Super What Now?

I'm a U.S. guy but I'm not much of a football fan, and I can prove it. I was on the phone with a U.S. female yesterday and the subject of Super Bowl parties came up. She gave me a pop quiz: Which teams are playing this year? I'm not sure how important the actual game is in the whole Super Bowl experience but I wanted to do my best, so I thought about it. Like anything where you don't just know the answer, you have to work it out by logic. Now, in looking at some news stories there are others that come into your peripheral vision. And then there's the radio, where there's no choice. I'd heard that this New England Patriots team was very very good, so I felt that I was on solid ground here. I'm a good test-taker, actually.

"The Patriots?" I asked.

Yes, it turns out the Patriots are one of the teams. She took pity on my ignorance and said the other was the Giants. Huh! Whaddaya know. That's the kind of football fan I am.

I have another friend who distinguishes carefully between sports and games. He insists that football and other team sports are in fact games—formal rules, played with balls and bats and such. Hunting and fishing are sports. Which makes me a sports fan after all. I've been busy lately, with one thing and another, so I haven't done the winter trout fishing thing. But I think about it, and will soon, if I can.

I also think about spring, summer, and fall trout fishing, casting a long line quietly under the tree limbs to the fish rising in the shadowy banks. And there's the saltwater, casting heavier tackle out beyond the breakers, and coming tight to the heavier fish you catch there. And there's the Rockies, with the faster, bigger streams and the mountains as a backdrop. And the tropics, with blues and greens and viscous sunlight and frigate birds wheeling slowly overhead. Lately it's been buildings and parking lots and desks and staplers pretty exclusively, but I haven't forgotten that according to some definitions I'm a sports fan. Nothing against games, plenty of fine folks get a kick out of them. But you act according to your nature. Fish gotta swim, bird gotta fly, and all. I have nothing against eating chicken wings and potato chips and drinking beer with a TV in the corner of the room showing a series of extra-edgy commercials interspersed with occasional snippets of a football game between the—wait a minute—Patriots and Giants, right, nothing against that sort of thing. But personally I'd rather fish. And will soon, if the fates allow. Cold, tramping around in the outdoors, a few trout brought to hand and released. That's my idea of a super Sunday. Soon, like I say.