Redskins – pre-season and remembering why I don’t go to games anymore
Dear Hank,
A few years ago I was on my way to Maine when we hopped off the turnpike at exit 2, got something to eat and decided to go thirty miles up route 1 to get back on 95 north. There’s a reason you don’t do this. You have to go through the town of Ogunquit, which is cute and pretty and quaint. It is also loaded with tourists and there’s a cross roads at an odd angle in the center of town with no light. The road is packed bumper to bumper for most of the thirty miles and it moves at an every other car speed the entire way. It can take two or three hours to go that distance.
But you forget every ten years or so and you do it, or start to do it, and then you remember. It’s like getting a “snap out of it slap” in the face.
Going to a Redskins game at Fedex Field is like that slap in the face. I went the first year the stadium opened. I was astounded by the bad traffic patterns, the long torturous ramps to walk to your seat, the huge open seating with nowhere to get out of a bad weather situation, the lack of any good food concessions, and the meager selection once you got to the front of the line.
We went to the last pre-season game for this season, against the Baltimore Ravens. We got free tickets, so why not? I’ll tell you why not. You forget that it will take one and a half to two hours to get there because of traffic. You forget that they’ll hustle you into a “cash lot” where you pay $30 to park, take a bus to the stadium and arrive after kick off.
We had seats in the upper deck, row 29. Do you know where row 29 is? It’s the top most row. You can’t get any higher. You better be in shape if you are going to take these seats. I saw people stopping two and three times to catch their breathe before proceeding.
We were hungry so I bought two “Philly cheese steak” sandwiches and a bottle of water, $21. They frisk you at the entrance you can’t bring in any bottles so you have to pay the $5 for a medium sized bottle of water. So our free tickets have cost us $51.
It had been in the 100’s earlier in the week and temperatures had come down a bit. Rain was threatening. We brought our ponchos; thank goodness we did because on the top row the wind, even mild came over the top edge of the far side of the stadium and hit us. We were freezing.
We huddled in our seats, backs to the fence, trying not to look down the cavernous maul before us and ate one of the cheese steaks. A speaker box was thirty feet away and so loud that it hurt our ear drums. It was on the end of a structure that held the lights for the game, which was swarming with bugs. Big moths were flying in the lights. The wind would come across the stadium; create a down draft and a moth would get sucked down. The moths would smack into your body every so often. You had to be careful not to open your mouth too soon before putting your sandwich into it for fear of getting a dive bombing moth instead.
Oh the game, that’s certainly an after thought. We naively thought leaving between one and a half and two hours would be enough time. It wasn’t. We missed the starting players for both teams. So we watched a bunch of no names. I haven’t been to a game in several years and it does look a lot different than on TV. I always forget how bad they are. It looked like two high school teams. Late in the game a woman near us yelled, “Throw the ball!” The quarterback obliged. The woman then yelled, “Throw it to our team.” There was lots of talk on the sports programs earlier that day that the coaches “didn’t want to reveal too much in their play book.” I think they failed miserably or succeeded wonderfully depending on your outlook. The players revealed that they can’t catch, run, kick, block or tackle; so who cares about the play? What does it matter what play you have called if, when the quarterback gets the ball and is dropping back a defensive player is there with his hands on the ball and another defensive player is tackling the quarterback from behind?
I thought that when the ball was in the air anyone could catch it, but I was wrong; no one could catch it: through the hands, off the numbers, low ball – don’t dive. Hey, it’s pre-season; the coaches didn’t reveal anything in their play book and the players, I hope, didn’t reveal anything in their abilities.
My stomach was upset from eating that cheese steak (to make it even more insulting, near the refreshment stand was an ad for Subway Sandwiches with the tag line “Eat Fresh”). I decided to go down and find some soft serve ice cream. Shelby wanted some popcorn. There was none of either to be found. I finally saw a guy walking by me eating an ice cream sandwich. I walked around the upper deck for three or four sections and gave up.
The wind had gotten so bad that we moved down twelve rows. It wasn’t much better. The wind could now hit the seats and be funneled at you sideways so you could get hit by empty paper cups and peanut husks. At least you didn’t have the backdraft and the bugs were slightly less annoying.
