The lunacy of fandom

On January 11, 1970, late in the first half of Super Bowl IV, the underdog Kansas City Chiefs, who’d been chipping away at my mental health for about an hour and a half with a steady stream of first downs culminating in field goals, finally broke the game open, as the commonplace goes, with a sucker play -- a trap, designed to take advantage of the Vikings’ growing desperation and defensive aggressiveness – springing old veteran Mike Garrett for a touchdown, and thereby escalating the score from a deeply worrisome 9 - 0 to an absolutely catastrophic 16 - 0. The Vikings that year dominated, when they dominated, defensively; they featured a primitive, brutish offense poorly suited to stirring comebacks. While at defensive end they trotted out the terrorizing Carl Eller (at 6’6”, back then gigantic for his position) and at defensive tackle the supernaturally quick Alan Page (who in one game caught a running back from behind before the back had hit the hole), their quarterback, Joe Kapp, looked and played like a guy who’d been recruited from a biker bar, and their running backs were white guys with crew cuts – Dave Osborn and Bill Brown – who, while they were tough as nails, had the foot speed of Roseanne Barr. And besides, Kansas City was physically beating them up. What happens when you have a brutish offense that’s getting physically beaten up?

The first half ended. The halftime show began. I left the television in a mental state that only Thomas Hardy or Malcolm Lowry could have described. I wandered the house. I was beside myself. I was thirteen years old.

In the photograph the colors are dark. It’s from late in the game. The gloom captures the mood that I remember viscerally, forty-two years later, from a certain point in that greased slide of a loss. It was the late third quarter. The Vikings, who that year either won through a kind of fearsome intimidation of their opponents’ traumatized offense or did not win at all, were confused and tentative. Their expressions were bewildered but game, the expressions of professionals who’d expected another outcome but could see where this was headed.

Paul Krause has that expression in the photograph. He’s just tackled Pitts after yet another end-around had produced yet another demoralizing first down, and what’s going on behind his eyes is a formulation that Sartre would have recognized, as in: Okay. So. That’s the way it’s going to be, then.

He’s carrying himself well, in a difficult situation, in other words. The Vikings often did. I almost never did, watching them. But they certainly gave me enough chances to improve, in that regard. They lost one playoff game on Christmas Day. They lost another on a Hail Mary miracle pass on the game’s final play. In the latter case, their quarterback Fran Tarkenton’s father, watching at home, had a heart attack and died. They played wonderful first halves and were annihilated in the second. They played miserable first halves and mounted heroic and insufficient comebacks. The one thing that has been invincibly consistent over the last forty-two years is that their seasons have ended with a loss. They’ve put together great teams. They’ve lost countless playoff games, six NFC championship games and four Super Bowls. When it’s come to the postseason, they’ve been upset coming right out of the blocks; they’ve been steamrolled by favorites; they’ve beaten great teams and then immediately lost to lesser ones. The Vikings over the last forty-two years have in fact been an encyclopedic workshop on losing -- the cosmos taking me by the hand and showing me the infinite ways in which such a thing can be done, and survived – which of course has its upside. Learning about losing might not be, after all, a bad first step in terms of learning about loss. And as many before me have pointed out, loss is a seminar in which, sooner or later, we’re all going to be enrolled.

I’m not still thirteen years old, at least not in most ways, but I am, by profession, a fiction writer. I negotiate made-up worlds. I nose around trying to imagine and retrieve moments of pain and loss and revelation. As a form of self-mortification, what I’m up to can seem both high-minded and foolish. Right next to my desk, then, is a little touchstone of childhood agony -- silly agony, but agony nonetheless -- to provide me, should I need it, with a shove in the right direction.

Or at least in the direction my favorite team has always gone. I’ve often been asked: in the event of a Super Bowl win -- a season that actually finished with a victory -- would I feel a euphoria to match the devastation I feel after a loss? It’s always seemed to me a question that doesn’t require an answer, since, as a Vikings fan, I’ll probably never find out. My loved ones have continued to consider my condition an affliction, and treat it like a drinking problem that recurs once a week for five months a year. They hold out the hope that I’ll outgrow it -- unlikely at this point -- or that perhaps the team will transform itself so dramatically -- the Los Angeles Vikings? -- that even I will register the arbitrariness of my loyalty, and drift away. And mostly I have been able to disengage enough that it might seem I’m cured. That comeback in the last 20 seconds in the Vikings’ 2012 opening game, for example: I checked the scores afterwards, to find out what had happened, but not too obsessively. I’ve been following the team’s subsequent success since, but reminding myself: sure, they’re doing well now, but where do you think this is going to end up?

Then three years ago, in 2009, the Vikings put together a nearly equally good team, crushed a good Dallas team in the divisional playoff and in the NFC championship ran up almost 500 yards in total offense against the eventual Super Bowl champions before, with seconds to go in the game and needing again only another chip shot field goal to win, Brett Favre threw an interception so jaw-dropping that my inbox flooded with condolence emails before the game had even fully ended. Oh, yeah, and there was also a bad call in overtime that moved the Saints into position for the winning field goal. But don’t get me started.

2009 NFC Championship Game

This year? I’m not going to follow that closely. But then again, I say that now. How is my wariness going to fare if they beat the Bears? Or the Packers? And keep their string going?