The Game That Made David Berman Cry

football was always there

Dec 06, 2023

"Like they used to say about Joe Montana, he threw soft because he couldn't throw hard," Mr. Berman said on a recent visit to New York. "He was successful because he didn't try to do what he couldn't." Mr. Berman knew he could write lyrics: "I couldn't rock out harder than everybody, or overpower people with mastery like Jack White of the White Stripes, so why try? That's why I've always worked harder on words."

— the late, great David Berman, to the New York Times in 2005.

If you followed David Berman’s bands, the Silver Jews, Purple Mountains, or read his poetry, or just like, saw an interview with the guy, you’d soon start to identify trace amounts of football trickling out into the universe, in his analogies, metaphors, or, more direct references to late 1970s / early 1980s players or teams.

It was there from the first Silver Jews press photo in 1994 (above) for Starlite Walker. I hadn’t been paying a lot of attention. But when you see a pic of Stephen Malkmus lining up to run a route from an offense helmed by the dude in charge of the band, you play the record. I loved the record. It was unreal and human. I interviewed David. I liked him.

By the way, that “play” from the photograph was never executed. The photo was taken in Oxford, MS, where the album was recorded. The concept for the photo? “Berman’s idea. I’m pretty sure,” says Bob Nastanovich, who played drums, and for the purposes of the photo, “center.”

I don’t even see a football. Was it real or imaginary?

“Imaginary,” says Bob.

And football was there on “Dallas” from the Silver Jews’ 1996 sophomore record, The Natural Bridge, the one where David (temporarily) kicked out the Pavement guys—Stephen and Bob—leaving them in the studio to record Pacific Trim. The “Dallas” lyric “Is it true your analyst was a placekicker for the Falcons?” is only slightly less memorable than the one about seeing B.B. King on General Hospital.

And football was there again in David’s poetry in 1999:

From “Self-Portrait at 28”

My childhood hasn’t made good material either,
mostly being a mulch of white minutes
with a few stand out moments:
popping tar bubbles on the driveway in the summer,
a certain amount of pride at school
everytime they called it “our sun,”
and playing football when the only play
was “go out long” are what stand out now.
If squeezed for more information
I can remember old clock radios
with flipping metal numbers
and an entree called Surf and Turf.
As a way of getting in touch with my origins,
every night I set the alarm clock
for the time I was born, so that waking up
becomes a historical reenactment

And football was there, in the studio, when David and Malkmus went to Vancouver to record an early version of the Purple Mountains stuff in 2017 with Destroyer’s Dan Bejar and some session musicians. From an email:

“I told the young Canuck bassist yesterday to elbow me in the back when i was sposed to come in -- steve said he looked like an edmonton eskimo off. lineman as he brought his forearm up into position for the nudge.”

“Malk and I watched a bit of the 78 Pro Bowl last night”

and it found a home as an analogy on his final record, Purple Mountains in 2019.

Ten thousand afternoons ago
All my happiness just overflowed
That was life at first and goal to go
Me and you and us and them
And all those people way back when
All our hardships were just yardsticks then, you know
You know

David wasn’t the kind of football fan who was going to leap off a conversion van onto a flaming card table at a Buffalo Bills tailgate (he might be there goading someone else into doing it though), but neither was his fandom some torturous exercise—the poet on an existential quest to parse the machinations of the gridiron gladiators. He just liked the game.

