Why Do We Care So Much?

Paul Campise is 76 years old, a retired court reporter who lives on Main Street in Moorestown, with a summer place on Long Beach Island. But Paul’s a Philly boy. He grew up at 28th and Mifflin. In ninth grade, he aced the test that got him into La Salle High School, which launched him across town to 19th and Olney and out of the neighborhood for good. He went on to have six kids, and his youngest, Tina, took over his business. She inherited something else as well, best explained in her failed first marriage.

“I was 19 or 20 when I got engaged,” she explains, “and, this is the God’s honest truth, my father sat me down. Now, we were both still in school, didn’t really have jobs or our own apartment, and here we are engaged, planning a wedding, but my father doesn’t tell me I’m too young. He says, ‘Tina, he’s a Cowboys fan. This is going to be a problem.’”

Pro football — in case you haven’t noticed — is not like other sports in Philadelphia. That’s because in Philadelphia, football isn’t a sport; it’s a calling. And I don’t mean for the players.

Paul spent much of the ’70s running through the parking lots and stands at Eagles games waving a banner, rousing the faithful on up to the nosebleed level at the Vet. Three years ago, he spent 60 hours a week — for six months — alone, in his basement, creating Eaglesville, a model stadium with fans and cops and tailgaters and handicapped parking spaces and a fat inch-high Andy Reid and trains looping around it all; to get the particular blue of the sky above the stadium, with the right puffy clouds, he had to send away to Germany for wallpaper, which cost him 75 bucks. The scoreboard reads Eagles 54, Cowboys 0. Paul hates the Cowboys — their arrogance, their sanctimony, their Super Bowl wins, everything about them that’s so clearly not us. The Cowboys don’t stand for evil. They are evil. As for Tina, she now has three young daughters with her second husband; the first one, the Cowboys guy, well, her father was right. “It was a factor,” she says, in what went wrong.

She isn’t kidding.

TALK TO ENOUGH EAGLES FANS, and Paul and Tina begin to seem less crazy. Or at least they’re part of a very big club of lunatics. The Eagles got rolling here back in the ’30s, so there’s a long history of fathers introducing sons to the game, and the sons on down to their sons (or daughters, or wives), buoyed by championships in 1948, 1949 and 1960. Rooting for the Eagles is a passion fanned by family connection — the method of connection for a lot of families.

But family ties are only one part of the story. Starting 30 years ago, the team became much more important, a place to escape, but also a place to invest the simplest hope. Can we? A long time ago, we were good. Can we ever get there again? It hasn’t happened, of course. But sprinkling a little bitter despair into the emotional cocktail has only made it stronger.

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