I used to think getting into the sport meant changing who I was. But the makings of a football fan were always in me.
Life
I used to think getting into the sport meant changing who I was. But the makings of a fan were always in me.
On a Caribbean cruise in early December, my husband and I found ourselves one evening sharing the jacuzzi with an older couple. We exchanged the usual pleasantries about our travels and learned they were retired and from Dallas. “Nice to meet you,” I said, smiling. And then, as if experiencing a water jet-induced exorcism, the words spewed out of my mouth: “We hate your football team!!”
You could practically hear the record-scratch sound effect. My husband looked at me with a mixture of awe, amusement, and horror. I knew what he was thinking, because it was the same thought running through my head: Is this just who I am now? The Dallas couple, thankfully, laughed as I explained we loved the Philadelphia Eagles — sworn enemies of the Cowboys — and that my disturbingly exuberant declaration was, in fact, the culmination of recent major life change: I had become a football fan.
No one is more surprised by this than me. Growing up, the closest team to us was the New England Patriots, and — sorry — Tom Brady just always seemed like an arrogant charisma vortex. I would join my dad to watch tennis and baseball, which did not involve large men violently colliding and at least had comprehensible rules, but sports wasn’t a priority in our home. I was the kind of artsy teen who would unwittingly call an athletic game a “performance,” and even once I married my husband, a lifelong Eagles fan from South Jersey, I only watched games with him out of the corner of my eye while scrolling through Instagram. (I barely remember the Eagles winning the Super Bowl in 2018, but I do remember Pennsylvania girl P!nk singing the national anthem.)
Yet when I read Time’s Person of the Year profile of Taylor Swift — girlfriend of Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce and probably the most famous football fan in the world right now — I felt a newfound kinship: “Football is awesome, it turns out,” she said. “I’ve been missing out my whole life.” Discovering my own football fan within, I’d come to the same conclusion. I just beat her to it by a couple of years.
In a way, it all started with banana pudding.
In the fall of 2022, my husband started showing me funny YouTube clips of Eagles cornerback Darius Slay Jr. — an cartoonishly animated man who goes exclusively by “Slay.” (One particularly iconic clip is a supercut of him insistently correcting every reporter who calls him Darius.) Googling him led me to the Twitter account of his wife, Jennifer, who is a character all her own: obsessed with her husband, a wellspring of exuberant punctuation and emojis (“GIMME THAT SHIT SLAY!!!!????????????????????????,” reads one representative post), and beloved for regularly showing up to the 4th and Jawn podcast’s tailgates with her famous homemade banana pudding, which she also gives out to the team on Fridays.
