THIS evening at Aloha Stadium, my wife and I will once again be yelling and cheering while laid-back Hawaii fans politely applaud a good play. The folks in Section J are used to us by now. The making
of a football fanWhen I enrolled at Notre Dame in 1963, the old movie with Pat O'Brien as Knute Rockne and Ronald Reagan as George Gipp was a compulsory feature of freshman orientation.
Of course, I'd heard of Fighting Irish football but I wasn't prepared for the fanaticism that went with it. My misunderstanding was so deep that once I even sold my student ticket -- a disgraceful act that netted me $10. Since the game was on TV, it seemed like a good deal.
By my sophomore year I was totally won over. Great players like Jack Snow, John Huarte and Alan Page had launched the Ara Parsegian era. Having survived multiple seasons of torch-lit pep rallies and splinters from the old stadium's always sold-out benches, I thought I'd become a real college football fan.
That was before I met my wife. She and her fellow Nebraska faithful actually get up at 5:30 on Saturday mornings, put on scarlet back-to-back-national-championships T-shirts and drive to a sports bar to watch the Cornhuskers play. Two years ago, she talked me into a trip to the Fiesta Bowl in Tempe, Ariz., where we joined 45,000 other rabid red-clad fans, most of whom drove hundreds of miles to be there.
There's nothing like a winning home team to bring people together. Go, Bows!