Margaret Duncan was born in 1926 in Norfolk Virginia. Her friends would come to refer to her affectionately as Peggy. I have no earthly idea why, but it stuck, and Peggy was Peggy for many moons to come. In that neck of the woods, you didn’t watch NFL football on Sundays. In the south, football was played on Saturday’s. The team that received the most shouting through her television set was the Virginia Tech Hokies. While I wasn’t present, I can only assume there was a constant barrage of marginally polite but mostly curt verbal direction on what the Hokies players should, and more likely, shouldn’t do. This makes sense of course because someone sitting on their couch enjoying a cocktail is far more qualified to guide these young men than the grown adults that get paid decent sums of money to be the actual coach of the football team.
Peggy later moved to Annapolis, Maryland, where she gave birth to my Dad, and subsequently jumped all aboard the Baltimore Colts train. While she claims that she was pals with half the team, and the head coach lived on her block, I think she was full of it. After all, my tendency to slightly embellish particular details of a story to enhance the overall delivery didn’t come out of thin air. It must be hereditary.
On March 28th 1984 several trucks were stuffed full of Baltimore Colts football gear and pointed west, to Indianapolis. Each truck took a slightly different route to avoid too much attention. The team had to operate in such a fashion to avoid legal action from the city of Baltimore who was positioning to acquire the team using eminent domain. I promise that paragraph contained no embellishment. A truly wild, yet true, series of events.
Along with practice equipment, office equipment and miscellaneous team items, Peggy Duncan’s fandom went. She would not stand for it. Taking her football team to another city was the equivalent of removing her soul from her body, and she wasn’t having it.
So Peggy faced a little conundrum. With the Colts now out of town, she had some free time on Sunday’s, and that was not a situation she was interested in maintaining.
The good news was that at that time, Peggy and her family no longer held a residence in Maryland. Years prior her and the family moved to the quaint little town of Marblehead, Massachusetts. You guessed it, this elegant southern woman was going through the oft maligned journey of turning into a Masshole. This transition cannot be made successfully without fully adopting everyone’s favorite team to hate…the New England Patriots.
Now at that time, the Patriots stunk, and I mean STUNK. They were the laughingstock of the professional football ranks and would live in that unfortunate football cellar for many years. But Peggy doesn’t waiver. She doesn’t jump ship after a few bad seasons, or a new head coach, or a new quarterback. No, Peggy only jumps ship if you pack all your sh*t in the middle of the night and skip town. Anything outside of that, and you’re safe.
In 1988 I came along, grandson number 2. Grandson number 2 was quite interested in sports. Grandson number 2 and Peggy (we called her “Gram” growing up), were a match made in football heaven.
Gram recognized that I was ripe for some football watching coaching. And coach she did. Now I can’t recall the specifics of some of the early tactics, but I’m fairly confident the teaching involved excessive yelling, and increased voice volume, if the other teams running back so much and broke the line of scrimmage. She would repeat the phrase “Get ‘em!” at an alarming rate. She was a viscous fan, and I was hooked.
The Patriots continued to inch their way along amongst the NFL’s basement dwellers, but there was hope. We had a guy by the name of Drew Bledsoe at quarterback, and Drew was our guy. Drew was going to take us to the promised land of NFL playoff football. A concept we weren’t too familiar with. Then, on April 16th, 2000, the Patriots held the 199th pick in the NFL draft. The coaching staff at the time saw something in a guy who was a backup most of his career at Michigan. They couldn’t help but notice his poise, knack for leading his team back from a deficit, and his laser arm. That night they informed Tom Brady that he would need to pack his bags and make his way to the Northeast to play some football.
None of us knew it at the time, but that single decision would change our football viewing experience for the next two decades.
When our buddy Drew Bledsoe got hurt in the 2001 season, in marched Tommy Boy. And march he did. Tommy led us to the playoffs that year, but we weren’t too sure of the guy. He was young and unproven, but there were no moving trucks backing up the stadium in Foxboro, so we were gonna ride with our team.
Football viewing with the dynamic duo of Grandson number 2 and Gram was a little strained around this time. I was very fortunate to go skiing most weekends up in Vermont. This hadn’t been much of a conflict with the standard regular season schedule, but now that the patriots played in the playoffs in January, we had a problem. The weekend of January 19th 2002, Gram and Grandson number 2 hatched a plan. Instead of Grandson #2, Grandson #1, and their parents packing up the mini van and heading north, we would chisel out some space for Gram. We were bringing Grandma with us, because that’s what you do when the Patriots make the playoffs. Under no circumstances do you break apart devoted football fans in such a time.
