Bigging down.

Dick and Jack.

And he got. This is hell.

This is hell.

Whistling by the graveyard since 1996, this is hell.

And that's something football fans have been doing since the American version of the sport actually started.

My father loved football, that is American

football, which means I was raised on American football. As a kid, Sundays meant waking up too

early to get dressed up for church. We would follow that up with breakfast, sometimes going out

to eat, which was a rare treat, and then going home to watch football with my dad.

That is, until his friends from the old neighborhood in Detroit would call to tell him their weekly

get-together at their bookie's home had begun, a gathering that, as you can probably guess,

was definitely not kid-friendly, and I never went. I looked forward to when I was old enough to actually go watch

football with my pops and his friends, but by the time I was old enough, I had moved out and

moved on from being a child who idolized their parents. Football for me, when I was growing up,

was a lot more than an idle Sunday afternoon entertainment. It meant sharing time with my dad, a common interest.

It meant family.

And it was nearly inescapable in my mind, inseparable in my mind, from church.

He would tell me stories from his glory days, although he would never call them that.

As a semi-pro football player, who after he left the military, was finally big enough to play

the game he loved, but was too small to play when he was in high school before he got

drafted into the service, he clearly enjoyed his few years of semi-pro ball before getting married and settling down.

...