VIVID

I have my step-father to thank for getting me into sports. My childhood wasn’t the rosiest, but somehow sports made it all bearable. Most of my fondest and most vivid memories were of attending sporting events and especially football games. I went to my first game when I was nine and have been hooked since. I don’t know what Andy will eventually retain from his childhood. Right now, he remembers practically everything. But I wanted to give him some of the same cherished memory opportunities I had as a kid. We’d been to one football game three years ago and he remembers it still. The Phoenix Cardinals used to be an easy ticket. They’d get maybe 25,000 people at a game in a stadium capacity of 70-plus thousand. But now they’ve got a new stadium and games are sold out. I really wanted to take Andy to a game but sheesh. A $45 end zone seat was selling on the internet for $200. When I told Andy that $400 was simply too much for a football game and that we could go to a basketball AND hockey game instead, he seemed OK with it. But later his mom told me he was bummed out about it. So of course you know what dear old dad did.

I’d already bought the basketball tickets, but I knew I needed to buy the football tickets. I don’t think you can really put a price tag on a lifetime memory. So I bought and we went. We took pictures, we ate kettle corn, hot dogs, and ice cream, talked football strategy, and cheered on the hapless Cardinals. It’s a shame they didn’t even come close to beating the Cowboys. Even worse may be Andy’s lasting memory of the rude Cowboy fans at the game. Maybe he’ll have better memories of the Suns basketball game we went to because they won easily. But hopefully years from now, he’ll vividly remember the great time he had with his dad attending these cool pro sports games. Something tells me, somewhere down the road, it will be a story we will both share and remember with great fondness.