Three Yards and a Cloud of Dust
The language of football offers an immigrant girl growing up in South Carolina a way to connect with her father—and the USA.
In the summer of 1998, my housemate Eric Gomez says he’d like to visit an art school in Savannah not far from where I grew up in South Carolina. Eric didn’t attend college like everyone else I knew. But now, after we’ve all graduated, he says he’d like to try it out.
He’s a musician, and he plays a Moog. On the avocado-green walls of his bedroom, he has a poster of Eames-designed chairs. He’s soft-spoken, and when he’s not riding his Vespa, he races fixed-gear bikes. In the swirling grunge and Riot Grrrl alterna-scene of late ’90s Portland, Oregon, where he and I live, Eric makes sense. It’s easy to picture him at art school with his large, stylized glasses and thrift store duds, so I invite him to travel to the South with me on one of my trips home.
It’s how we end up on the Combahee River in July, hanging out at the dock of Katie’s river house. She’s one of my oldest friends, and I’ve been going to her family’s second home for years. We’re out in the midday sun despite the humid heat; it’s more than 100 degrees. Our high school pals Billy, James, and Jeremy are there, too, big Southern boys with farmer’s tans and bottles of Miller beer. The trio bake in the small motorboat moored to the dock, while Katie and I, cupped in inner tubes, float in the water. Eric sits on the dock a little ways from us, though we holler at him now and again to join us in the water.
“It’s gonna be McGwire, I know it,” Jeremy says from the boat.
“Griffey,” says James.
“His production always slumps in August and September,” Jeremy counters.
It’s true, what he says, and we are quiet afterwards. We each have our favorites. The home run record has stood a long while, and the chase is a fine and exciting thing that summer. News outlets track the contenders’ daily output, analyzing every at-bat, celebrating every homer. I tell my friends I think McGwire is taking something, juicing up with steroids maybe. The suggestion kindles a hot, happy argument about batting averages, Roger Maris, and trade rumors. Laughing shrieks ring out when one of us splashes the other to emphasize a point.
I look away from my friend, dip a hand in the cool river, and wonder how I survived the solitude of my own years in Dixieland.
“Why do you care?” Eric calls out from the dock.
The mayhem subsides, and the hush that falls over us this time is less agreeable. The boys squint at a distant point across the river. Billy chugs his beer; Katie tilts her head back, trails her arm in the water. I look up at Eric from my inner tube, surprised. His query is reasonable enough, but it sounds quarrelsome, like arguing about moon landings or gravity. Eric shifts his weight on the dock, rubs his neck.
“I mean, why, you know?” he asks again more softly.
My friends have lived their lives in football jerseys and dirty cleats, at afternoon practices and away games. They know the dates of homecoming games even now after college. They shift their work schedules so they can go to those games and the tailgating parties beforehand. Eric’s question begs another: What’s the point of any of that?
His eyes meet mine. My first thought is that Eric doesn’t fit in. His aesthetic and hobbies, so apropos in Portland, are less common in this part of the country, but my friends have been solicitous toward him in the genteel manner of the South. No, what I realize anew is the divisive nature of sports. Not the fractious feelings that arise from cheering for one team instead of another, though that is certainly part of it— I mean sports’ ability to parse the world into those who are like you and those who are not.
I sip my now-lukewarm Miller and look at Eric’s brown skin and mine, think of the bands we’ve seen together and our shared appreciation of midcentury design. I consider how seldom I found enthusiasts for my own loves—modern art, indie films, poetry—when I still lived in the South, how those interests isolated me. Eric appreciates them too, but I can’t imagine he knew many others with similar pursuits back in Indiana, where he was raised.
I look away from my friend, dip a hand in the cool river, and wonder how I survived the solitude of my own years in Dixieland.
You can spend autumns in South Carolina hearing nothing more than a light reprimand to Put on a sweater, for god’s sake, but in 1982, it seemed the cold and dark fell deeper and earlier each afternoon. On weekends, Tammy, Cathy, and I stayed out as long as we could in the woods behind our subdivision, building a lean-to out of broken pine limbs, but the chill air and the fading light and our mothers’ insistent voices eventually forced us in. G’bye! G’bye! I would wave to Tammy and Cathy as I got on my bicycle and pedaled home. There, a cup of Swiss Miss, homework, and any one of the Narnia chronicles filled the rest of the dimming afternoon.
