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Get Your Own Damn Beer, I'm Watching the Game!: A Woman's Guide to Loving Pro Football - Softcover

Peete, Holly Robinson; Paisner, Daniel

 
9781594861635: Get Your Own Damn Beer, I'm Watching the Game!: A Woman's Guide to Loving Pro Football
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1594861633 ISBN 13: 9781594861635
Verlag: Rodale Books, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

Year after year, Sunday afternoons and Monday nights during the NFL season have belonged to men. While they cheer and argue play calls, the women in their lives are relegated to beer and chip detail. It's time for these women to join the action, and Holly Robinson Peete, star of 21 Jump Street, For Your Love, and Hangin' with Mr. Cooper, and wife of NFL quarterback Rodney Peete, has written this hip, smart, cheerful guide to help them do so.

In Get Your Own Damn Beer, I'm Watching the Game!, Peete shares her infectious enthusiasm for pro football and takes the complexity out of the game by breaking it down to its component parts. She explains the role of each position player, provides a rundown of all on-field penalties and referees' hand signals, and offers an illustrated guide to some of the most common plays in the NFL. She gives her take on the most memorable plays in NFL history and dishes some inside dirt-in a breezy, girl-talkin' narrative that promises to turn the novice spectator into a well-informed football fanatic.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

HOLLY ROBINSON PEETE is one of the best-loved actresses on television and a lifelong, diehard football fan. Holly frequently appears on Fox Sports' Best Damn Sports Show. She currently resides in Los Angeles.

DANIEL PAISNER is the author of more than 25 books on topics ranging from business and sports to politics and entertainment. He is also one of the busiest collaborators in publishing, having worked on books with Whoopi Goldberg, Montel Williams, Willard Scott, and other celebrities. He currently resides in Port Washington, New York.

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1

Where It All Began (for Me)

Bleeding Eagles Green

I suppose a bit of a personal introduction is in order before we get too deep into this thing. After all, it doesn't just happen that a little girl grows up in Philadelphia rooting for the Eagles, only to wind up marrying an Eagles quarterback. But that's the short version of how it happened for me.

Here's the (somewhat) longer version. My dad was a big-time football fan. It was his thing. It wasn't his only thing, mind you, but it was a big deal. Man, he loved his Eagles, and I grew to love them right alongside him. Again, it wasn't the only thing we shared, but it was something special.

My father's name was Matt Robinson, and he was an incredible writer. He wrote and produced a bunch of local television shows in Philadelphia, but he also commuted to New York for a lot of the time I was growing up. He wrote scripts for Sanford and Son, and The Waltons, and Eight Is Enough, and he wrote several children's books, plays, and screenplays. Later on, he was a writer and producer on The Cosby Show. But he was probably best known for creating the role of Gordon, which he played from 1969 to 1972 on the original Sesame Street. He still turns up from time to time in the repeat segments they sometimes air, with his big pork chop sideburns and bushy moustache. Could a 4-year-old have asked her daddy to have a cooler gig?

He's gone now, my dad, after a long, difficult bout with Parkinson's disease, but football is at the heart of my memories of him. It was our common ground. I watch his old Sesame Street tapes with my children and think about how it was when I was their age, when my dad first started hanging out with Oscar, Big Bird, and the rest of the gang--and when I first discovered Harold Carmichael and Norm Snead, who were two of the more popular Philadelphia Eagles players throughout my growing up. My dad had a pretty busy taping schedule up in New York as I recall, but he was around on weekends and we made the most of our time together. Sundays were our special time during football season. My brother and I would sit at his knee, watching the game on television. Plus, we loved to watch him roll over in laughter each draft day as he scouted the proceedings--not for the best players, mind you, but for the hippest, most unusual names of the latest crop of college stars. Remember William "The Refrigerator" Perry? Well, we knew all about him in our household even before he burst onto the NFL scene, thanks to my dad's love for crazy-cool football names. That was always one of his favorite things, to collect the wildest and most unique football names that crossed his radar. And as a special tribute, I'll present a list of some of his all-time favorites (plus a few new ones he would have loved) a bit later on in these pages.

