34.

34.

Sweetness.

Growing up in Kansas City, I absolutely fell in love with my Chiefs. It was the early 80s, and they were the home team. I still love them in the way a man ONLY loves his football teams.

SOME women don’t understand that a football team has typically been in a man’s life since his childhood. (I'm always stoked to run into those that DO!) As companions, if they’re lucky, they’ve been through good AND bad times together.

Together, they’ve experienced good girlfriends/great coordinators, bad girlfriends/horrible head coaches, and personal tragedies/god-awful seasons. And they’ve been there for each other like best friends are supposed to be. It’s a very interdependent relationships. A football team NEEDS great fans. That collection of men feeds off our energy; not just in the stadium, but in the newspaper, and the local clubs, and in the traditions, and in the way an entire city wears their colors during a streak. And we fans live vicariously through their great hits, and suffer through their agonizing defeats. Without it, a team cannot succeed … even if it wins. It’s one reason Los Angeles has never been able to hold on to a team of its own.

There is NOTHING like the way a city that loves its football team FEELS the day after an important loss. Everything is gray, even when the sun is shining. There are fewer smiles to go around, and people are a bit more abrupt than the norm.

Even in small town America, where your team might represent a high school, or a college, that team carries the soul of its fans onto the field; underneath the pads and paint, between the cleats on each shoe, and between every rep in practice, or the weight room.

But sometimes, we men look across the room, and something about a team that DOESN’T belong to us, catches our eye.

For me … it was Sweetness. #34. Mr. Walter Payton.

Later today, the great, great, great, grandkids of the most exciting football team to ever grace a field will step under the Superbowl spotlights to revive a legacy that cannot be matched.

The 1985 Superbowl Shuffling Bears.

You will hear from Mr. Mike Singletary, conscience of the greatest defense of all time. He will speak about his comrades—Dent, Wilson, Hampton, Marshall. There’ll be words about, if not FROM McMahon, Perry, Gault, the whole gang …

But I want to take a moment, to remember Sweetness. Ran too pretty, died too soon.

I’m pulling for the Bears today, but more than anything I’m happy for the coaches. I’ll love the game, but it’s not my Chiefs.

But for Sweetness …

Nothing but Love.