Skin in the Game

Jimmy G will lead the 49ers against the Pack on Saturday Night

What do Los Angeles, 

San Francisco, Cincinnati, Buffalo and Kansas City have in common?

If you answered "nothing," you are 99-percent correct.

On a scale that measures employment opportunities, unvaccinated citizenry or numbers of E-bikes flying down the road, you will find wide discrepancies. Especially this time of year.

If you said, "fanatics," you hit the jackpot!

Make that football fanatics who will prove their lunacy this weekend.

I hid Tampa Bay from the above list to avoid the obvious. And besides,Tom Brady fans and non-fans are all over the map.

Even COVID will take a backseat to NFL Playoff Weekend with eight teams banging heads while their fans scream, pound their chests and enact a weird human ritual that will take our minds off of pandemic overload, personal problems and political fatigue.

Sports are our last bastion of agreed upon winners and losers, my friend Glenn pointed out to me recently. There are no disputes when the game ends and the score is posted. Reality prevails.

This weekend, football will play the role of savior and prove that America really is united by our love for the polyhedron-shaped leather spheroid known as the pigskin. 

In 1906, Bradbury Robinson of St Louis University had no idea of the significance of his act when he threw the first forward pass ever recorded in a football game. Or maybe he was prescient and did know the omnipotent power of a spiral.

For years I didn’t watch football. I hated football. Football represented everything that is wrong with our country, especially professional football with its meglomaniacal team owners who exploit our modern-day gladiators for profit and prestige.

Football is a thinly veiled form of blood-sport that makes diminutive white men wealthy, so clubbish that they would not allow one of their own, a pucker-lipped pissant with the initials D.T., to own a team of his own.

Consider that a three-plus hour football game contains only 10-minutes and 43 seconds of real action, according to a Wall Street Journal study. "The rest is fill, the Styrofoam peanuts in between: commercials, replays, coaching, huddling, officials muddling" and broadcasters prattling away with obviously stock remarks and commentary.

So will I be watching football this weekend?

You bet I will.

Because my team, the San Francisco Forty-Niners -- who are actually headquartered and play their home games in Santa Clara -- will enter the icy tundra Church of Lambeau in sub-freezing Green Bay on Saturday night against the storied Green Bay Packers, the only publicly owned NFL team in America, whose shareholders wear crowns of cheese on their heads, the numero uno seeded team in the NFC.

I really don't care who my error-prone Niners will face, but the frigid weather and the wily Green Bay quarterback, Aaron Rodgers, who misrepresented his COVID immunity, will make the battle more... interesting.

When I was a lad, I was all about football. I collected football cards of players like Dick "Night Train" Lane of the Detroit Lions and Willie "The Wisp" Galimore of the Chicago Bears. I begged my father to take me to the Rams games at the Los Angeles Coliseum so I could see my favorite player, Jon Arnett, run with the ball. I played football from elementary school through high school. Until it broke my heart, which is another story.

The elusive Jon Arnett, 1957

It took years before I was lured back to football by the San Francisco Forty-Niners with Joe Montana, Dwight Clark, Ronnie Lott and Jerry Rice.

In 1995, I watched Steve Young lead the Niners to Super Bowl victory over the San Diego Chargers at a sports bar in Capitola with California's esteemed U.S. Senator Alan Cranston also in attendance.

Yes, this weekend I will be among the millions of Americans -- my fellow football fanatics-- who will be watching and hollering about pigskin action -- and inaction -- in our homes, in stadiums and taverns across the land.

Because I have skin in the game. And win or lose I will accept the results.

As of Saturday morning the spread is Packers -5.5. The Pack are 8-0 at home. 

Forty-Niners are 5-1 against the spread in their last six games; 7-3 overall on the road.

Go Niners!