I was a football fan when Wendell Bryant's mom patted me on the back, just as I had been when I interviewed Michael Bennett, or when I'd see Ron Dayne standing outside Ingraham Hall on Tuesday mornings. Usually, I'm not much for football.
Usually, I read the sports section on Sunday not because I care about football, but because I need to study up for the week's conversations. Everyone talks about football, and sometimes I wonder if anyone really cares.
Personally, I don't care, and it wouldn't even bother me if the University of Wisconsin had no football team. In fact, most of the time I think we'd all be better off here without football, but then I change my mind.
My cousin will e-mail me from China with something to say about the Badgers, or I'll distribute programs before a home game, and the crowd will get me excited. Sometimes for a minute or even a day I'll become a fan, but most of the time I don't care.
In high school, I didn't care about my school's football team, but I went to every game because I had friends on the team. When I came to school here, I didn't have any friends on the team, so I didn't buy football tickets.
I'll admit I bought tickets my sophomore and junior years, and I got caught up in the Heisman hype and the Rose Bowl chase, but it all comes down to this year, and now I don't go to football games anymore.
By now I've spent enough money, and I've put in enough time standing in the student section. I've had the sunburns of the first few games of the season, and I've yelled, \eat shit,"" with everyone else, and I don't even know why.
I think I was yelling out of boredom, and I think I was doing everything else because it's what I was supposed to do.
If you attend classes at the University of Wisconsin, you're supposed to attend football games there, too. You're expected to spend something like $15 a game, and you're expected to stand by your team when they violate rules and make the university into a national joke.
I think you're supposed to say, ""Oh, but he plays football,"" when a football player steals a TV or beats up a pizza man or threatens to knock down some girl's door at the Regent, but I don't know. Who really knows?
I get the impression that a lot of people really don't have a clue. People get all dressed up in their red and white and then can't understand what is even going on on the field. I've seen girls studying at games, and I've wondered if they weren't among the ones who really knew what was going on. They knew they were wasting their time.
So now I'm already wasting my time studying up for next weekend's Michigan game. I'm not going to the game, but I need to be able to talk about it. I need to have something to say in case I run into Barry Alvarez or Brooks Bollinger. I haven't met those guys yet, but as luck will have it I will, and then for a minute I'll be a football fan again.
andrewmiller@students.wisc.edu
