My Involuntary NFL Sabbatical

It was September 1, 1996 at 10:04 am Pacific Time. Sunday morning, Week 1 of football season and a game was just then kicking off.


I’d been a football fan since 1975, I was eight, and my team had always been the Cleveland Browns. Very sadly, the Browns had moved to Baltimore at the conclusion of the previous football season and changed their name to the Baltimore Ravens. My Cleveland Browns no longer existed!

I was tremendously disappointed with this development, but couldn’t be certain how it would affect me until football returned. I’d been a football watcher on Sundays during football season for 20 years. Would I still feel compelled to watch the great pageantry that is professional football even though I was now without a team? For whom, now, should I root? I was riddled with confusion. Today I would find my answers as the first games of the season kicked off across the country.


“Honey, do you want this?” My girlfriend at the time, who later, to my glee, would become my bride, asked if I had an interest in watching the football game that was airing on the television.

Thinking briefly upon Sweet Pea’s query, “No thanks.”


Silly thing, I didn’t know how I would feel about football again until that first kick off of the new season. Here we were. I was surprised at how easily I had turned the page on the NFL. Its draw for me had been extinguished.
-klem


[Note: An NFL team returned to Cleveland in 1999. It would be a few years more before I made my peace with the NFL and returned as a spectator.]