A friend who wasn't retired once asked "doesn't it mean the weekends aren't special?" He is now retired and will realise that they still are. That's when your family can come to stay, as they aren't working. And there's the weekend's sport: TV to watch and golf competitions to play in. But Mondays are different.
However, now I have to get up and do stuff on a Monday to make it magic I don't stay up to watch the Superbowl, which I often did while still working. There is of course an old joke about coming back to work for a break to recover after a good holiday.
And I must admit I do get much more tired after a late night now. Getting old sucks but as I always say, it's better than the alternative. So yet again I won't be watching this year's Superbowl live, as Mrs H and I have something planned.
The climax to the NFL season always makes me wish I'd watched more of the coverage through the season. As the NFL season starts in early September, just as the football season has got into full swing, I tend to start paying proper attention towards the end of the regular season, as the race for the play offs shakes down.
But there is so much good sport to keep up with that I' ve gone back to watching gridiron mainly via the highlights shows, which was how I got into watching it back in 1982 when Channel 4 first broadcast the sport regularly on British TV.
One of the reasons I feel that way is because, as Osi Umeniyora says "the NFL never disappoints". Osi presents the BBC's weekly highlights show with Jason Bell. When I started watching the highlights shows on BBC which cover the whole week's play, rather than highlights of selected matches on Sky, I found the pair of them boisterously enthusiastic to the point of irritation. Indeed, Mrs H couldn't bear to be in the same room as the TV. So Osi doesn't just say "the NFL never disappoints". Each week after the best action has been shown he exclaims "you know Jay Bell, THE NFL NEVER DISAPPOINTS!!!" thumping one hand into the other rhythmically at the same time. And, although it was Bell who appeared on Strictly Come Dancing, it's Umenyiora who dances around when talking, unable to stay still for more than an instant. And he frequently asserts his credentials as one of the New York Giants defenders who stopped Tom Brady winning seven Superbowls instead of five.
The thing is, Osi is right. Or very nearly right. One reason is the outcomes are nearly always uncertain and there are surprises every week. If you take the Divisional Championships week in the play offs (what a soccer fan would call the quarter finals) all four matches were tight, none of them were decided by more than a single score and they were all on a knife edge in the closing stages of the matches. One match was decided in what the Amercians call "overtime" (extra time to a Brit). The others were decided in ordinary time but with literally no time left on the clock, the winners scoring on the last play. (Like rugby the play continues until the ball is dead by which time the clock already said zero). The top ranked team in each of the conferences lost. The two fourth placed seeds going into the play offs will contest onight's Superbowl.
No wonder many pundits said it was the greatest weekend in NFL play off history. Three matches won with no time left is a record for the play offs season, let alone one weekend. In the Kansas City Chiefs win against the Buffalo Bills the lead changed hands three times in the last two minutes of playing time. Even more dramatic than the 1979 F A Cup final. (You remember - Arsenal 3 Man United 2, all the key action in the last 5 minutes).
Of course the game is set up to produce tension until the end. In some of those matches teams tried to deliberately score the winning points with effectively no time left on the clock, so the other side wouldn't have the opportunity to strike back. It worked in some cases but it failed disastrously for Kansas in their Conference Championship (semi-final) match against the Cincinnati Bengals, declining the chance to score an equalising field goal with time left, intending to run the clock down and either win it or at least level the scores right at the end. But two plays went wrong and they had to make a harder kick to take it into overtime before going for an ambitious play, conceding possession and losing.
They lost to a team that two years ago was the lowest ranked team out of 32 in the NFL, whose whole structure promotes competition, though within the closed shop franchise system of no relegation. The Bengals, as the lowest ranked team, got first pick in the college draft and selected the number one ranked college quarterback, Joe Burrow. A no 1 draft pick quarterback, by himself, wouldn't normally be enough to turn round a team so quickly (Osi says) but Burrow has done it. The Bengals play in their first Superbowl since the one I was fortunate enough to see, against the San Francisco 49ers in 1989. That game was won at the death in one of the great Superbowl finishes by San Fransico's legendary quarterback, Joe Montana, passing to the almost equally legendary receiver, Jerry Rice. As I said to Mrs H as we sat at the far end, a hundred yards from the action "I'm not sure if he got there, looks like he was knocked out at the one yard line". Then the TV screens showed Rice stretching out his hand in mid air to break the plane of the touchdown line and the 49ers had won.
And now Joe Burrow has acquired one of Montana's nicknames; "Joe Cool" for his calmness under pressure.
I know American Football is too stop-start for some. Although it's a series of set plays, improvisation does come into it especially with teams like Kansas and its quarterback Patrick Mahomes. It does have ebb and flow - after all cricket is a series of set plays each lasting a few seconds and a test match can certainly ebb and flow - though maybe not end to end. But American Football does flow end to end at times: interceptions and touchdown kick off returns certainly provide that, much like rugby.
And rugby, despite its end to end nature, has what Stephen Jones in the Sunday Times recently called "the grinding predictability of the box kick as the scrum half laboriously places his men in position to obstruct and the defensive team funnel back to try to take the high ball. No one ever uses that set up as a dummy play for some kind of surprise attack". They do in the NFL, Stephen, but they call it a "fake" not a "dummy".
Jones went on to say of rugby rucks: "those horrible, linked crocodiles where individual players form up on the back of the player in front, giving the scrum half about an hour to kick clear... the most unsightly and predictable of all".
Though my main problem with rugby is, despite playing it at school (a long time ago) I've never understood the rules or tactics. In the NFL the officials speak to camera to explain decisions. (In the amateur form of the game in the UK they do the same, though you have to stand on the home touchline to hear them). So you know exactly what has been decided.
As for tactics, in the NFL you know they are mainly running standard plays selected by the coaches, whereas in rugby you just know that much of the time they are running standard plays in open play, as my office buddy who was a rugby league fan explained to me in 1978. "They're running standard plays imported from the NFL, Phil. Rugby Union will catch up eventually". And they have, but it hasn't helped the spectacle.
But while I find Amercian Football much more exciting to watch than rugby I admit Osi is not entirely right. I practically stopped watching the sport when most of the coverage focussed on the live games, often late at night and not always guaranteed to be interesting. A one off game can of course be boring. And with the advert breaks (three intervals for four quarters) time outs and stoppages a one sided or uneventful game isn't great on TV. (If you're in the stadium there is the compensation of pizza and beer delivery to your seat of course).
So I won't lose sleep over not watching the Superbowl live. But I can't wait to catch up with the highlights.
* Stephen Jones's piece "Predictable game can't let control freak coaches like Erasmus take fun away" was in the Sunday Times on 2 January 2022
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