When you live in a house with six Patriots fans, football season typically sucks. As with all Bostonians, their complete irrationality when it comes to anything related to sports can be unbearable. Having won championships in football, baseball, basketball and hockey over the past ten years has instilled in them an unwarranted feeling of superiority. They expect their teams to be in the hunt for various titles every year; their sense of supremacy and assuredness knows no bounds. It’s maddening. Maybe that’s just because I only care about two sports, and one of the two teams I like — the New York Mets — is so far from being a championship caliber team I’ve developed a horribly cynical worldview when it comes to baseball. The other team I like, the New York Giants, has had some success in my life. I still remember watching Super Bowl XXV at a family friends’ house. I remember arriving home and crawling into my parents’ bed just to watch Scott Norwood’s 47-yard field goal sail wide. It was my first experience cheering for a championship team. A few years ago, when the Giants defeated the Patriots in Super Bowl XLII, I called in sick to work and watched the game with a handful of Giants fans and a handful of Patriots fans. It was an amazing day, and the feeling of winning that Super Bowl was even better than the first, but this was before I lived with six Patriots fans. For that Super Sunday we almost had an equal amount of Giants fans in the house to offset the Pats fans.
Not this year. Try as I might I could only find a couple New York fans to invite over, and one of them recently moved out-of-state. So that pretty much leaves me, the lone Giants fan, at a party — thrown in my own home — that could draw as many as 30 or 40 Bostonians/New Englanders. The best I could hope to do in the week leading up to the big game was ruffle everyone’s feathers with an insane degree of Giants fan-dom.
It’s been pretty easy thus far, because I think deep down inside all the Pats fans here are a little bit nervous about facing the Giants. Going as far back as the Conference Championship games, my roommates were talking about how their team would run right through Baltimore, and then they’d destroy the vaunted San Francisco defense, too. Nobody picked the Giants to win the NFC Championship, and when they did the smiles on my roommates’ faces were obviously feigned. These guys are already scared.
I was quiet all last week. I let Pat push their buttons from across the country. He would text them all multiple times a day, boasting about how the Giants were going to break their hearts again, cheering the Giants defensive line and wide receiving corps, championing Eli Manning as a better quarterback than Tom Brady — in short he was doing everything he could to drive these guys up the walls. I sat by idly watching everyone grow irate. Then, slowly, over last weekends and into the beginning of this week, I joined in on the fun. I’d text or e-mail my roommates pictures of Tom Brady swarmed by Giant defenders in Super Bowl XLII. I started showing up at the house wearing random Giants apparel. Each day of the week this week, I’ve walked in after work wearing a new Giants t-shirt or snapback cap.
Today I stepped up my game. I went to the art supply store in Glendale with one of my roommates — who shall remain nameless to protect them from the shit storm that would rain down should anyone else find out their true identity — to pick up some paint and a brush. Upon arriving back at the house, I set about making a homemade shirt to wear before and during the game. It was inspired by Pat’s 18-1 shirt that he wore for weeks after Super Bowl XLII. Here’s the result:
Of course, I’m horribly unartistic when it comes to drawing or painting. So I had my roommate basically do all the work for me. In the end, it made the creation of this shirt so much more entertaining. Because the only thing better than making your own handmade anti-Patriots shirt is having one of your roommates — a Pat’s fan — do it for you.
I already know that Sunday is going to go down as one of the most important, memorable days since I moved to Los Angeles. I can’t wait.
Oneohtrix Point Never – Zones Without People [MP3]
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