But there were only so many books and assignments to occupy me that long fall, so my attention always turned to my father, who had magicked a kingdom on the couch. He stretched out there, outfitted in his weekend uniform of jeans and white, V-neck T-shirt, the ever-present Marlboro dangling from his lips, watching a football game that threatened to play the whole fall, if not the winter and very possibly eternity. Friday night games became Saturday afternoon matchups and then Sunday showdowns. My father spectated it all as the benevolent monarch of the living room.
Some sorcery allied my mother to him. No sooner had I pulled out the music bench, arched my wrists over the keys, and begun playing scales would she scuttle out of the kitchen to shoo me out of the living room, where the piano shared top billing with the TV in our small house. With my sister and me banished from the living room and my mother in the kitchen ironing, my father ruled a veritable football dynasty.
It’s only now that I realize he was lonely. Or maybe I see in him an echo of who I was at the time, a ten-year-old whittling away at the weekend before the welcome routine of school took her out of the house into a universe beyond family. I had neighborhood playmates and a younger sister to take up my time, but my father had no male relatives—no brother, son, or in-law—to watch games with him. His weekends didn’t resemble the commercials or sitcoms: He never had buddies over for beer; he never went to bars to grouse about which player flubbed a pass. My father didn’t watch football the way I imagined most everyone across the country did, but we were an immigrant family in a small Southern town in the early 1980s, and that had something to do with it, I think.
Instructed not to bother my father under any conditions whatsoever during that long-ago autumn, I came to see him as a target, a questionable tyrant of the TV and living room.
Professional interest may have played a role too. My father sold cars, and although he lost his accent with eerie swiftness after we immigrated from the Philippines, at the dealership he was still a Filipino surrounded by good ol’ boys. The ability to talk about football (and sports more generally) likely gave him a way to join in backroom banter or to chat with a prospective customer, but none of that would occur to me until I was much older.
Instructed not to bother my father under any conditions whatsoever during that long-ago autumn, I came to see him as a target, a questionable tyrant of the TV and living room. His fiefdom was unstable; his boundaries, porous. I decided to invade.
I began my attacks by torpedoing my mother’s pleas to leave my father alone on those cold autumn afternoons. Instead, I would sprawl, bored and dangerous on the living room floor, equidistant from the TV and my father on the nearby couch. My mother trailed me there, and we argued, my insistence on staying where I was loud and then louder. My father ignored us. Marlboro intact, his head bobbed around our bickering profiles to glimpse the screen. Nothing swayed him from the game.
After a time, my mother quit her hourly reconnaissance because she consistently found my father and me watching the game in silence. Despite myself, I was entranced. The quiet room heard only the drone of the TV and my father’s occasional exclamations. He smoked. I studied the game from the floor. My body was a line in the carpet dividing us from everyone else. We were doing the same thing, my father and I, both learning football by watching it, but I didn’t know that then. Of course, he wouldn’t be familiar with American football; it’s not played in the Philippines and my father’s access to it would’ve been limited before our move to the States in the late ’70s. Was it even broadcast in the Philippines? I doubt it, but I believed he knew the game because he knew everything. He was a father, which made him omnipotent, because that’s how children understand parents to be.
I assumed he knew what was happening on the screen: men grouping, clapping hands, barking nonsequential numbers, colliding. Terms like free safety and shotgun formation electrified the air, and I asked my father to interpret their shimmer. Having spent weeks observing the game, he did this with a cool nonchalance that I later recognized in old-time movie stars like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. Seeing them on cable years later in the original Ocean’s Eleven with their dark, cleanly parted hair and perfect implacability, I found the resemblance startling. After dragging deep Rat Pack-style on his cigarette, my father crossed his arms behind his head and translated what we heard on TV, a variant of English not spoken by anyone I yet knew. The QB throws a Hail Mary pass when..., he would begin calmly as he explained the game’s rhythms and stratagems.
“What happened?” she’d ask. My father would smile. “Oh, the Chiefs just scored the game-winning field goal.” His response drew the inevitable, “What’s a field goal?”
The lessons were nothing like when my father helped me with homework. Those sessions ended in tears, with me screeching how he knew nothing about New Math or long division or anything at all. My father responded with hard words during those fights. He may have had the charm and cool of Ol’ Blue Eyes, but he shared Sinatra’s famous temper and could be cruel when faced with ignorance, even a child’s. Once on the porch, he appraised me and said, unprovoked, “You’re really dumb.” I had been peering down the street to see if my friends were at the far end of the block but turned to face my father, who sat unbothered, cigarette in hand. The tears stung as I blinked rapidly and replied with a sagacity I marvel at today, “You’re not supposed to say that to me. You’re not supposed to say that to a kid or, or, or anybody.” Now, when he explained why a player with the ball runs at an angle with a defensive lineman pounding behind him, his voice was low and conspiratorial. My only response was to nod and sip my Swiss Miss. I liked these lessons. My father took me in his confidence, imparting information from the world of adults toward which I still had long to travel. Learning the meaning of three yards and a cloud of dust—surely the most mystifying sequence of words ever heard by my fifth-grade self—seemed a kind of grinding advance toward adulthood and maybe another world I had yet to discover.
