Saturday, February 3, 2018

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- Super Bowl 2018 Edition

It's Saturday Night - 
time for more Genealogy Fun! 



Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible! music) is to:


1)  The Super Bowl is on Sunday, 4 February 2018 in the USA.  The New England Patriots are playing the Philadelphia Eagles for the National Football League championship up in Minnesota (an indoor stadium!).  The winners get to go to Disney World.  

2)  Predict the score for this game.  You have to predict the winning team and the closest to the actual score (point differential summed for both teams) to be the winner.  The winner of this contest gets announced next week in a Genea-Musings blog post.  

3)  Tell a story about your experiences playing football or watching professional football games.  Did you go to football games? Who in your family was the real fan of the game?  What were the pre-game routines?  How do you, or your family, react to good plays or bad plays, or wins or losses?

4)  Provide your entry in a comment to this blog post, in a blog post of your own, or in a Facebook or Google+ post.  Be sure to tell me about your post in a comment to this post.

Here's mine:

My score prediction:  Patriots 27, Eagles 20

I actually worked for the San Diego Chargers in the summer of 1963.  Read My first real job for more details. 

I've been a pro football fan since the late 1950s, growing up in San Diego before the Chargers came to town in 1961.  My father played football in high school, and my uncle Edward Seaver was a lineman for the Columbia University that went to the Rose Bowl in 1934 and beat Stanford, 7-0.  

When the Chargers came to town in 1961 I was 18, and watching the NFL games became a regular event on Sunday afternoons.  There was only one game a week.  I went to several Charger home games each season at Balboa Stadium near downtown San Diego.  In 1963, when I worked for the team, I started taking my 8 year old brother Scott to the games.  We went to the championship game also, my Chargers beat the Patriots 51-10 for the AFL championship.  

After I was working in engineering for awhile, I spent quite a bit of time at the local bowling alley, and some of the guys in the bar got tickets to the Chargers games at the new San Diego Stadium in Mission Valley.  So I went, and Linda and I eventually got season tickets for several years before our children were born.  We always sat in the first row of the upper deck at about the 30 yard line on the south side of the field.  

Alas, my home team, MY Chargers, have fled to a soccer stadium in Carson near Los Angeles.  They left because the San Diego voters wouldn't pony up $500 million for a jazzy downtown stadium, and the one in Mission Valley is 50 years old and not suitable for a Super Bowl any longer.  As luck would have it, the Spanos family has to pay about $500 million over 20 years for the privilege of moving to Los Angeles and leaving hundreds of thousands of fans here in San Diego.  Traitors, Judases, chasing the almighty dollar.  I hope the owners go broke.


It's going to be 75 F here on Sunday - perfect Super Bowl weather.  Enough said!  

 I still watch the Chargers games every week that they are on and sometimes watch the other Sunday afternoon game, and some of the Sunday night and Monday night games.  

I used to get upset during the games by a bad play or bad luck, but I've become more stoical in recent years (stuff happens!).  I still talk to myself about some plays, and I still suggest plays that should work to the TV, but nobody listens.  I don't dress up in a team jersey or shirt because they weren't lucky in the past.  I do have a bucket of popcorn at halftime of Charger home games.  

After 58 years of Chargers football, with one league championship (1963) and one Super Bowl year (1995 Super Bowl XXIX, lost 49-26 to the 49ers and it wasn't that close!), I yearn for another championship team.  I hope it comes soon - I don't have that many good years left!



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Copyright (c) 2018, Randall J. Seaver

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3 comments:

Lisa S. Gorrell said...

Well, being a baseball fan, football never really interested me, except when my dad asked me to Raider games.

https://mytrailsintothepast.blogspot.com/2018/02/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-super-bowl.html

GeneGinny said...

I have always been a huge football fan, having grown up in State College, PA (home of Penn State). Big fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers, especially after two of my college buddies went to play for them. Then moved to Seattle and converted to rooting for the Seattle Seahawks through many lean years and a few recent better years. I can't stand the Patriots or the Eagles, but would prefer the Eagles to win, just so Brady doesn't get to deliver his already-prepared MVP speech. Score: Eagles 24, Patriots 21. My daughter suggested that the Patriots could win and then have their title stripped for cheating. Then neither team would get credit for a win, right?

Janice M. Sellers said...

I am also a huge football fan, and I'm with Ginny about not wanting to deal with another Brady win.

http://www.ancestraldiscoveries.com/2018/02/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-super-bowl.html