By Bill King
Way back when I was a boy, we played football in my backyard with an old, dried-up coconut. That thing was older than I was. I’m not sure, but it may have even been older than the game itself! Our coconut football was still encased in its oblong outer covering, so it actually looked like some kind of fossilized football. Every part of our makeshift football had dried up, so it was as hard as a rock. If you went deep and the QB threw you a bomb, you had better not let that coconut slip through your hands, or it might crack your coconut…or at least bloody your nose!
Back in those days, televised football games were in their infancy. There may have been a few people who claimed to have E.S.P., but nobody had E.S.P.N. or had ever heard of such. The only television cable we had were the guidewires that held our antenna in place. If they ran to the ground, they could do some serious damage when you ran into them on a long pass or a bicycle! We lived life dangerously back then. Between the guidewires and the coconut footballs, I’m surprised any of us actually made it to adulthood.
We only picked up three channels off those old antennas, so we only had the opportunity to watch a few football games in black-and-white each weekend. There were a few college games on Saturdays and a few NFL games on Sundays. Eventually, Monday Night Football with Howard Cossell and Dandy Don came along.
Fast forward a few years, and cable television arrived. I first connected to cable in the early 80s. I think we only received about 30 channels for the low, low price of $15 per month. That was only fifty cents per channel. Then came satellite television. I surfed that wave for several years. I eventually went back to cable, but cable had changed. Now, I’m receiving 2,398 channels and pay more for cable each month than I paid for my first car! My cable bill is as much as my electric bill, but then, in all fairness, my grocery bill these days is about the same amount as my mortgage! We now have more football games than we can possibly watch, or at least we did until this season. A couple of weeks ago, I tuned in to my first game of the season, but right about kickoff time, my picture went blank. It seems that Mickey Mouse and Spectrum are not getting along, so we, the customers, have been left in the dark…literally, and with no refund for all those missing channels and games.
There are certain things that simply aren’t done. The late singer/songwriter Jim Croce sang, “You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind, you don’t pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger, and you don’t mess around with college football in the South.” Well, something close to that. I guess they figured we would sit around and wait for the feud to end and then pay the increased rates so we could watch the games. The younger generation has told me for some time, I need to start streaming. So, guess what! I have now learned to ski, both on water and snow, surf, but not on water, and as of last week, I’ve learned to stream. That’s not done on water either! Something else that’s not done is to unplug college football before the first kickoff. There really are some things you simply don’t do, and not all of them are about football.