My earliest football memory (to which I alluded earlier) is from when I was 5 or 6 years old and more interested in spending time with my father than in the game he was watching or the players on the field. The game itself was probably nothing more than background noise to me when I was that little. If you'd have asked me, I'd have told you Jim Ringo was a Beatle before I pegged him for an Eagle.

Anyway, one late fall afternoon, I heard the jangle of the Good Humor ice cream truck coming up the block in my Mount Airy neighborhood, and I started tugging on my father's shirt to get his attention at some crucial point in the game. All I cared about was a strawberry shortcake ice cream bar. All he cared about was a field goal the Eagles were attempting, to take the lead as time ran out on the clock. In an effort to hush me up for another beat or two, he turned to me and said, "Honey, if that kicker makes this field goal, you can get your strawberry shortcake."

I started cheering for Dad's Eagles right then and there, and from that moment on, I think I associated everything I ever wanted in life with an Eagles' victory. (I guess that explains a lot.) In any case, there was usually a strawberry shortcake ice cream bar to help us celebrate at the end of each win. We started watching games together every week during the season; and in the beginning, it really did have more to do with my love of ice cream than my love of football. Soon after that, it was more about hanging with my father than anything else; but after a while, the lines got blurred and I was hooked on the game. I loved the adrenaline rush of excitement that seemed to flow from that field, the artistry of the wide receivers, and the crunch of brute strength at the line. I loved the sheer thrill of an open field run. I wasn't the most sophisticated fan in the world right out of the gate, but my father was a patient teacher and I paid close attention. In time, I learned the basic rules, and eventually I was able to pick up a little strategy and subtlety. When I moved from Philly to L.A. at the age of 9, and years later when I left the house after high school, I still managed to follow the Eagles. They were my team by that point, and it didn't matter if I was away at school or studying for a year in Paris--whenever the Eagles were playing, I was doing my best to catch the game and cheer them on.

And then life just kinda happened. I caught my first big break in 1986 on a television show called 21 Jump Street for the upstart Fox Network, opposite a then-unknown Johnny Depp, and from there I managed to keep finding steady work. My mom, Dolores Robinson, already a prominent talent manager started managing my career--and she kept me busy and out there and happening. And all along, I kept my eye on my Eagles. My dad was a true die-hard fan, who counted it a real frustration whenever his team came up short. But I was turning out to be more of a die-easy fan (not quite sure if that's the opposite of die-hard, but you get the idea). If the Eagles managed to win a couple of games, that was just fine with me. If they managed to string together a successful season, even better. And if they lost a heartbreaker, I still treated myself to a strawberry shortcake ice cream bar at the other end. Why not? Life went on, pretty much as it would have if they had won the heartbreaker. Truth is, it wasn't always so easy to root for the Eagles; and if you ask any of today's fans, it hasn't gotten any easier--no matter how well they're playing. Anyway, I kept at it. I never lost faith. I figured if the Philadelphia Eagles could go to the trouble of suiting up and giving it their all each week, the least I could do was pull for them from my couch in L.A. or wherever I happened to be at the time.

In 1993, while I was shooting a sitcom called Hangin' with Mr. Cooper, I was introduced to a quarterback. His name was Rodney Peete, and he was something--good-looking, God-fearing, and more charming than any man had a right to be. Plus, he had a golden arm and a killer smile--in all, a totally winning package. He won me over in about the time it took to run a 2-minute offense. (Well, okay, maybe not that quick. There was a female friend--or 10!--I had to send into exile first, but that's for another book. . . .)

Rodney had been drafted by the Detroit Lions out of USC and had started on a promising career before the Lions cut him loose. He eventually wound up in Philadelphia, calling the plays for my beloved Eagles. I thought, "How cool is that?" Just think, to root for your hometown team as a star-struck little kid and to somehow wind up with the quarterback on your arm. Let me tell you, it was a fairy-tale wrapped inside a storybook wrapped inside a dream. I couldn't wait to introduce Rodney to my father--not least because he'd given me a lot of crap about the guys I'd been dating, and because short of Dr. J (Julius Erving, the Philly basketball legend who was a bit too old and a bit too married for me), I couldn't have brought home a more perfect guy than the new Eagles...

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Verlag
Rodale Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2005
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1594861633
ISBN 13 
9781594861635
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
240
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