My unquestioning acceptance of his explanations warmed me to him in a new way. He chuckled when I hoorayed loudly for my teams. We cursed at botched calls, high-fived when the Redskins scored a touchdown. Curious about the revelry, my little sister would wander into the living room. “What happened?” she’d ask. My father would smile. “Oh, the Chiefs just scored the game-winning field goal.” His response drew the inevitable, “What’s a field goal?” Our words hurried against one another as we tried to explain it to her, but my sister would interrupt with a soft, “Oh,” and pad back to her room. Fluffing a pillow, I would settle back against the sofa where my father had made room for me, happy that he and I shared something apart from my mother and sister.
In subsequent autumns, the phone rang more and more often. My mother always took the calls, beating my father to the phone each time. “Hello, who is this? Who’s there? Who is this?” she drilled every unresponsive caller. Banging the phone in place against the wall, she would glare at my father and begin haranguing him in rapid-fire Tagalog. I had but a child’s grasp of my parents’ native tongue but needed no translator for the raised voices and slammed doors. After a time, I came to understand the phone calls as connected to my father’s increasing absences on game days.
He had grown restless in a house with three females already under his spell, and he chose to philander, that other characteristic he shared with Sinatra. Naturally, his activities brought grief to my mother and, to a lesser extent, my sister and me. Later, I would learn the impossibility of telling someone in love that the person to whom they’ve awarded their heart does not accept the gift, much less deserve it. Even as children, my sister and I saw that imbalance in our parents’ marriage.
“Why don’t you get divorced?” I would ask my mother. “A lot of my friends’ parents are getting divorced.” I thought the trend would comfort her, but she said Catholics don’t get divorced, a rule as baffling to me as why or when we stood or knelt during mass. My sister and I kept trying over the years but could no more convince our mother of divorce than we could blame our father for his nature. We were in love with him ourselves, you see, but the terms of the relationship were not ours to govern. I saw early on who he was—a charming skirt chaser unfit for fatherhood—and accepted him for who he was. The fights, the crying jags, the tense silences, and occasional separations—all of it seemed avoidable but for the harsh ban imposed by the church. Only later would I understand my mother’s refusal for what it was: an excuse forged by the complexities not of religion but of marriage.
But, as a child, I could only absorb so much of their drama. I knew only that my father and I once spent many consecutive weekends together, and then we did not. I grew to have a singular relationship to football, and I mean that rather literally. As my father became a less reliable companion, I watched games by myself, the living room enlarged by a dad-shaped emptiness and my own hollow aloneness. A combination of muted sadness and indifference to sports kept my mother and sister in their respective rooms, doors closed, so I sat by myself before the glow of the screen on those darkening weekends, kept company by announcers like John Madden and Ahmad Rashad, players like Joe Theismann and Marcus Allen.
Were they proxies for my father, for my family? Today, I’m still not sure, but I know I learned football’s language from their play-by-play analysis and post-game interviews just as my father had. Offside, broken tackle, sacked on a blitz—knowing the jargon wasn’t just a key to adulthood but a secret English that told a grand story. Strung together, its grammar emerged, revealing characters like the Chicago Bears, natural protagonists for anyone introduced to football in the early ’80s. They did the Super Bowl Shuffle—Walter Payton and The Fridge—those enormous men who rapped, moved to the left, glided to the right, and then, guided by the mustachioed menace of coach Mike Ditka, obliterated their opponents. It thrilled me to root for them.
We tee-heed about blowhard jocks and the spandex they wore, how it gave them tight ends. It was racy to joke like that with Gina, but my heart raced faster because I could talk football—knew the technical definition of a tight end—and longed to converse instead with her suitors.