And he was no casual. David Berman went to a goddamn Super Bowl in person! Super Bowl 12, in 1978, shortly after he’d turned 11. Broncos vs. Cowboys in New Orleans, at the Super Dome. That has to change a boy, no? But let’s back up…

If you ever met him, your Inbox is likely proof that David Berman told you a bunch of stories. He was communicative. Curious. And eager to make sense of everything, including football. So it was not unusual to get something like this:

what's fritz's (irl) favorite team?
does it seem like changing your favorite team mid-childhood is more accepted?
more and more i realize that i never fully committed to a team.
joe namath - jets … i was pulled in to the drama about his bad knees. i had missed the sweet years and so it was doubly bittersweet for me. all was like new york city in the planet of the apes. i had missed the good times and so stood dumbfounded amidst the wreckage of society.
bert jones - baltimore colts
richard todd- jets
dan pastorini - oilers
dan fouts - chargers
staubach/white - cowboys

The Dan Fouts’ Chargers, by the way, are also related to the clickbait-y title of this post. Keep reading. And of course, the list inevitably gets revised. Minutes. Hours. Or years later. Like this:

Teams I have ever been a fan of, in chron order:
jets
redskins (shhhh, i was seven)
cowboys
oilers
chargers
jints / bills (the pleasures of reading the early nineties new york post on way to whitney....so many ideas!)
[Click that link to hear an hour’s worth of Berman, Nastanovich & Malkmus in their Hoboken apartment in 1990.]
titans -----------> 2004: end of caring

We’ll get to the Titans momentarily.

Oh, and…

also liked bartkowski falcons (black falcon on red helmet
was undeniable. been hoping the ministry of vexillogy [sic]
in tirana will adopt my recommendations for a white outline
around the double headed falcon on albanian flag.

Then David continued to elaborate. Sending photos.

My childhood bedroom in the attic of mom’s Wooster, OH house was frozen in 1979, for 35 years until I had to sell the house after her sudden demise. The clippings were taped up in frenzied anticipation of oncoming Oilers - Steelers playoff game.

Note the pennants on opposite ceilings.

At the time of the first Steelers vs. Oilers AFC Championship, David had just turned 12. He’d been living with his mother and sister in Wooster OH (123 miles away from the NFL action in Pittsburgh), moving from Reston, VA after his parents’ divorce, when he was 7.

I didn’t know a ton about this game. But the "news” tells us what people who saw the game already know: conditions were biblical, if Jerusalem was a rust belt city in the dead of winter.

It was Jan. 3, four days before the game, and the weather in Pittsburgh offered 9-degree temperatures with 16 mile-per-hour winds. [Bum] Phillips was bringing a dome team into this, and he didn't want to make the weather an issue.
"You can't practice being miserable," said Phillips. "It'll be an emotional game, and it won't really matter if it's cold or hot, or whether it rains or snows … We've both got to play in it. It ain't gonna be colder on our side."
As usual, [Steeler Jack] Lambert's perspective was unique. "The only time I mind the cold is at halftime, when you're wet and cold and you don't have time to change into anything. I feel a helluva lot worse for the fans. All they've got under them is that cold cement."
When game day arrived the weather was every bit as horrible as anyone could have expected, with a wicked combination of cold, wind and freezing rain, and even though there was a general consensus that this matchup was between the two best teams in the AFC for a spot in Super Bowl XIII, the outcome was decided before halftime.

The genesis of this post is that Sunday night, the YouTube algorithm randomly surfaced a Steelers-Oilers AFC Championship Game, and it made me think of David, and those photos, and how passionate and diligent he was about clipping and taping up those stories. Something any excited kid might have done back then. Turns out the video was the same teams, with the same stakes (AFC Championship) but from the next season.

I’ve been watching this dude’s painstaking restoration work on old NFL games (David probably would have enjoyed that 78 Pro Bowl more), and I realize the name of his channel doesn’t exactly make you want to dive in.

But his efforts go a long way in sharpening the disintegrating VHS ooze of the old days. You’re seeing broadcast-grade (of the era) footage, not something that looks like it came from the bottom of a pond.

Here are other (hazy) clips of the Steelers vs. Oilers AFC Championship game (this is the Terry Bradshaw slip & slide play) that David was excited about.

