Football fan in Prague

I don’t know what it is, the weather – cool, sunny, with wind carrying the hint of a bonfire. Or maybe the light – that sideways glance you get of the sun that brings out the color in Prague for one last time before it retires with November and everything goes grey til spring. But most likely it’s because my university’s football team, the Vanderbilt Dores, a quite remarkably bad team for years on end, has won 4 out of 5 of our last games.

But here’s the thing. For one season at least, I am following football. Every Sunday morning I jump to the New York Times to click open "Saturday College Football". I read the entire listing, and call up my football fan friends in Prague (all southerners or southern alums) to chat over the litany of team wins that we have, for the moment, learned by heart. When my dad calls, I ask him for his predictions, and that night I listen to my brother’s college radio show and pick the analysis out of the fun. And it all seems somehow exotic, but nostalgic too, in a land where football means soccer and tailgate parties and college sport leagues don’t exist.