Football road trips

My dad and I are planning a trip to Philadelphia to check out Citizens Bank Park. It’s still in the early stages, so I don’t really have all the details yet, except that we’re planning on driving. More accurately, my dad will be driving; I will spend the entire three hours in the passenger seat. This is standard: Like buying cold cuts or building an ice factory in the Belizean jungle, distance driving is an endeavor my father has deemed me congenitally unfit to perform. He doesn’t even fully trust me to be a passenger.

Before the trip begins, he’ll remove the cigarette lighter on the grounds that I might accidentally start a fire. A fresh piece of duct tape will be applied to the tape deck, a reminder of an incident from my childhood when I attempted to jam a CD into the cassette deck, a bout of foolishness that, even in my 20s, my dad feels I’m a constant threat to reenact. It will be exactly like every other car ride we’ve ever taken. I can’t wait.

Football doesn’t lend itself to the road trip, unless you’re one of those folks who finds meaning in six-man high school football or a pilgrimage to Bear Bryant’s boyhood home. The unpredictable fall weather takes away a lot of the charm: Peeing in a trough at Fenway Park seems quaint and folksy when it’s 85 degrees and the girls are in their summer dresses; the novelty doesn’t translate to games at Arrowhead Stadium in late November when it’s 40 and drizzling. Baseball stadiums trade on their architectural eccentricities, encouraging fans to bask in the venue’s history (genuine or artificial). With Lambeau Field relegated to token “cathedral of the game” status, the remaining NFL venues (with the possible exception of Arrowhead) split the difference between all-purpose concrete monstrosities and dead-tech, post-modern teeth chatterers. There’s always college, but that invariably involves lots of standing, and trips to hellholes like Knoxville, Columbus and College Station.

If he can’t rely on history or comfort, where does the football fan go for something other than mock drafts and FLAT OUT COMPETITORS? I don’t know exactly. But here’s what worked for me:

South Bend in the offseason

Driving back across the country after my junior year of college, my friend and I passed something like two dozen signs for South Bend. Neither of us particularly wanted to visit, but then the red light on the gas tank started to flash, and it was either visit South Bend or risk being devoured by cannibalistic Hoosiers along the side of the highway. We chose South Bend. Within 12 seconds of entering the city limits, we were hopelessly lost and sobbing. But it was OK, we told ourselves — this is Small Town America, where people look out for each other. And it was. Except this was Raymond Carver’s Small Town America.

They still look out for each other, but it’s mainly because they think you’re plotting against them. Which again would be fine, except they also think you’re obsessed with Notre Dame. This won’t stand. We pulled into a driveway to turn the car around, but in the time that lapsed between shifting from drive to reverse, a 400-pound man leaped off his porch and told us that it cost $10 to park in his yard on game days. Game days? This was in early August. Somebody wasn’t playing with a full BCS exemption. We asked him how to get out of town. He gave us directions to the athletic offices. I asked if that was where they kept Ron Powlus’ Heisman Trophies. He told me to go to hell. The lesson: South Bend is weird and unfriendly and nobody in his right mind would want to play there. And if you disagree with that, you probably just live there.

Canada

A few weeks back, I talked with the inimitable Marc Trestman, the former Raiders offensive coordinator and current head coach of the Montreal Alouettes. He spoke with infectious energy about his experience in the CFL. He reveled in unpacking the intricacies of the Canadian game, although that probably had something to do with the fact he made the Grey Cup in his first season. Go 6-14 and suddenly those singles and mandatory 20 Canadians on every roster start to seem decidedly bogus. Anyway, Trestman seems to be enjoying himself, which is great. I know I had a good time when I went to an Argos game and a running back named Pinball arrived for the coin toss by rappelling down a rope affixed to the SkyDome roof. So that was fun.

Lambeau Field

A semi-serious recommendation. While the pleasures of northwest Wisconsin have been romanticized all out of proportion in recent years, to the point you’re supposed to believe Green Bay is the center of the football universe just because the fans don’t leave in the middle of the third quarter, the small-town setting has its quaint charms.

For one thing, they’ll interview you on the local news if you’re wearing the apparel of the opposing team. Really, it’s true. After a tough Redskins loss in 2007, I think no fewer than six reporters came over to the hood of the car to listen to me threaten Santana Moss with bodily harm.

The college road trip

Worth doing just so you know never to do it again. It’s like the Bizarro World episode of “Seinfeld” — everything is the same but somehow different. The drinking games all have different names; the good sororities are reversed; the houses and five-bedroom apartments are still inexplicably filthy, only now the grime is a problem.

I went to see a game in Ann Arbor my sophomore year at Wisconsin and it was one of the more disquieting experiences of my lifetime. It was like spending the weekend with the dad from “The Great Santini” — everything turned into a competition, and all I wanted to do was repress my love for Blythe Danner. When the Michigan folks lost any of these impromptu battles (which was often) they started citing UM’s reputation for academics, like having a highly ranked law school excuses the fact you didn’t hit a single cup in beer pong. Wisconsin is no slough when it comes to academics, but as the weekend wore on, I could see that I had nothing on these kids, minds so agile that they could recall the average SAT score of the incoming freshman class even at the tail-end of a night of heavy partying. I guess it’s true what they always say: When you get accepted in-state at the University of Michigan, you can write your own ticket on Wall Street.

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