HOW THE GAME IS PLAYED

 

by Wendel Potter
September 18, 2005



I don't like bars. That's not to say I don't like drinking. I'm half Irish. Often, my cup is at least half full.

I love football. You'd know that only from talking to me about football and only if you brought up the subject, or from reading a column such as this.

You wouldn't know it because you saw me in a drinking establishment with a gazillion barstool quarterbacks watching (and coaching) the game on a Big Screen TV. You won't see me there.

I will watch any NFL or Division I-A college football game any time. It's not a personal prerequisite that I be a fan of one team or the other.

I watch from home where I am the sole football fan (and beer drinker). I will adjust to any chair in front of any TV in the house. It makes no difference. Occasionally, I will plug in the 20-year old 9" Zenith on a patio table in the back yard and watch a game while my dog slinks away to a shady corner, sulking because he will not have my attention for quite some time.

Over the years, bars have become too trendy. They have become Theme Bars, usually called Sports Bars and they have cute names like "Sluggers" and "The Dugout" and "The End Zone", and any town of any size has them.

As Jimmy Durante used to say, "Ev'rybuddies try'n ta get into da act." Everybody has a gimmick. I guess that's just part of the Wide World of Commerce.

When I first drank legally and socially, it was in a bar in Fullerton, Nebraska, the town where I lived. Fullerton boasted a population of less than 1500 citizens and the bar was called quite simply, J&L Tavern. That was before the age of Cable TV and Pay-Per-View and if J&L Tavern even had a television set above the bar, it was probably a 19" Black-and-White model.

If you wanted to talk sports, you could talk baseball with the bartender, Bags Umstead. He was a good bartender with a great memory. Once you'd drank at J&L, Bags could match any face with its drinking pleasure.

Bags knew baseball. That's how his nickname originated. He not only knew the sport, he could have played it. Instead, he ended up tending bar at J&L Tavern in Fullerton, Nebraska, population 1400-something.

There was probably a sad story there. But that's what life is. People and their stories, happy or sad.

Hoisting a couple of beers at the bar or in a booth at J&L was tolerable. The tavern had that small town ambience and the patrons were good company.

Mainly, no one there put on airs. I don't like putting on airs.

In his memoir, "A Drinking Life", writer Pete Hamill recounts how he got through his first few weeks without booze by reciting these words every morning: "I will live my life from now on, I will not perform it."

I've thought about that often. We are performers. Even Shakespeare said, "The whole world's a stage".

Sometimes none of us are real. We all have an innate talent for acting and that's how we react to life and its slapdash twists of fate.

Perhaps when we get to heaven, there will be an Academy Awards type of ceremony and we'll all be nominated. I hope I don't win.

When I sat in a bar like J&L Tavern, I didn't feel like I was waiting in the wings. My friends and I conversed, we listened to the jukebox, we played shuffleboard. It would generally be a quiet, good time.

Beer was two bits a draw and if we were hungry, a buck and a quarter could get us a good burger and some pretty tasty French fries. No nachos, no tortilla chips and salsa, no fancy drinks with paper umbrellas and snickering ho-ho names like "Sex on the Beach".

The Sports Bar today offers a much different milieu than the small town J&L Tavern of yesterday. With fully staffed kitchens touting grand Tex-Mex menus, bartenders who will concoct anything you want to drink and offer up a name for it as well, and a half dozen ESPN-locked TVs viewable from any chair in the joint, the Sports Bars are rocking.

But one thing they lack is intimacy. Because people don't live life, they perform it.

People like to be on and a Sports Bar is just another backdrop to act out life against. There will be a stage full of noisy fellow actors there, brimming with liquor and hot wings, and the Big Game will bring out the worst of insecurity and arrogance in the room.

Each play will be sent around the tables for review and a faulty analysis by some of the most brazenly vocal, yet unknowledgeable fans in the city. The biggest and most empty barrels can be found on any given Game Day in any given Sports Bar.

Not only do they not know how to enjoy a game, they don't know how to drink. But the Sports Bar is their stage. So they act.

And I stay home, where I can enjoy a few beers in peace and listen to the play-by-plays and analyses of qualified professionals.

If I want to have a drink with friends, I'd just as soon seek out a bar like J&L Tavern, where there was no pretentiousness, no Big Screen TV, no fancy cocktails, and no roaring crowd.

And if I want to talk Sports, I'll talk to the bartender who has a sad story and doesn't tell it. But he sure knows the game.

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Copyright 2005 Wendel Potter

Lonesome Whistle, Empty Swing

by Wendel Potter
June 15, 2008


The following column was written and published on my website on June 15, 2008. Some memories we keep to ourselves.  Others continue to be worth mentioning from time to time.

From now on, Father's Day Weekend for our family will always be cast in a bittersweet light.

My wife and sons will continue to celebrate my fatherhood. There will be gifts and cards and dinner. I will always revel in being a father to my boys, as well as a husband to their mother.

But there will be a shadow as though we are standing under an eclipsed sun.

On June 16, 2007, my wife's father died of cancer. It was on a Saturday, the day before Father's Day.

Bill lived in a small town in Iowa. He was in his late sixties, was a strong man still working full time in the mail room at Iowa State University in Ames.

He had no immediate intention of retiring from his job. Or from life.

The cancer settled in quickly and after diagnosis and then surgery, the doctor's outlook was positive. With treatment, Bill could live weeks, possibly months, perhaps a year or two. Maybe even go back to work part-time.

He was gone in three weeks. The day before Father's Day.

Three of his children - my wife Karen and her younger brother and sister Will and Felicia - were by his side at the end. That was the last, yet the best Father's Day gift they had ever given him, could have given him.

Bill's daughter, Cheryl, who lives in New Jersey, only recently got to know her dad. Sadly, we had lost touch with her and were unable to let her know that her father was dying. Had we been able to tell her, she would have been there, too.

Daughters and Son to the very end and beyond. Still are.

I always looked forward to our annual summer trips to Iowa to visit Bill and his wife. There was nothing like sitting lazily on the back porch swing listening to the frequent whistling and rumblings of the freight trains as they whisked along the tracks that split the little village just a couple of blocks from Bill's house.

Countless times over the 30 years I had known my father-in-law, he said, "I just want me a little peace," and then he'd chuckle softly with a "hee hee hee".

Sitting on that back porch swing and sipping a cup of coffee on a lazy sunlit morning or a dusky summer evening in that tiny Iowa town, Bill soaked in a little of that peace. It was always a pleasure to sit there and enjoy it along with him.

This morning, on Father's Day, I sat at my patio table with my morning coffee. I heard the far off whistle of a freight train. I was struck by its lonesome sound. Like the lines from that Hank Williams song, "the midnight train is whining low, I'm so lonesome I could cry."

My own dad died 22 years ago. But I celebrated Bill on Father's Day because I thought of him as a father. He thought of me as a son. He told my wife that a couple of weeks before he died. That meant an awful lot to me.

Memories are important and we should keep and cherish them. That's the way we can hang on to our fathers after they're gone.

If we hold fond memories in our hearts, we will be able to sit down on that swing and it won't seem quite so empty. And when we hear that whistle blow somewhere in the distance, we know the train is taking our fathers home where they can find themselves a little well-deserved peace.

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Copyright 2008 Wendel James Potter