Death and Football

My dad died the day after my last post. Perfectly, for him—sadly, funnily, beautifully—he died during a 49er game. He would have appreciated the D. H. Lawrence poem I posted the day before; he was a literate enough guy. He would have appreciated the words I spoke to his unresponsive form late that night; he had his sensitivities, even if he didn't like to show them much. But he would have found much more meaning and poetry in the fact that he breathed his last as the Niners took a 9-6 lead into the locker room, flanked by both his sons. Most of all, I think he would have enjoyed the fact that because we were yelling at Jimmy Johnson's halftime inanities, we both missed his final breath.

      Russell Jones was a sweet man and a genial man, but not an easy man to reach. His father died when he was young, leaving him in the care of a cold, mean mother during the cold, mean Depression. (As my Aunt Betty likes to say of their childhood, "The wrong parent died.") The best years of his life were his first two in the Marines, 1940 and 1941; he had a place in the world, an ordered life, a community, and enough to eat for the first time in his life. Then the war tore that ordered world apart and sent his community of shipmates to the bottom of the Savo Sea. That, I think, was the betrayal that sent him into his shell for the rest of his life. He married a woman who seemed nothing like his mother but turned out to be too much like her in some painful ways. He endured an often cruel marriage by keeping his head down and his eyes turned away from his heart, and he sought comfort in the pleasures he'd learned to trust in childhood: old movies, hiking, big band jazz, fixing cars, and football.

      He wasn't one to stretch out and embrace his sons' interests; I suspect he was afraid to stretch too far beyond the places that felt safe to him. My brother and I learned, years apart and on our separate paths, that the way to connect with our father was by learning to care about his interests. Ray was the more physical one, the better hiker and the better repairman. I was the one who in his teens knew who directed The Public Enemy and who played lead trumpet for the Benny Goodman band. Both of us, though, knew the 49ers.

      When my brother was young, in the early 1950s, the family lived in San Francisco, at one point in an apartment across the street from Kezar Stadium. My dad would take him up to the roof to watch games for free, hoping nothing too exciting happened near the west end zone, where the curve of the stadium cut off their view. When Ray names players from those years, they echo with the depth and weight of a liturgy: Tittle, Perry, Nomellini, St. Clair. A decade later, when we were living in the suburbs and watching the games on TV, I learned to recite magic names of my own: Brodie, Washington, Wilcox, and the real Jimmy Johnson.

      The family kind of flew apart in the '70s. My brother wasn't getting along with our mom, who had developed an inexplicable distaste for his wife; I'd pretty much turned my back on my dad and his interests as I pursued the young-writer role that my mom liked to see me in. Then came that autumn day in 1981. I was living in San Francisco and couldn't help overhearing that the long-hopeless 49ers had just beaten the Dallas Cowboys 45-14. Not quite able to bring myself to be a football fan again, I nonetheless checked the sports section the next week to see that they'd beaten the Packers in Green Bay, then actually listened to the radio for a while as they held off the hated Rams to take control of the division. So when I visited my parents the next weekend, I suggested to my father that we watch the 49ers play the Steelers to see if these guys were for real.

      For years he had been following the 49ers on his transistor radio in the garage, if he managed to follow them at all, driven underground by my mother's loathing of sports. But she could raise no objection when her favored son (hell, I'd just landed a literary agent and had an editor interested in my first book) wanted to watch the game. San Francisco won. My dad, his heart wounded by decades of 49er disappointments, focused mainly on the fact that their offense hadn't been very productive, but I was excited, more excited than I'd ever have expected to be. I think that afternoon was the first time in years that I'd picked up the phone to call my brother. Had he been following these guys? Was this really happening? He'd also been burned by the Niners too many times, but I remember a cautious note of optimism in his voice when he said, "It looks like Montana might actually turn out to be a pretty good quarterback."

      Over the next two decades, the 49ers were the linchpin of my family's socializing. Watching them with either my brother or my father had a special sweetness; when Ray and I both managed to watch a game with the old man I felt as though I were part of a sort of triangular perfection. Gradually even our mom got excited by playoffs. The last time Ray and I took my dad on a major outing, when the hydrocephaly was beginning to rob him of his mobility, it was to see SF beat Detroit at Candlestick Park. The day, months after our mother died, when we moved our father into an assisted living facility, the 49ers were playing the Eagles; we plunked him down in the common room to watch the game, taking turns checking on him and the score. We forgot about the furniture moving for a while as our boys sealed the game with a magnificent goal-line stand, the last football we three watched together until the day our father died.

      His mental decline paralleled the team's decline. I watched a few games with him in the bad years of 2004 and '05, but he couldn't quite follow what was happening. The seasons after that were entirely lost to him, as was life itself except for a narrowing circle of emotions and half-memories. We got the call on a Sunday night that he'd gone into the hospital with pneumonia and might not come out. For a few days we lived at the hospital, watching him fight for life, until he settled into a morphine sleep. Then we took turns with the vigil, agreeing that it was too much to hope that we could both be there for his death, hoping that one of us could be.

      Late Sunday morning I came in to relieve Ray. He was watching the morning NFC game on the TV mounted to the hospital room wall. He would have left right away, so he could watch the 49er-Giants game at home, except that the Falcons put on a fourth-quarter rally to tie the Saints and he couldn't tear himself away. The Niners game started, and he decided to watch a little of it before he left. It turned out to be one of those gut-clenching defensive match-ups, and a little became the entire first half. We talked about how fitting it was that we got to watch one more game with Dad. When a doctor came in to check Dad's uneven breathing and stopped to look at the TV, Ray told him about watching games from the roof of that apartment building across from Kezar. In the closing minutes of the half I noticed that Dad's breathing had gotten more ragged, but how could I think about that with the Niners botching a chance to score right before going into the locker room?

      Finally, at halftime, Ray stood up and gathered up his book and his sweatshirt in order to go. He paused just long enough to watch Terry Bradshaw and Jimmy Johnson trading inane remarks. I looked at Dad to tell him, as a matter of ritual, that Ray was leaving. Then I said, "I don't think he's breathing."

      We watched the rest of the game together, with our late father between us. We talked about the immensity of what had just happened, the loss of our last parent. We talked about our memories of him and our gratitude that his decline hadn't dragged on any longer than it had. But we also talked about Justin Smith's perfectly timed leap to knock down Eli Manning's fourth-down pass and win the game for San Francisco. Russell Jones raised his sons to know what really matters.