Just the Ticket For Me

Back in the distant days of my childhood when I first converted to N.F.L.ism at the tender age of ten, the congregation was much smaller than it is today. Since time immemorial, games were only observed on the Sabbath, but then in the early Seventies we were given a latter day night game on Monday evenings. For me, it was always a bad way to start out the week as far as school was concerned since even the lamest match ups were always more interesting than homework assignments.
Unbeknownst to me as I sat in the living room watching Monday Night Football by myself throughout my youth, there were millions of adult followers faithfully attending M.N.F. parties in bars across the land. Local watering holes would try to build their football flock with cheap food and drink specials and giveaways. It was a competitive game but back then Monday nights were well attended.
In the past few years, however, Monday nights have become less special as the powers on high have chosen to give America more of what it craves with Sunday Night Football and Thursday Night Football. So now we have S.N.F. on NBC., M.N.F. on ESPN, and T.N.F. on N.F.L., all of which can be watched from the safety of your living room with just the basic cable package.
The odd thing is that while the fans stay home for the most part to watch the night games, they come out in mass on Sundays. At the risk of ruffling the same sort of feathers that John Lennon did, I have to say that the N.F.L. seems to rival the Lord in popularity at least for a few hours on Sundays during the football season. There is neither hyperbole nor hypocrisy in my hypothesis as I have been have been dropping in at several different local bars to get a grip on the Sunday gridiron gatherings.
Two weeks ago when the Seahawks played at 10, all the good seats at Goodtymes were filled by kickoff. Owner Debi Smith has added two mega screens that occupy a huge portion of the southern wall. At both ends a trained parrot roots just for the Seahawks. On top of all that, the kitchen puts out a great breakfast buffet for $12.
The 1# ranked Seahawks are a huge boon to the Sunday bar business and while the wily veteran at Goodtymes has built a large patronage with her deft plays, sophomore sports bar, The Ref, seems to have scored most of the remaining Valley Seahawk fans. Somehow last year in its rookie season The Ref came out of nowhere and became Seahawk Central. That same morning that Goodtymes was packed, the Ref was a sea of Hawk fans from the banquet room across the large bar area and into the family dining room. As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but blue jerseys being stretched a bit further with beer, pizza and chicken wings.
You would have thought that everyone was at these two places but just around the corner from the Ref, Bolo’s had a good crowd of their own. For years Bolo’s has been serving a breakfast buffet at just $10. Like the Ref, they have the Season Ticket which lets the bar play any game on any big screen. Debi at Goodtymes, on the other hand, has given up on it because she thinks the $200 weekly price is not worth it.
While I can commiserate with her, as a true believer in the power of the game, I see no reason to just watch the Seahawk game when I can watch all the others out of the corner of my eye on several nearby screens at the same time. The Season Ticket is probably the reason the flock ventures from their living rooms on Sunday only.
The Season Ticket helps me relate to today’s youth lost in front of their computers playing games. I am thankful that I was not exposed to it as a kid because it would have been a sensory overload that surely would have zapped all of my desire to live in the real world. It is bad enough that as a middle-aged guy it zaps my desire to live in the real world on Sundays from the season opener though the final minute of the Super Bowl.
Two more great venues in the Valley to catch all the games are the Sullivan Scoreboard and True Legends. The Scoreboard is more of a blue collar, baseball cap kind of a bar, but that can be a good thing when watching football. True Legends draws a whiter collered crowd, though no less enthusiastic of one. Both True Legends and The Scoreboard put out great breakfast fare for Sunday football and are actually neck and neck when it comes to their Eggs Benedict, (which is the only thing Elaine likes or understands about Sunday football). True Legends, however, has the Scoreboard and everyone else whupped when it comes to size of their big screenie weenie and when it comes to football, size matters.
While I highly commend and recommend all of these N.F.L. tabarnacles, there is one that I deem the best place to observe the N.F.L. on Sundays and that would be the Black Diamond. They are really on their game with breakfast served all day as well as a great normal menu. I have been attending there for the past two years and have seen their flock grow. The Black Diamond is a Valley gem that is gaining in popularity each year and deservedly so.
If you are a nonbeliever and would like to see what the fuss and fun is all about, go to the Black Diamond next Sunday. You’ll see scenes like I did last Sunday where grown men in Raider jerseys cheered for their teem in front of one big screen while across the pool hall a group in Chief jerseys watched the same game and erupeted with cheers and boos at the exact opposite times as their counterparts.
Then when all the games are ending you might be lucky enough to catch a cliffhanger like last Sunday’s game between the Saints and Patriots where Drew Brees threw a last-minute miracle touchdown only to be answered by an even more miraculous last-second touchdown bomb by Tom Brady. If you are lucky enough to see that and still don’t believe then I don’t know what to tell you, because I’m thinking that is what the original Miracle Man had in mind when he instructed us to find heaven on earth.

This was a tastey bratwurst sandwich with carmelized onions that I got at the Black Diamond. I also love their garlic fries. With N.F.L. on every screen, and dozens of pool tables and shuffleboard, there is a lot going on at The Diamond on Sundays

Debi Smith at Goodtymes is for the birds. Beyond the Seahawks on Sunday, she and her daughter raise 42 birds at home.