Why Do We Care So Much?

It can be hard to tell, given the level of passion, whether our hopes are pinned on a mere sports team. Blip to WIP-AM on a Saturday morning in, say, March, and there’s a perfectly sane-sounding guy from Olney, or Newtown Square, who has called in because he’s worried about the state of the quarterback’s knee. Not just worried about it. Obsessed over it. Saw the quarterback on TV and it looked like he was limping. This can’t be good. Plus the QB has an Amish beard. Yo, dude — it’s March.

Margaret Gardner thinks about the Eagles every day of the year. Margaret got braces, one day in mid-July. It occurred to her, that day, that in seven weeks she would color them black and green, in honor of the Monday night season opener of the Eagles. Margaret Gardner is 39 years old.

She lives in a nice house in West Deptford, she sells advertising for the American College of Physicians, she has a husband named Sean and two daughters, ages 13 and 10. She appears to be normal.

What’s going on? When did our football team morph from sports to the manifestation, for so many of us, of something so much larger?


IT DID START WITH FATHERS AND SONS. And it crosses class lines, the connection and hope and pain. Mike Tollin, who’s made the movies Radio and Varsity Blues, grew up in Havertown. He was five in 1960, when his father took his brother to the championship game at Franklin Field; Mike was deemed too young to go, which he will never forget. “In some subconscious way, I was scarred,” Tollin says. “I felt, This may take the rest of my life, but I will be at an Eagles championship game.” As he got older, he did get to hand Mr. Himes, his Hebrew school teacher, a note from his father to get him out early — seven Sundays a year, for seven home games. He and his father and brother would park on 34th Street, and it was the most glorious 20 minutes of anticipation, the smell of cigars and peanuts, the rickety steps, a hard bench. Then the Eagles would start losing, it would get colder and colder in the fading light, they’d walk back to the car depressed in the frigid dusk, to homework, to hell. Bingo! Hope and despair in three hours. Tollin lives in L.A., but took his seven-year-old son to the Philly/Jacksonville game last year, introduced him to Donovan McNabb, thus positioning him “right where I want him.” Primed for a life of Eagles misery. Tollin invites 15 Eagles fans trapped in L.A. over to his home theater on the only Sundays of the year that count.

Through the ’60s, into the ’70s, the family drama rolled all over the city. E.J. Banks is a 39-year-old probation officer and rap musician who lives in Overbrook. He got his Eagles introduction through the Lord. “When I was little, I used to think that Jesus Christ was an Eagles quarterback. I was four or five, and I had to stay upstairs while my dad watched the game with his gangsta friends. They’d drink beer, play cards. And every couple of seconds I’d hear, ‘Jesus Christ! Throw the damn ball!’ So I thought Jesus Christ played for the Eagles.” Pretty soon E.J. was old enough, Sunday mornings, pregame, to enjoy eggs and sausage and The Three Stooges with his pop. The quarterback was Roman Gabriel. He was close enough to God.

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