What I don't know about football would fill this column

I hear there’s some big football game this weekend.

No kidding, I had to look up which two teams were playing. I also had to find out which Super Bowl it was. LV, for those who like Roman numerals; 55, for those who don’t.

As part of my extensive research, I learned Tom Brady will be the quarterback for Tampa Bay and why that’s significant — because he’s old for a football player, but young for most everything else.

I also learned this is the first Super Bowl where one team, Tampa Bay again, will play in its home stadium. Oddly enough, they will wear their road uniforms.

I assume the Tom Brady info is well-known enough that nobody will be impressed if I drop his name into a conversation. But the other two factoids might gain me an appreciative glance or two, assuming I talk to anybody who cares about football, which during a pandemic is even less likely than it would be otherwise.

Still, old habits are hard to give up.

Years ago, when I worked in sales, and everything was testosterone and football, I used to bone up on a few gridiron facts every week. I figured I needed to know one talking point on Friday and maybe two on Monday to make me effective.

This was necessary because I recognized the importance of sports in general and football in particular to American life. Tell a customer you don’t like football and they make all sorts of assumptions about your life, patriotism and manhood. From there, you’re only one interception away from losing a sale to the rival team.

It wasn’t that I hated football. I just didn’t watch it or have the slightest interest in it. To this day, I doubt I can name more than four or five professional franchises. If I did, chances are good one or more of them would be a basketball or baseball team.

In the pre-internet era, my screen pass — see, I know some of the lingo — required advance legwork. “Boy, I can’t wait to see the Browns face off against the Steelers at 4 p.m. Sunday on NBC,” I might say, because it was easier to glean such information from the TV listings or a radio commercial than from the sports pages, which were filled with cryptic columns of numbers that had all the meaning of runes carved into a cave wall to me.

Then I would listen attentively to the news on Monday morning, memorizing a few scores and maybe one key observation from some commentator to pass off as my own, usually some gobbledygook about the defensive line looking anemic or a bungled call that should have gone the other way.

I didn’t know what I was saying and I didn’t care. I couldn’t — and can’t — visualize any part of the game. If you showed me a video of dogs cavorting in a park and said it was fourth-and-inches, I wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to contradict you.

To be honest, I doubt I fooled too many customers. After all, what other salesperson rushed through their doors and rattled off yardage stats like Robby the Robot on crack, trying to spit it out before he forgot it?

Maybe they liked me or maybe they actually wanted what I was selling. Or maybe they were playacting like I was, thinking they had to sound erudite about football when talking to the wan and doughy sales guy who sauntered into the business a few times each month wearing a trench coat and ponytail. (My sense of style in the ’90s was even more deficient than my football knowledge.)

It’s sad to think of people faking their way through a conversation because they’re afraid to be more authentic, but I guess that’s ’Merica. Or capitalism. Or both.

These days, I’m more likely to be honest about my football failings, especially to my high-school students, who find my lack of understanding about the game to be funny. And humor is a disarming weapon. When they’re laughing at me, their defenses are down, and I might score a touchdown by getting them to think critically about an essay they’re reading.

Nevertheless, it is kind of cool to think of Tampa Bay wearing their away uniforms at home, even if I don’t know what color those uniforms are and have already forgotten the name of the team they’re playing.

Maybe I’ll tune in for a little while on Sunday, just to find out.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter