Welcome Back to Football Hell
Regarding the 2017 Blog and what I'm planning on doing with this one
I was very intoxicated and on a cruise ship on one of the final days of 2016 when I had the idea to put together a book. Or at least something similar to a book, involving the amount of writing which would go into a book even if it never got printed as a book, inspired by the essays I’d been reading for a nonfiction creative writing class I had taken in the just-ended semester, in particular one about a guy on a cruise ship that I’d read in preparation for going on the aforementioned cruise ship, where the author talks to people, sets scenes, evokes feelings, that sort of thing. I wanted to do that for a sport, and I felt that the team to which I was most intensely connected in what was at the time my favorite sport was primed to be an interesting subject for it. The beloved Kansas Jayhawks of intercollegiate football. They had shown improvement in 2016, winning two more games than they had in the 2015 season with a new, exciting coach, eventually pulling out a dramatic win over Texas late in the year. 2017 was set to be the turnaround season, the year wherein the team’s potential became real - And I would be there, documenting it all.
That was, I think, December 31st, 2016. I had eight months to plan: I’d buy a domain name and come up with a format and a schedule to stick to, I could attend certain sporting events in the interim and write practice pieces. I looked over the schedule. I could sit or stand in different sections for each game, experience each game differently with new people - I could be with the students one game and with my parents in another and on the hill in another. I pieced together how feasible it’d be to drive to Fort Worth and Ames, even Athens, Ohio to see away games as a fan for the first time – I’d spent my college years with the Marching Jayhawks. I was about to enter my second senior year, I was twenty-two years of age, and I had finally found a project that matched my ambitions of writing something of substance with a topic that I felt deserved that substance. I’d start in August.
What I did not see as I made these plans was the metaphorical guillotine that hung over my neck, one which fell down right about at the beginning of that August. August 1st is a familiar date to Lawrencians, it’s when the majority of leases in the town start, a factor of Lawrence’s status as a college-town. August 1st is the first page of the next chapter for most in Lawrence, be it something as small as the first date of a new lease in town or a major life shift away from the comfort of the fair Alma Mater. I was a fifth-year senior, and the bulk of my friends had finished in four. Most of them found jobs elsewhere, which took them away from Lawrence, and by proxy, me. I knew it was coming, but the feeling of seeing the glint of the guillotine blade above you is nonetheless a different sort of feeling from the one which follows as it drops. I can remember the moment when it hit me: I was alone, sitting on the blue leather couch at my aunt’s house as I dogsat her boxer, Ruby, her digital cable package set to a 90s Nostalgia Video Block on MTV Hits which had picked the most emotionally charged moment possible to show Lisa Loeb in the horn-rimmed glasses running around that spacious 1990s New York City loft throwing herself into the lyrics on what I think is the eighth verse, kind of the climax of the song “and you said that I was naive | and I thought that I was strong” et cetera et cetera looking around looking at myself and really coming to an understanding that I was alone and most of my friends were really gone and the bulk of my other friends were in the Marching Jayhawks and if I didn’t do something to ensure I was around someone I cared about the sadness and loneliness would overtake me to a crucial, potentially irreversible point.
So I did a fifth year with the marching band, to maintain sanity, even though I recognized it’d severely diminish the potential of the project I’d set out for myself. I’d already bought the domain name for Football Hell dot net (I’d taken the name from a combination of a Jon Bois piece and a KU Promotional video that declared Allen Fieldhouse to be “Basketball Heaven”), I figured it could at least be an exercise in consistently keeping a writing project going over time and not giving up on it after I started having to work to come up with ideas.
My mental state at the time reduced the original Football Hell from a collection of essays to basically a series of game recaps, which when I look back over them are still relatively entertaining and thoughtful, and still available at the original Wordpress blog, footballhellnet.wordpress.com, though I let the domain name lapse years ago. If you read through the 2017 posts, you’ll see a young man’s optimism crushed in real time, his love turned to disgust and regret. The complete lack of gravitas I give to that last post about the Oklahoma game I think is heartbreaking in context. But it wasn’t what I wanted it to be, it’s not the collection of works that I could turn into my own A Massive Season or Dallas Til I Cry, it feels too stuck in the moment, like I was writing for the Monday or Tuesday after the game rather than creating something evergreen - I had to pad too much of it with stats and gifs from the game on the field, which wasn’t really what I wanted to do, but every framing story would’ve been “I stood with the band.” But I did it, I worked on it consistently from week to week, I finished it, and I think back on it positively.
It has been five years since that depressed autumn in Lawrence, and I’d spent nary an Autumn in Lawrence since. The interim autumns were spent in San Diego, California, Olathe, Kansas, and Waterloo, Ontario. Most games since the move I had to watch on TV or ESPN+, or when I was living in Canada via sketchy online streaming sites. I’ve counted six games I’ve attended live since, still somehow at least one game per year: Oklahoma State and Texas in 2018, Baylor in 2019, Oklahoma State and I think Iowa State in 2020, and Texas Tech in 2021, keeping alive a streak of attending at least one KU Football game since I think 1998. I very easily could’ve quit caring at any point during this stretch. I moved to a much larger city in a much different and fun climate to attend a school with a much better football team, then there was a disease, then I was in a different country where they didn’t really play big-time college football, and somehow two things were always true, I cared about the Kansas Jayhawks of football and I would do whatever I could to attend home games if I was scheduled to be around.
Through a series of cosmic coincidences and mishaps, I find myself, in August 2022, again in Lawrence, Kansas. Again I am connected at the hip to the University, this time as an employee rather than a student, and again I intend to attend every game I can this fall. This fall, I’m throwing myself back into Football Hell.