But like I was saying, Dave “Back Door” Volsky posted the following year’s magnificent-looking rematch, which is worth a click (unfortunately the NFL of course forbids me to embed it), where Oilers receiver Mike Renfro was screwed out of a game-defining TD by the refs, who could have been helped by instant replay. Just imagine if Earl Campbell had gotten to go to a Super Bowl. In the end, the Steelers won both AFC Championship games.

All I knew at that point was that David was clearly pulling for the Oilers to win. But why? Why was he watching at all? Wooster was much closer to Cleveland. Why wasn’t he a fan of the Browns? And Brian Sipe? (My prodding, including a screengrab of an incredibly self-satisfied Sipe, looking as if he might have been cast in a CBS movie about Ted Bundy went ignored).

David responded:

The Browns were my grandparents’ team.

On his mom’s side. She’d grown up in Ohio. Returning there from Virginia was her going home to familiar territory. David obviously loved her, but didn’t dig Wooster.

I stood opposed to all the locals so I did not like the Browns. I was a misunderstood aristocrat, embedded among the trash and yokels. I immediately id'ed with the smarter well to do sunbelt folks…

His dad was living in Dallas. A Bennigan’s / Steak & Ale restaurant exec.

and by extension the cowboys. Which meant I hated the steelers and felt nothing when browns steelers played.

Culturally, tension was high in Wooster.

when i came back to wooster [from visiting his dad] with a polo shirt my woosterian enemies tried and succeeded in framing it as a sub-lacoste brand like the tiger, and fox etc. i had no internet, no way to expose their lies. they didn’t believe in the existence of steak and ale and bennigan's. we obv lived in rattiest house in school district and I had no dad...so.when i brought back pics from the cowboys broncos superbowl as proof of my superiority,

Wait, what?! Turns out his dad’s job got him SB12 tickets. Golden Richards, a Cowboy receiver who snagged a TD in the game, loomed in David’s imagination for decades afterwards, a name that would randomly surface, much like Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains.

Riffing on a fake product, Golden Retriever Water, Richards returns after years of being M.I.A. David:

But back to the Super Bowl. Showing off his photos didn’t endear him to the youth of Wooster.

it fucked with their reality, but instead of updating their provincial worldview they dug in harder

This meant the end of the attic bedroom. And living with mom. He left it all behind.

and i decided i might as well give in to my dads entreaties to move...

David’s mom was around 37 then. Raising her two kids. Doing her best. Meanwhile, his father was significantly better off. Living in Dallas. I asked how she responded.

she was sad
dad was bad
sister was glad
i felt had.
too many chads.
the world moved on. cleveland was a punchline
as inexhaustible as "airline food"
akron was a vendetta carried-out,
youngstown a spagetti sauce speckled toe tag
i adopted my dad's attittude towards ohio:
total contempt ( but only mustered partial disdain in the end)
he actually got a copy of the wooster daily record
delivered to his glass office building in north dallas
in his midthirties a swinging single sunbelt rest exec vp from ny city
from 1975-80

But despite the drama, none of these games made David weep. That comes now.

Two days before David’s 15th birthday in 1982, the San Diego Chargers traveled to Miami for a divisional playoff game. A late Saturday afternoon contest that lasted four hours and became known as the “Epic in Miami.” (watch this for an idea of how the game went).

(fans at the game. the woman on the left is so stylish. it’s awesome)

After being utter dogshit for most of the 1970s, the Chargers were three plus years into their Air Coryell era. Chuck Muncie had 19 regular season TDs, and Kellen Winslow had established himself as a starter and Pro Bowler. The Chargers won four of their last five games, beating a fading Super Bowl Champion Raiders team twice in that span, and hopped on a flight to Miami for round one of the AFC playoffs. From David:

Kellen Winslow in that Chargers vs. Dolphins playoff game was so totally heroic, I was in tears. The back and forth was the most emo wrenching deal I’d ever seen. And Dan Fouts’ beard gave him an air of Ulysses Grant gravitas, no other QB had ever possessed.

