

In the past couple of years, the buzz word that has dominated the headlines of our newspapers and television newscasts has been the word “change.” “Change direction”, Change the course”, “Change the leadership”, “Change the economic outlook”, “Change the tone/tenor”, “Change the course of history”, and so on and so on. “Change” is the buzz word for 2008 and in honor of this buzz word, I have a new motto for this election year; “Change that Holiday!”

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Last night I sat down to write out the injury report for our annual Snow Bowl Co-Ed Touch Football game on Super Bowl Sunday and as I finished the list, I realized that nobody on the report had a “knee injury” this year. It’s an interesting little footnote on the past seven years of our lives but one that will probably live on for many years to come.

It all really hit me about fifteen months ago when Stephanie and I were entertaining friends at our house. Will and I were shooting the breeze on the couch when I overheard his wife, Kristin, say to Stephanie, “Oh my God, I almost forgot, guess who has a ‘knee injury?’”

“Who?” Stephanie responded excitedly.

“Joanna. Actually, she had a ‘knee injury’.”

“That’s so awesome, I’m so happy for her. And Danielle won’t be playing in the Snow Bowl game this year either because she has a ‘knee injury’ as well.”

“That’s great.”

And from there, the conversation about “knee injuries” continued while I sat back and smirked. It was odd for me to hear them talking about “knee injuries” as commonly as most people would discuss the weather or the daily news. It was a weird conversation for them to have but as they continued, I just settled back into the couch and patted myself on the back.

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