“Cover your man!” I’d yell at the TV on weekends, my adrenaline carrying over on Mondays to the classroom, where I eavesdropped on Matt Jones and Davy Mickle when their conversation drifted to football. They sat in front of me in third period, laughing at the hapless Tampa Bay Buccaneers. “The Rams have a pretty good record this year,” I’d chirp at their backs. “Even better than the Cowboys, but you gotta love that Marino.” They’d swivel around to find me grinning and leaning forward, anxious to talk, but all they did was nod, turn away from me, and move their heads and desks closer together, the legs of their chairs squeaking against the floor as they inched away from me. Intuiting the nearness of adolescence, the boys my age held fiercely to the subjects—football, ninjas, farts—that cleaved them from the opposite sex. Later, that would change, but at the time I was left out, wasting my new vocabulary on Gina Sanchez at the bus stop. She was rumored to fool around with JV football players, and I believed it, looking at her blue eye shadow and twelve-year-old, frosted pink lips. We tee-heed about blowhard jocks and the spandex they wore, how it gave them tight ends. It was racy to joke like that with Gina, but my heart raced faster because I could talk football—knew the technical definition of a tight end—and longed to converse instead with her suitors. Absent that and distanced from the cosmos of Matt, Davy, and my debauched father, it was enough simply to voice my new words out loud, even if it meant using them incorrectly.
Had I been a tomboy, I might’ve gotten somewhere with Matt and Davy. Had I been the sort of child to wear dirty jeans, snap my gum, or pop a wheelie faster than they ever could, the boys might’ve ceded me a certain savviness, but I was the kind of girl who wore eyelet dresses, hated being mussed, and lived in quaking, all-consuming fear of being hit on the head by a ball, any ball. Scrawny with poor hand-eye coordination and a pronounced aversion to team uniforms, I was no candidate to actually play a sport. Until I was older, those character traits guaranteed long, solitary hours in front of the TV, where I decoded whatever sport I chanced to fancy. My heart grew larger, and I came to love tennis, hockey, basketball, and baseball with the same passion I had first shown for football—or, no. I loved them more greedily than I had football, because I knew they contained vast narratives, operas sung for no ear but the one who heard icing call, no-look pass, stranded at third and, in those words, divined some great tragedy or comedy or both.
That was the heart of the matter: sports as stories. I learned to read at the age of four and never stopped, nagging my mom to take me and my sister to the library every week, more often if her schedule allowed it. Sports mirrored this love. The games I watched showcased villains and heroes feuding and scheming—the original version of reality TV, authentic and unscripted. During the pre-game shows or halftime, the networks would profile an inspiring athlete, perhaps someone whose father had taught her tennis at a young age, who attended every match his little brown daughter played in a white-dominated, elite sport, and who beamed and hooted when she beat Martina Hingis in the 1999 U.S. Open final.
Or there were magazine features on long-suffering teams like the Boston Red Sox, who lost the 1986 World Series in heartbreaking fashion before finally overcoming the Curse of the Bambino in 2004 with their win over the St. Louis Cardinals, a victory less memorable than the team’s ALCS comeback against archrivals the New York Yankees.
Such tales are known to some, unfamiliar to others—the names and dates and allusions a boring blur of trivia that separates those in the know and those not in the know.
Another take: Sports are stories read together in real time.
Their communal narratives became easier to share over the years as the boys around me grew up. They became stand-ins for my father whom I left behind in the South when I went to college in the Pacific Northwest. We gathered in apartments and bars and stadia to gasp and groan at each grand slam, each turnover, each balletic serve. We made clever posters to wave from the stands; we ate nachos in the sunburned heat of a fourteen-inning game; we taunted the opposing team. We, we, we—the collective experience was sensational, a physical mélange of deafening roars, freezing temps endured, ice cold beers consumed. And this: the warm shawl of belonging, of connection.
Sports weren’t—aren’t—just stories and anecdotes swapped across barstools and bleachers. They’re also historical narratives, a way of understanding a country’s past or a city’s psyche.
That last point hit home most forcefully when I first began writing for a living. Assigned by a local paper to write about a small business, I interviewed the harried owner who responded to my questions in clipped monosyllables. Struggling with our exchange, I looked at him and then at the Yankees pennant he’d pinned above his desk. An artifact of the team’s storied history, it was the only item displayed in his fluorescent-lit office. Almost under my breath, I murmured, How much longer till we have another run like that, huh? His eyes brightened. He was there the night they won, he said. I put my pen down as I leaned back, and we talked trash about the Red Sox, wondered if Chicago’s time had come, and complained about rising ticket prices. Afterward, I walked away with a handful of good quotes about his printing company, and I never forgot how knowing the league standings that year made all the difference. Was that how my father felt at the dealership on Monday mornings after a big game? Did he stand at the water cooler with coworkers as they shook their heads and lamented the game-ending interception? Were the good ol’ boys actually good to him after those conversations? He passed away before I could ask him such questions, but I want to believe that at least once he told them about watching the game with his oldest daughter, that they clapped him on the back and folded him into their clique.