The Chargers jumped out to a 24-0 lead before letting Miami creep back in. A series of missed field goals in OT finally led to a successful Chargers field goal after nearly 14 minutes of play. From Wikipedia:

But perhaps the best performance of the game was put in by Kellen Winslow. In addition to his blocked field goal, he recorded an NFL playoff record 13 receptions for 166 yards and a touchdown, despite suffering numerous injuries. During the contest, he was treated for a pinched nerve in his shoulder, dehydration, severe cramps, and a gash in his lower lip that required three stitches. A picture of an exhausted Winslow being helped off the field by two teammates after the game is an enduring image in NFL lore and has been replayed constantly ever since.^[15]

"I've never felt so close to death before," Winslow said afterward. "That's what Muhammad Ali said in Manila and that's how I felt out there at the end."

By the way this is Kellen Winslow SR. Not Kellen Winslow JR. Which… never mind.

****

Let’s jump ahead.

The Oilers, of course, became the Titans just as Nashville became David’s home at the end of the 1990s.

David & Cassie. Pure joy.

His fandom was renewed, though the Titans losing to the Rams in the Super Bowl in 2000 was a spiritually low moment for David. One that precipitated tough times. He’d recall that Super Bowl for years. Like on a random Friday evening in November 2014, amidst a terrible Titans season, a message with accompanying highlights from 14 years earlier.

thinking about him [Steve McNair] tonight... what he did on 3rd down and 5 at the rams 27.

another clip

here in real time (@7:11)
after that play, for two minutes,
the way the whole season had gone,
i had the faith of a million priests
that victory was inevitable...

And then it didn’t happen. McNair gave the Titans a bunch of thrilling seasons though, before an acrimonious trade to the Ravens went down in 2006.

David had an adventurous early 2000s, getting married to Cassie, making Bright Flight and sending out a nearly unintelligible, and reliably hilarious e-mail “sports” newsletter called the Nashville Rascial Sprots Report, before hitting bottom and re-directing. (I wish I could find them now).

More football. I remember David telling me a bunch of times he was titling the new Silver Jews album — which became Tanglewood Numbers — West Coast Offense. To me, it made sense. Malkmus was playing on it again, and bringing his seemingly effortless finesse (a la Bill Walsh-49ers vibe) — the guitar solos that helped make American Water great.

(Speaking of titles, after coming up with Pavement titles Slanted & Enchanted and Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, he later told me he’d convinced Malkmus to call a Jicks album LA Guns, which was purposefully confusing and hilarious — his intention, most likely — but even with the title switched to LA Gunz, the legal risk sunk the idea.)

Back to football. Living back in Nashville, after his retirement McNair was murdered by his young paramour in 2009, the same year David shut down Silver Jews. A note from that July.

i went down to the stadium yesterday. you could sign a card to the family.
sit in the big empty stadium and watch videos of interviews with him
on the jumbotron.

(A Berman shrine to McNair and Tammy Wynette)

McNair’s death likely marked the end of David caring about football in any meaningful way. Or so he said. In reality, he still continued to engage, playing in a couple of Fantasy Football leagues with Silver Jews fans. We played for over a decade. Plans to maybe go to a real game would be hatched:

ill be there. im in ohio. ill drive over.
i can leave my dog in the truck.
wonder if they'll let me come out and walk at halftime?

That one didn’t happen. Communication would come and go. But for someone who’d later write lyrics about spending a “decade playing chicken with oblivion” it was oddly edifying to get a Yahoo! Fantasy notification at 3:47 AM on a Wednesday that the guy who wrote “Random Rules” had added Shonn Greene and dumped CJ Spiller.

Perhaps, in lieu of legit conversation, thinking of David scheming as Fantasy GM was too comforting. Still, it felt like he was frequently able to engage on some level, maybe even surface the passion that kid back in Ohio had. If not about the NFL, then about the culture, weirdness, and ephemera that surrounds it, if only just to make a friend laugh.