When the Bucs made it to the Super Bowl this year I knew I had to watch the game with my
father.
My family moved to Florida in 1977 and dad immediately became a Bucs fan. He loves an underdog and he sure got one - suffering through many of the losses in the 0-26 streak that the franchise started with. In 1979 the team was playing well and my father organized bus trips from Orlando to Tampa to watch games selling fans a ticket, a bus ride to the game, and access to a keg of beer at the back of the bus. It was then - at the age of 10 - that I became a Buccaneer fan. That year the Bucs lost in the NFC championship games and I cried. I bawled. Tears streaming down my ten year old cheeks, "All that effort into watching a team get that far and lose" I thought. Then I said "We'll be back".
But we weren't. Very quickly dad and I became die hard fans. The only kind of Bucs fans that existed for nearly 20 more years - suffering through more than a decade of losing seasons. As the team got worse local interest faded and dad wasn't able to fill the bus anymore. Soon the bus trips stopped. I had to listen to home games on the radio because of the NFL's TV blackout on games not sold out. The team would be 1-14 and I would be listening to the last
game of the season right until the final whistle.
My father has much memorabilia from that early period including posters from a game played in Orlando to try and increase regional interest in the team. He also has the newspapers from the Bucs first ever win, the Bucs making it to their first playoff, and their first ever playoff win.
In all the past 15 years - since I moved out and he moved North - we had only watched one game together. But every weekend I would talk to my dad both before and after the game - mostly about whether it was time to start rooting for losses to get a better draft pick. Many conversations began with the mantra of the loser - "wait'll next year". No matter what was going on in our lives or no matter how busy we were, we were always talking Bucs come
football season. A sports team become glue for a father-son relationship.
I watched the first ever Super Bowl with a Bucs team in it with my dad. I wasn't disappointed! When I arrived at his house in Syracuse, NY he had converted his living room into a Bucs Shrine. All his memorabilia was on the walls and the mantel. We watched the game with the haunted past all around us. We both talked about how this completed something that for us started 23 years ago, a father and a son waiting for their team to become champions. Sports can have such a powerful effect on us fans.
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