Monday, November 27, 2017

Vikings

How I became a Minnesota Vikings Football fan.

As far back as I can remember I watched football with my dad. Pretty typical, little kid hanging out with dad on Sunday watching the game.

Sundays were kind of a special day for me, it was the day I usually got to hang out with dad. he would get up early, make some coffee, play his trumped along whatever albums he felt like, watch and usually record Robert Schuler's Hour of Power on TV then wait for the Vikes to come on.
 He had been a Vikings fan for many years so it made sense I would want to be a Vikings fan too. And I thought I was one, until the game did finally had to point out I was cheering for the wrong team.  I remember looking at the TV and looking at the team I was cheering for and said something like "but dad, you told me to cheer for the team with horns on their heads".  He thought that was pretty funny and corrected me by saying the Vikings had the Purple helmets with white horns. I had been cheering for the Blue helmet with Yellow horned Los Angeles Rams.
From that moment, I knew who to cheer for. Whether we had to listen to games on the radio, try to drive to Minnesota to avoid blackouts, watch tape delayed games overseas, or even stream from a laptop onto his tv, we stuck with the Viking win or (mostly) loose. Most importantly, over the years we had some really great times.

This all came back to me while watching the 2017 Vikings-Rams regular season game the weekend before Thanksgiving. It was nice to see the Vikes win as I'm pretty sure the Rams beat the Vikes that day back in the 70's. And yes, I'm over-emotional about it considering this has been the first season  of Vikings football since my dad passed away. I started the season almost not even wanting to watch football, and have even missed a couple games entirely this year. But now I'm going to watch the games I can and remember that I can always look back on the good times, win or loose.