The tribal aspect of sports mesmerized me, not just their narrative drama, though that appealed intrinsically to my bookworm self. By and large, men composed this tribe, and I sometimes worried that women saw me as a pick-me girl, someone interested in sports solely for male validation, but that couldn’t be helped. I had to trust they’d see more to me than my being a sports fan.
There was, in fact, more to sports than the realm of men. There was an entire country. Sports gave (and continue to give) the excluded—typically immigrants, women, our Black and brown brothers and sisters—entrée to the American experience, a chance for the national pastime to become truly national.
Think of the great Yankee Clipper, Joe DiMaggio. In 1939, just three years into his MLB career, Life magazine wrote of the eventual legend:
Although he learned Italian first Joe, now 24, speaks English without an accent and is otherwise well-adapted to most U.S. mores. Instead of olive oil or smelly bear grease, he keeps his hair slick with water. He never reeks of garlic and prefers chicken chow mein to spaghetti.
DiMaggio may have been white, but he was Italian, and Italian Americans then did not yet enjoy the favored status of their more established German and Irish counterparts. Only over time, as Italian Americans took on more roles on the field or in sports franchises, shops, movies, and schools of the country more widely, did they descend metaphorically and physically from the cheap nosebleed seats that first-generation immigrants tended to occupy and closer to the hallowed ground of the baseball diamond and America itself.
I like DiMaggio over, say, Jackie Robinson, the first player to break the color line in Major League Baseball, when considering what outsiders mean to sports and vice versa, because DiMaggio isn’t remembered that way. Despite his whiteness and athletic prowess, he too had to meet certain criteria before being accepted by the culture at large. Those standards (at least according to the Life article) involved erasure, the hallmarks of heritage hidden or dispelled. What then did my father, breaking down the game with coworkers on Mondays, or I, stomping and clapping in the rafters, sacrifice to feel included? What did we gain in return—a nation?
Sports weren’t—aren’t—just stories and anecdotes swapped across barstools and bleachers. They’re also historical narratives, a way of understanding a country’s past or a city’s psyche. You can trace America’s exclusionary attitudes in who its teams signed, for example, or appreciate what a World Series championship might mean to a city like Seattle, whose Mariners have never clinched the title in the 120-some years since the founding of the American League. You might rise before the first pitch, join in singing the national anthem, and feel the expansive stretch of history behind you, picture the fathers and daughters screaming themselves hoarse over a playoff win, the athlete who stood as the first player from the Dominican Republic in their sport, the kid who worked concessions just so he could be at games. You might even feel yourself an American, there among imagined memories.
It’s been decades since that afternoon at the river in South Carolina, but I know now how I would answer Eric’s question.
Eric likes Savannah and the college, but he’s still not sure he’ll apply. We fly back on separate flights. His leaves early; I board the red-eye hours later. I have a layover in the Midwest, which means I spend a chunk of the not-yet dawn awake and staring, slouched against the unyielding seats at the boarding gate.
In the years that follow, I will follow sports less closely. The growing demands of adulthood will eat into the hours and the days, and I will lose track of the characters and plotlines of certain teams, franchises, entire sports. But at least once each year, I will take my place in the stands or on the sofa and join easily in the conversation about the game at hand. Its syntax and vocabulary will be like old friends, and I will remember how I learned the language of the game—roasting in the sun at an Oakland As home game, mocking the Lakers at the sold-out Rose Garden, enjoying football on autumn afternoons with my father.
But that time is still ahead of me. When the morning finally arrives at Chicago O’Hare, I stand and walk with other travelers to the vendors and newsstands, now open. Some of us crave caffeine; others, only information. I’m one of the latter, a skimmer with no intention of purchasing the newspaper I wrinkle and crease at the Hudson News closest to my gate. The cashier glowers at me in such a way that I feel compelled to buy the paper I’ve already mangled. I stand in a long line to pay for it and notice a man hunched behind the rack of yogurt raisins and peanuts. He’s hiding from the cashier, clutching the sports page of USA Today. He looks up; our eyes lock. We wave our respective sports pages at one another. He gives me a crooked, rueful smile and shakes his head. Sosa, he mouths. Griffey, I mouth back. We both grin widely. McGwire was ahead that day.
Cielo Lutino is a writer and editor currently based in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in Cold Mountain Review, The Carolina Quarterly, and The Los Angeles Review, among other outlets. She received her MFA from St. Mary's College of California and is at work on a collection of essays.