Saturdays are days of mourning at Georgetown. Instead of happily bounding out of bed, grabbing some Tylenol and heading off to the Tombs to get steeled for the game ahead, the average football fan awakes to the unhappy reality that if he or she is to feed his or her addiction, it will be done cheering on some other college with a good football team. While our boys dutifully mix it up with teams that barely register on the radar, the eyes of the would-be cult of the Hoya are glued to ESPN, where Hoya football never treads, watching throngs of happy and deranged fans cheering for brutish gangs of fools-cum-heroes with exotic names like Nebraska or Colorado blazed across their chests. Such is the recurring nightmare every Saturday. With this understood, the rationale behind staying in bed until 2 p.m. suddenly becomes quite clear.
The implications of this nightmare range further than these bouts of the Saturday morning blues. I often ponder the future, and how often I will have my secretary cut a check to Georgetown. Then I think about my father, who regularly contributes to his alma mater. In talks with him about college, he rarely gets too excited about those lost years. But when he sees his team play football, he gets The Look. He becomes crazed with thoughts of fury and loss, with remembrances of past victories and heroic coaches. His nose starts to bleed, and sometimes his soul leaves his body.
I suspect that these football-induced moments of ecstasy fuel his undying support for his school. Forty years down the road, you won’t think back and say, “God, I love Georgetown because of the new buildings they put in the Southwest Quad.” You won’t even remember such boring details. Then you’ll see your team on TV, and suddenly, you’ll be back in college again, living and dying by your team’s record. And you’ll say something like, “God, wasn’t that great when we won the Big East and everybody got laid?”
But you won’t. And if you’re me, you’re keeping your pocketbook tightly shut until Georgetown promises victory on the most holy of American sporting grounds.
I’ve had a recurring dream, and this is how it goes. Over lunch with the Reverend Leo O’Donovan, the holiest man in Manhattan, I bring up these apprehensions about Georgetown’s future. The old bear starts to chatter, his teeth clacking together, creating sounds reminiscent of the mysterious language of the Bushmen. His glass starts to shake, spilling perfectly good J&B all over his ever-present cashmere scarf. This is not what I’d expected, but I act like it was. Then he speaks: “Football at Georgetown?” he screeches, “Why you mad fool, what do you think I was doing racing all over the globe when I was the boss? Selling ice cubes to Eskimos? No, you little bastard, trying to scrape up the funds to get us into a Bowl game, any Bowl game, or at least hire us a few corn-fed All-Americans.” Indeed, the Catholic right has long been known for its fascination with self-mutilation and its feverish desire for causing pain to those who wish to enjoy life. But I cannot forgive the old bear; failed intentions are still failures. Then I wake up with a bad taste in my throat, and my own cashmere scarf mysteriously tied into a noose.
But where Leo tried and failed, perhaps this administration will at last understand our needs, strap on a pair and start soliciting funds from alumni. It is a fact that alumni are out there enduring sleepless nights, itching and sweating and salivating, only too ready to give cash for football. It’s like my roommate Justin Lewicky always says: “I like basketball. But what besides football makes you want to get up in the morning, crack open a beer and say “BLEEEAAAGAGGHH! FOOTBAAAAALLL!!” A real fan does not lose these passions with age; often, the fits become more violent.
When it comes down to it, the football problem is not a money problem at all. Instead, Georgetown’s money problem is a football problem. If solving Georgetown’s crisis of pride is just a matter of draining the slush funds, paying off some brutes from far-off Nebraska to drag their hulking corn-fed frames to D.C. and getting the Blue and Gray on national television, then damn the nay-sayers, would-be academics and apparatchiks. Get me the Devil, because I am ready to make a deal.
