Colorado
When Denver Missed August
"To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”
- Nelson Mandalla
August 2013, I and three of my friends drove from Alabama, across the country to California making a few stops along the way. A highlight of our trek was Denver, Colorado. Alabama in August is one of the hottest, most humid times of the year. We are day in and day out covered in our own sweat from just walking to our cars. Despite the misery of August, we southerners know the nearness of football is immanent. That is why this tale for me and my fellow travelers was stranger than it may sound.
We arrived on a Thursday evening from driving all day from Dallas, Texas, riding the high of devouring possibly our last Chick-fil-a chicken biscuit. We stopped to crash at the house of a college friend. On arrival, we walked to dinner at a near-by sports bar. Not long into our walk, two things struck me as noteworthy. The first being; how does a person not float off the earth on a cool summer day in Colorado? As I am walking fully expecting to be covered in gallons of my own sweat, I realize I am bouncing as I gaze up and see clear skis above the beautiful Rockies of Colorado.
The second revelation was not as pleasant but even more strange. The last Thursday of August is the first official day of college football. No matter your team, in the life of a Southerner this is a monumental day. In 2013 in Denver, Colorado, this was that day. However, as we obliviously waltzed into this restaurant, what never entered my mind is something else could be more important. Because from wall to wall, on at least twenty-seven different TVs, all broadcasting one sporting event, on each and every screen, was the last NFL preseason game for the beloved Denver Broncos.
For those who don’t follow pro football, this game is meaningless. It is the last of four preseason games, where no major starters or stars play nor do they want to, according to an organization called the NFL Players Union. It is mainly for fringe players looking for a final roster spot on a team or possibly make the practice squad prolonging their football career for at least one more year.
Let me put it this way. The amount of NCAA college football players each year is around seven-three thousand. Of those who graduate and/or make themselves draft eligible is sixteen thousand. The number drafted is two hundred and fifty-four plus a couple hundred free agent signings. Most of whom will play little to none for the team who drafted/signed them, and the average career lasting less than three years. Therefore, making football a career profession and yourself a household name in the hearts and minds of fans is few and far between, and with that in mind as I unfold this next part, you’ll understand my confusion.
The hostess escorted us to our table, and our waitress approached. I asked a simply question sitting in our little booth in our little corner of the restaurant, “Can you turn this TV to ESPN?” Reminder, there are at least twenty-seven televisions in this restaurant. The waitress paused and stared at me like I had asked her four year old daughter out on a date. So I tried nicely, “uh…please?” She then responded with, “let me ask my manager.” Manager? I didn’t think a manager was needed in this process of events, but it’s Colorado, maybe they have a law against using remote controllers with a liquor license. The surrounding tables reiterated this sentiment with shaming looks as if we were teenagers trying to score beer at kid’s birthday party. My friends and I looked at each other in confusion wondering if any of us had publicly attempted to murder John Elway before arriving.
However, the waitress came back with the remote and changed the channel, all the while looking over her shoulder like a brawl was about to break out, and she was the first to take a beer bottle to the back of the head. She then asked what we wanted to drink and the rest of the night went well, mainly because the Broncos game ended about twenty minutes later, and the waitress realized her job or well-being was no longer in jeopardy for serving us.
All in all, this experience inclines me to say, culture is a funny thing. We create cultures and sub-cultures around our interests, socioeconomics, upbringing, and loads of other stuff. Most of the time, we interact with culture without even knowing it. Generally, we know it when we discover we are in direct conflict with it. I have visited Denver many times before and since, I always knew people in Colorado loved their Broncos, but to the degree where I felt unwelcome for not participating as they did, was not a reality I thought existed. Now looking back, to be accepted, we could have waited to change the channel and pretended to participate with them. Yet, why? For their benefit or ours?
In every human lies the essential desire to be accepted. Acceptance is real and important, but it can train us to be survivalist within culture, adapting to people and their assumed realities which leads to forsaking identity and conviction to feel the high of “being liked”.
Having friends and family that accept us for who we are is a wonderful and concretely powerful thing, but if we pretend to have it, is it really acceptance? True acceptance comes from first accepting self. Cheesy and possibly overused, but true. Especially with the conversation of “changing culture”, the individual’s right to belief and think independent of culture is valuable, possibly necessary. If not, acceptance becomes redefined to ‘fitting in’ to the new culture created by the masses. Robots are good at that.
Culture is secure and important especially when it’s ours, but acceptance is crucial when someone is received outside our culture as a human explicitly as a human independent of our likes and dislikes.