Many people left the game at the end of the third quarter. After the Redskins kicker missed his second field goal from thirty yards most of the rest of the crowd left. By the end of the game I’d estimate that the stadium was 10% full. I’ve got to give it to the camera crews. They managed to find pockets of people to show on the big screen that made it look like it packed. Let me tell you how empty it was. From where we sat to where the exit was for our section, which was seventeen rows down, the only person sitting in the area directly in front of us was the stadium staff person. The section was empty for those rows except for a few groups on the far side of it.
I looked around the upper deck and it was about the same in every section and the lower sections weren’t much better.
When the kicker missed that second field goal; even the loyal Redskin fans – the ones with the jerseys and the hats and the beads and the noses – the ones who stand up to signal first down; even those people were looking away and snickering; not laughing but snickering.
Most people had left by the time the Redskins mounted their touchdown drive, a drive that was kept alive by a questionable penalty against the defense. I wonder if the coaches revealed part of their playbook in that drive
Okay, guys go down the field and on third and whatever hope that we get a penalty in our favor. Earlier in the game, when I was hiking up in the stands I passed a rather mild mannered fellow sitting in his seat. I heard cheering and turned to watch what I would consider the only legitimate run of the game. I hear this fellow yelling, “Run you dick.”
When the runner stopped to try and let the defensive player over run the play so he could cut back he got knocked out of bounds. The guy behind me was yelling, “Don’t run out of bounds,” then screaming in disgust, “you pussy.”
Guess what the highlight of the game was? Well there was only one positive highlight.
There were lots of other highlights unrelated to the game. There were various commercial promotions for seat upgrades, free meals, fan of the game, best row of the game, none of which seemed to be rooted in any real decision process. There were “the first ladies of football” the Redskins Cheerleaders (at least they didn’t call them ‘The Redskinettes’.) Every time they announced them and their appellation I thought Shelby was going to release the contents of her Philly cheese steak onto the many orange seats below us. The first ladies of football were attired in uniforms that looked exactly like the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, little white shorts and a cross your heart tie behind your neck top in maroon and gold of course (not blue and white like Dallas – totally different look.)
All the cheerleaders had hair that came down to between their shoulder blades. But somehow a “Cheerleader of the Game” was picked and it was cheerleader Britney. She goes to George Mason. She’s pre-med. It’s her second year as a cheerleader and she wants to keep cheering for “the best team in football.” All I could think is, “When is she switching?” I also wondered how they picked her and did the other ladies scratch her eyes out in the locker room later? I also have heard stories of how hard these cheerleaders practice and work out. Obviously, they weren’t revealing too much of their playbook either. Their cheering consisted of swishing their pompoms in front of their torsos and changing formation from two lines to a triangle. I wonder how long they worked on those formations? About as long as the redskins offensive line worked on blocking assignments?
Ah me, the thrill of being there, it’s too much. But it was good to go back and be reminded why I don’t go. Then there was leaving. We decided to wait to the end of the game figuring no one would be left and we were right. We walked down the ramp, one quarter of the way around the field to the bus, which after loading up sat for a long time, got to our car, our lot was almost empty, and drove home, no traffic. How long does that take? How long does it take to leave Redskins Field, catch the bus and go home to Bethesda with no traffic? One and a half hours. Can you imagine how long it would take if everyone stayed till the end of the game: three maybe four hours? We’re talking about 70,000 people. Nascar has 160,000 to a race. I’ll bet they do a better job. Why not put the stadium 100 miles away with good access? You’d get home quicker and you wouldn’t burn as much gas.
I remember the first time I went to “Jack Kent Cooke Stadium” I was amazed at the traffic flows around the stadium. How could you design a stadium where you got the opportunity to run over the same person three times? They did it. Of course things our different now because so much of the parking lot is taken over with the bus service to ferry people to outlying locations in the surrounding office parks. Of course, they have to charge $30. You’ve got to pay for the cops, the people with flash lights, the people to put out the traffic cones and take them up, the trash pick up people, the buses, the drivers. There’s a lot to do when you design a stadium like this. You could put the stadium on a metro line; oh wait, we had that. It also afforded protection from the rain and blocked the wind. You could see the game too. No wonder we moved.
I can’t wait for September 11th (that, as everyone knows, is the beginning of the Redskins regular season. Nothing else happens on that date. Go Dan! Go Skins! Maybe Dan will have snagged Tom Cruise by then and he can come to the game. Wow, the excitement never ends.)
