January is a special time for me. With the insanity of Christmas gone and the majority of the summer still ahead, most people are letting their thoughts drift towards the cricket, listening to the ABC commentary team bringing life to one of our favourite sports, or perhaps muting the TV whenever Tony Greig pops up to sell us yet another limited edition piece of cricket memorabilia. And while that is something that I’ll be doing too, what really gets me excited is that for the NFL, January means playoffs and the road to the Superbowl. American football captivates me in a way that no other sport does, and while I love watching Australia play almost any sport with a passionate intensity there is something special about gridiron that none of our local codes can match. The first NFL game that I can remember seeing was the 1985 Superbowl between the San Francisco 49ers and the Miami Dolphins. In 1985, living in rural New South Wales meant that as far as television went, you could watch the ABC, or the local TV station that was affiliated to one of the commercial networks, so considering that it was the school holidays there was a fifty percent chance that if one of them showed the Superbowl, I’d see it. I can clearly remember watching this match in my friend Jason’s living room, with his older sisters complaining that we didn’t even understand the game and should leave the living room to them so they could do something else. They were right in one sense, the terminology was unintelligible to me, I had no idea about the rules, or who any of the players were, but it looked spectacular, and that was enough.

Over the years I’d try to find the Superbowl around the end of January and slowly I added to my knowledge of the game. But what turned my interest into a full blown addiction was my first year university flatmate and Don Lane. In the early 90s Don Lane presented the NFL on the ABC on Tuesday nights, with an edited version of one game and the highlights from all of the others. My flatmate Gareth was a passionate fan with an impressive knowledge of the game and a stack of journals about it, filled to the brim with statistics about teams, players, coaches and almost anything else that you can imagine. In a few short months I absorbed not just the rules but some of the strategy that goes toward making American football such a compelling sport.

If you’re going to follow a sport you have to have a team, and I settled on an underdog team with an exciting quarterback who had feats of brilliance mixed with disaster, Drew Bledsoe and the New England Patriots. I had a team, someone willing to explain the game — Don Lane — and the internet to fill in the gaps, everything that I needed to throw myself into following the NFL. Then Eddie Maguire almost ruined it.

Coming from New South Wales I had no idea who Eddie Maguire was, all I knew was that he was the person that Channel Nine had decided would front their NFL coverage after they outbid the ABC for the rights. Not only was Don Lane replaced by someone who clearly had little interest in, or knowledge about, the game, but it was pushed to the depths of their late night schedule. To make matters worse, the Patriots were having a good year and I couldn’t always ingest enough caffeine to make it to the end of the games. I read newsgroups while I was supposed to be doing statistical analysis in Psychology, to get whatever details I could, then while I was at home on holidays, I had to dial long distance to access the university modem bank after my family had gone to bed, but it all seemed worthwhile as the Patriots inched their way towards the Superbowl.

Channel Nine, after messing with me all year, then made a decision that I felt was designed to make my life hell. Instead of showing the Superbowl live on Monday morning, as had always been the case in the past when other broadcasters had the rights, Channel Nine decided that they would show the game late on Monday night. I spent the day avoiding any media that might spoil the result for me and waited. The twelve hour wait for that game only made the eventual defeat more painful and I questioned whether I wanted to follow this game any more. Five years later my faith was repaid when Channel Nine had given up on NFL broadcasting, and a field goal crossed the posts in the last second of the game to give the New England Patriots, led by backup quarterback Tom Brady, one of the biggest Superbowl upset wins in NFL history.

Today, Australian fans of the NFL are no longer at the whim of broadcast TV, with games streaming online, and web bringing a lot more to fans than the box scores and retyped match reports that we used to scour in the 90s.

But what is it about American football that I find so captivating? When I was eight it was the physicality of the game, the sight and sound of players crashing in to one another and performing amazing feats of athleticism. As I grew to understand the game better I fell in love with the strategy and the way that every single play is another opportunity to try and locate your opponent’s weak points. I love the way that a game can change so completely in mere seconds, that a result is so rarely a foregone conclusion, and that precision and inventiveness are rewarded. I love the statistics, the jargon, the theatre and the emphasis on the importance of the team above the performance of the individual. And, like cricket, I love a game that you get to watch for hours.

I think it’d be hard for any sports fan not to be taken in by the pomp of the Superbowl, avoiding of course the traditionally woeful half time entertainment. But if you make the effort to understand what a 1st Down is, why there’s a separate offensive and defensive team, and why the quarterback is allowed to pass forwards, you may just be hooked for life. If you want to find me on February 6th I’ll be having the day off, waiting on the outcome of Superbowl XLVI, hoping that my team has survived the playoffs and made their way to the main game. Go Pats.

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Dave Gaukroger provides a cautionary example for others. He continues to believe in quaint ideas like social equality, personal accountability and the power of indie pop music. Dave writes regular media commentary for Crikey’s Pure Poison blog. Follow him on twitter @dfg77

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