You have to understand that I am not remotely a very spiritual guy. Years ago, when a friend shared with me, upon my marriage, the wisdom of “The Prophet,” Kahlil Gibran–“let there be spaces in your togetherness”–I replied that I too had come to believe in the sanctity of king-sized beds.
Even when it comes to my sports passions, I’m not a really rally-cap kind of guy. I am not wedded to any silly rituals. Every year, every game is different. Two years ago, when I toasted my New England Patriots just before the Super Bowl, Lagavulin was my whiskey of choice. This time, I kept the Lagavulin on the shelf and went with a 15-year-old Springbank. To me karma, or kaah-maah as we say in Boston, might as well be the long-lost cousin of Nomaah. It is what we sportswriters talk about when we have nothing profound to say.
So I have to talk to you about the incredible karma in the Super Bowl Sunday night. It began to form, if that is what karma actually does, just before the NFL season opener. I didn’t have a clue that anything extraordinary was about to happen. I had just written my NFL preview and was basking in the glow of my witty take on the coming season when a reader sent me an irate e-mail.
He had spotted an error–more of a brain-glitch, really–in my column. I had written Tennessee when I meant to type Tampa Bay. And though it seemed to me but a minor gaffe and that what I meant was obvious from the context, he was bent out of shape by my mistake. “Don’t you guys have proof-readers,” he wrote, berating me for my sloppiness and blaming me for his loss of faith in sports journalism.
‘Hey, Jeffrey" I wrote back, “Can you lighten up?” And I proceeded to offer sundry excuses while assuring him that I regretted my error and had quickly made a correction. I certainly didn’t expect to hear from this angry guy again. And when I did, I wasn’t remotely prepared for his response. “I’m sorry,” he wrote, terming his first missive a bit of an overreaction. “It’s just that life really sucks here in Baghdad. And I really miss football something terrible.”
So I offered him some football companionship–or at least a football conversation–to fill that void throughout the season. Indeed, I was thrilled to be able to reach out with a care package of any sort–my little Bob Hope effort–for one of our soldiers in Iraq. And so it began. Over the next couple months, we exchanged dozens and dozens of e-mails. We were different ages, from different parts of the country and from very different backgrounds. Yet we bonded, at least in a fashion, over our mutual affection for the gridiron wars.
He was much more a fan of the college game, while I’m a devotee of the NFL. But as our correspondence ripened into something akin to friendship, we agreed to root–since there was no real conflict with prior allegiances–for each other’s football teams.
OK, this is where the kaahmaah comes into play. He’s a Cajun from small-town Louisiana and a diehard LSU fan. I’m a born-and-bred Boston boy, a New England Patriots fan since I attended their very first game with my dad and my three uncles 43 years ago. LSU and the New England Patriots. Are you beginning to see where this is going?
Though I now know that we had somehow tapped into the mother lode of karma, I didn’t have a glimmer back then. Otherwise, this might have been my retirement column. I can only imagine what kind of parlay I might have gotten in Vegas–back when the Pats were 2-2 and had just lost to the woeful Redskins, and the LSU Tigers had been spanked by Florida–picking LSU to win the national championship and the Pats to win the Super Bowl.
I have no idea why this Baghdad-to-Boston connection took on special powers. No more than I know why “The Curse of the Bambino” has held sway in my town for 85 years now. But as the fall segued into winter, I began to sense something magical was taking place. “Maybe it’s our joint season of destiny,” I wrote the sergeant. He immediately fired back, “I was going to say the same thing.”
When LSU whipped favored Oklahoma for the Bowl Championship Series title-in the same Superdome where the Patriots won their first Super Bowl two years ago, with an aggressive defensive game plan that mimicked how the Pats beat the overdog Rams that day–I no longer wondered. I knew. Jeffrey and I, we owned this season.
Going into the final weeks of the playoffs, I felt downright prescient. I picked Carolina and the Patriots in the championship games and, of course, the Pats in the Super Bowl. And I even envisioned the one scenario that could–but, of course, wouldn’t–produce a Panthers upset. In my final pre-Super Bowl column, I wrote: “The [Patriots’] most conspicuous flaw all season has been its inability to put away opponents. The Panthers are solid enough to stay in contention, poised to capitalize on a critical error.”
The Patriots, with two missed field goals by usually surefire Adam Vinatieri, indeed kept it close. And then a Tom Brady interception in the end zone midway through the fourth quarter loomed as that “critical error.” But as I wrote a few weeks back, these Patriots are the absolute antithesis of our Red Sox; they win all the close ones. And, of course, our karma was simply too strong. So just like two years ago, Kid Brady marched the Patriots downfield in the final minute of a tie game and Clutch Vinatieri drilled a last-second field goal to win the game. The Patriots and LSU, me and Jeffrey, we were champions of the world.
I figure that Jeffrey and I have about exhausted our karmic privileges with this extraordinary season. And in truth I feel a little bit guilty. Maybe if we had figured out what we had between us a little sooner, we could have used it for something more important than football.