The Patriots first playoff game was against the Raiders, who at the time were a pretty good football team. We knew if we got past the Raiders we had a decent shot at making a run in the playoffs. Now we had one small variable to work through, and that was the game kicked off at 8:05 PM. We were going to need to bend the typical 13-year old’s bedtime policy. Fortunately Gram had my back. Bedtime would need to shift a bit…a lotta bit. The football watching sheriff was in town, and my parents had no shot overturning her revised policy.
Things were not looking good for Tommy and the boys, but Gram assured me that we were fine. Then the snow began to fall at the Patriots stadium in Foxboro, and moving the football down the field became just a teensy bit more problematic. Again, she’s still not worried in the slightest. This was around the time that the rest of the family started to fade. One by one the half-way fans went to bed, until it was just my Gram and I. Holding out hope that the boys would pull it off. Then, with some promise brewin’ in the 4th quarter, Tommy dropped back for a pass, a Raider defender swatted the ball from Tommys hands, and the Raiders recovered. That was it, with less than 2 minutes left, the game was over. I stood my sorry mopey half dead soul up and began to walk to my bed.
“Tyler – You sit your butt back down. The game is not over.” I hear with breathtaking clarity from my grandmother.
Now I love this woman, and hold her football fan acumen in high regard, but I was convinced at that moment that my poor grandmother was a few weeks away from a trip to the looney bin. However, I didn’t have the fortitude to tell her she was wrong, and with no words in retort, I obliged to her request.
No more than 60 seconds later the head referee came onto the television screen. He stated that the quarterback’s arm was moving forward when the ball was jarred loose, turning the play into an incomplete pass and not a fumble. This was very clearly a pump fake from Tommy, he was going to tuck the ball back into his body and not throw the ball to a receiver. But to you all you Patriot’s haters out there, that wasn’t the damn rule! Now, they changed this rule the very next year because of this exact play, but at the time, ole Tommy and the boys were simply playing within the friendly confines of the current NFL rulebook.
I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t believe it. My grandmother predicted the infamous tuck rule. I have no idea if she knew the particulars of the rulebook to that extent, or she was simply a crazed football fan, but she was right. The game wasn’t over. After the ruling Tommy drove us down the field to set up a game tying field goal in the snow. We would go on to win that game in overtime. Peggy and her grandson were screaming like a bunch of idiots at midnight as we celebrated a Patriots playoff win.
A month later I was in my grandmother’s living room as our kicker sent another kick through the uprights to win Super Bowl 36.
We celebrated even louder and cheered even bigger than ever before. These are memories that I will hold tight to my heart as long as I have the health to live on this planet.
Fast forward 15 years – It’s now 2014, I had moved out to Colorado, and my grandmother’s health had begun to decline. I came home for Christmas that year and made sure to make my way over to Gram’s nursing home. We had some long chats about that year’s football team, and about how Tommy and the boys showed promise. I made sure to let her know that the Patriots were going to win another Super Bowl in her lifetime, and that she better keep fighting to get one more shot of jubilation watching our team win the big game.
Two months later Malcom Butler intercepted a pass on the goal line to seal the game for the Patriots over the Seahawks in Super Bowl 49.
My Grandmother made a prompt and stern request to her nurse at the time. She instructed her to pick up the telephone and dial the number of her grandson. She had some celebrating to do and was damn sure not going to do it alone.
5 minutes after the interception my phone rang. I’ve been lucky to have many great football memories in my life, but none are near as memorable as that phone call. We rejoiced about how incredible the game was, we talked about the comeback, about Tommy, about the thrilling finish. But most importantly we connected as humans with a shared passion, and a close bond.
5 months later Peggy would leave us. Not because she was old, or her health declined, but because she lost her passion for connecting with people, and her zest for life. She left behind a multitude of life lessons and beautiful memories. She used football as a vehicle to show me how to live life with some fire. To not accept life as it came, but to attack it with intention.
As my friends know I still watch Patriots games acting like a crazed maniac. I have to. Its in my bones. And if you think I’m loud during football games, I can assure you, I was the backup quarterback in the room next to my Grandmother on Sundays.
In With The Words 