Don’t Bother Me. I’m Healing Myself Watching Football.

How a winning sports team can help you get through a losing patch in your life.

I hadn’t been in San Francisco very long.

No job and no direction. Not much money. And the man of my dreams was putting starlight in someone else’s eyes.

I’d moved from a breathtaking place on the ocean after a bad breakup and was patching my life together. Again. So on a lonely Sunday afternoon, I decided to mend a few hems in front of the TV.

While threading a needle, I happened to look up at the channel I’d absently surfed. A football player threw a pass that made me think of a ballet move. It was that elegant and precise. He was threading his own kind of needle, sending the ball high in the air through a pack of scary defenders into the arms of the receiver, not an inch to spare, who turned on a dime and ran it in for a game-winning touchdown.

Typical Sunday fare for millions of Americans, but a new delight for me. I gasped at the feat. Thrilled at the spectacle, I made a note to watch the game the next Sunday, until I found out that game had ended the season.

I hadn’t been that excited about anything since my breakup, and it was just a guy throwing a football. I wrote down the quarterback’s name so I wouldn’t forget. I’d be back next year.

Joe Montana.

1984 and the beginning of my obsession with football.

You have to understand, I wasn’t a sports gal. Ballet, art museums, the symphony, Bach. I was a culture vulture. That’s what fueled my creative spirit. Literature inspired my writing.

But events in my life had thrust me into a pit so dark I thought the sun had gone out of business.

When the next season came around, I’d forgotten about the 49ers. I was still trying to dig my way out as a temp, dating loser after loser, rudderless as ever.

Even though a spell of heartbreak anorexia had kicked in and my clothes fit like magic, I couldn’t take pleasure from the thin figure I’d always struggled to maintain. Nothing was working.

So I was hardly a 49er faithful the next year. I don’t recall what jogged my memory to turn on the first game of the season, but from the first kickoff, I was hooked for the rest of the year and into the next.

Of course, it was easy to be a fan of the 9ers back in the day, in their glory years. They couldn’t lose for winning. In the happy years of my marriage my husband would school me on college football on Saturday afternoons while our toddler daughter played at our feet. So I knew enough to follow the game.

Perhaps it was my guardian angel looking over me to send me toward that team, that year. To attach me to something so good, so winning, to remind me there is life after heartache.

The San Francisco football team knew about heartache. They’d been so far down in the bottom of the NFL barrel, a sportscaster might say, 9er who?

They hadn’t been a winning franchise since Methuselah was teenager. Maybe that’s why I attached myself to them. They’d been down so long and all that. They might show me how to look up.

Of course, none of that was conscious. At least at first. So big deal, I was a Niner fan. So was everyone else in the world. Joe and Jerry Rice, together they started to build a dynasty.

But they did more for me. I never understood the allure of sports. I’d always scoffed at grown men wearing their team jerseys and getting drunk watching a game. But there I was, howling like a banshee every time Jerry scored.

Of course, I did it in the privacy of my living room because in public, I was the epitome of decorum. Alone on Sunday afternoons, though, I let it all hang out. And something about attaching myself to a winner helped me get through the awful months that turned into a few awful years of having no direction, no love, no success of my own.

When my team won, it felt personal. A Sunday afternoon of smashmouth football when my team crushed another opponent helped me feel like I could conquer the world. At least while I watched the highlight reels after the game.

A few years later, to my surprise, I found myself watching a golf tournament. To me, golf had seemed as exciting as washing the kitchen floor, but then a putting match got my attention. I decided to give it a look.

Soon after, Tiger came on the scene. What can I say? I was torn between the PGA and the NFL, but whichever I watched, it was from a perch far above the personal hell where I’d arrived that first Sunday trying to stitch my life together in front of a football game.

Now, decades later, I know enough about heroes to understand you have to pick them carefully and know their place in your life. Sports teams eventually lose, and many champions have feet of clay.

I began to lose interest in football when the scandals of the team owner came to light, and the front office treated Joe badly I thought. It was hard to root for guys who abused women, when that stuff became news. The Niners I loved either didn’t do that or they kept it quiet. Either way, my loyalty wasn’t compromised.

And then, Tiger. What can I say?

So I stopped watching sports, but I didn’t need that fix anymore. I’d fixed my life and moved on, way way beyond my sad days of the ‘80s.

But lo and behold. The Niners are 7 and 0 again. First time since 1990 or so. I remember that year. I remember all the good years. Now we’ve got Jimmy G. Is he another Joe? Probably not. There’s only one Joe, but Jimmy’s doing himself proud.

I’m watching again, for the fun of it, skipping over my deep reservations about the violence and body bruising that I didn’t think about in my early days. When football was part of my therapy. I’m rooting for the guys again. Will I stick around if they start losing?

I’m a fair-weather fan. I admit it.

But I’ll always be grateful for the old Niners. They helped me understand what the guys in the sports bars wearing their team’s jerseys know, under layers of beer, chicken wings, and unrealized dreams. That sports fill a function in our society.

The Greeks knew it. Of course, they idolized the perfection of the body. But I’ve read their plays and poems. You can’t tell me they didn’t love winners.

I haven’t fooled myself. It wasn’t the San Francisco football team that pulled me out the depths of despair in those dark times. I had work to do on myself. A Sunday afternoon screaming at the TV because the Ref made a bad call wasn’t right the wrongs in my psyche.

But I had a place to put some love that had gone missing. I found some hope when I felt hopeless, that my guys would come through for me on game day when I could barely come through for myself.

I had a bit of triumph that gave me just enough of a boost that I could face Monday morning again and carve a path through my gloom until I became my own winner.

Let’s face it. There’s nothing magical about a bunch of sweaty players chasing a ball around. It’s just a game, whether it’s soccer or hockey or golf or curling.

But there’s a reason we go nuts for our team. Yes, it’s fun, and we all like winners. Underneath all that, there’s also projection. I’m not sure we could survive without it.

We see ourselves in the roles of our heroes on the field. Where we can’t in our own lives reach the brass ring, they do it for us. Make us feel better than we think we are, capable of more than we can shoulder, at least in the moment.

At least for a few hours on a Sunday afternoon. And that, my friends, when your spirit is shattered, is priceless.

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