Love, Jimmie

I’m so happy I picked the Titans for my team.  Yeah, that was a good call.

About a week after I made my big announcement here in which I was giddy with excitement over having a team to call my own, my friend Billie asked if I wanted to go to a Titans’ game.  She had tickets and parking passes and a bottle of wine for tailgating.  Being a rabid fan and all, I said yes. 

That was the weekend we played the Bears.  Did any of you see that game?  What an embarrassment that was.  It was just pure humiliation.  I’m pretty sure that every time the Bears trotted out their defense, we gave them the ball and they scored.  Our first two points of the game were awarded because of a mistake made BY THE OTHER TEAM.  I’ll say this, the Titans have pretty colors.  That’s something.  I picked something pretty, right?

Billie and I spent the entire game sitting four rows back from the end zone and in a sea of Bears fans.  There were four people to the right of us wearing Titan’s colors and literally ever other person around us wore orange and navy and had a beer in hand.  The whole stadium was like that.  Those are some dedicated fans right there. 

Over and over again, every time the Titans did something stupid, Billie and I would slump lower in our seats.  When we initially arrived we were proud of our sweatshirts and jerseys but by the 90^th Bears’ touchdown, we were practically sitting on the concrete floor under our seats and couldn’t find enough material to cover anything we had on identifying us as a Titan.  And also after the 90^th touchdown, Billie and I just started telling everyone around us, “It’s our Southern hospitality.  We let you win.  Plus, we brought the cheerleaders.  You’re welcome.”  And the Bears seemed truly grateful for that. 

So about the Bears’ fans . . . . will anyone shoot me if I say they were nice?  They really were. Some of the nicest people I’ve ever met sat next to us.  The men who were so complimentary of our cheerleaders were also complimentary of Billie and me.  They liked our hair and our voices and our niceness.  I asked a few of them where the Chicago hot guys were, you know, the ones they were supposed to bring in trade for our cheerleaders.  Their response:  “We are from Chicago.  We look like sausages.  We eat well.” Noted.

And proven.  Those same guys invited Billie and me to their after game celebration tailgate party.  A group of them rented an RV, loaded it up with food and booze and drove down here for the weekend and so they had parties every night.  One of the guys owns a chain of restaurants in Chicago and brought one of his giant logs of gyro meat and the thingamabob you cook it on.  They had sausages of every sort.  They had chips and pretzels and caramel corn and beer and liquor and some more beer and sausages.  Their one nod to good health was the tub of raw onions they had for the sandwiches and the lone tomato they picked up somewhere along the way. 

The group of them invented a sandwich for this road trip, called the Road Trip 2012 Man Sandwich Gyro Griller or some such nonsense.  I called it a Heart Attack on a Bun.  The sandwich started with a buttered grilled hoagie bun which was topped with at least one grilled sausage split in half lengthwise.  Into the sausage was layered an extraordinary amount of shaved gyro meat.  It was then topped with raw onion, a tomato, and more tzatziki sauce than can be good for you.  Good luck trying to eat that.  I did try it, minus the onion naturally, and after a few bites felt a little tight in my chest so I tossed the rest.  Oof.

Those guys were a lot of fun.  They were perfect gentlemen, too, which was a nice change.  Not every man who plies you with tasty beverages and food and then cleans up after you, actually washing dishes and taking out the trash, has noble intentions.  At least not in my experience.  We made no promises to keep in touch but after reading the news the following week, I sort of wish we had.  I think those guys would be inordinately proud to know that not only did the Chicago fans drink the stadium dry that day, they also wiped out nearly every bar downtown of beer.  Unheard of. 

Chicago Bears – beer drinkers, sausage cookers, football players.  What an experience.  By the way, I’m still a loyal fan of my team.  I just wish I’d get the chance to attend a game in which I don’t leave in utter humiliation.  Sigh.