When I was in high school I had a part time job at Office Depot. I was a cashier (number one, no big deal), and it was cool experience and allowed me to earn some money after school and on the weekends.
It was the weekends that were an issue at times. Many of us have been there, many still are sometimes, where you have to work or have an obligation of sorts that happens to be taking place during a Dallas Cowboys game. It stinks.
Nowadays it feels like it is less of an issue than it was back then. But
this time pre-dated the recording of live tv as we currently know it, and my Mom would record the games on VHS tape for me. Even though I’d get home before the game ended, I’d have to wait until it was over so that the recording could finish and that I could rewind it to watch from the beginning. The lengths we go to.
PGA Tour players have similar issues!
About a week before the U.S. Open, the one that Wyndham Clark won in impressive fashion, I had a chance to speak with Jordan Spieth. These are professional golfers for anyone unaware.
Even if you know who these people are, you may not know that the latter is a massive Dallas Cowboys fan. Jordan Spieth has been seen at many Cowboys games in the past, interestingly he bears a striking resemblance to Jason Witten, and he is good pals with Tony Romo for obvious reasons.
In talking to Jordan we chatted Cowboys a bit, but I was curious if he ever had his own Office Depot moment, so to speak. Professional athletes are humans, after all. They have teams who they root for outside of their own sports and it was conceivable in my mind that maybe he runs into that issue from time to time. Turns out I was right!
“We were playing, I think it was the Eagles, and I was… it was it was either… it was the… I think it was the, either the Wild Card or Divisional Round .I can’t, it had to be first round I think of, 2017 playoffs, so the ’16 season into the ’17 playoffs. And it was January and I remember being on hole number 5 to 6 of the Sony Open in Hawaii.”
“So I’m I’m in the middle of my round on the weekend and I’m playing pretty well. I think I’m in the top five and I’m just having Michael [Greller] just check my phone and just keep the phone in. And then as the round went on I’d kinda go look… there were tvs playing the football game in some of the hospitality areas. So they would back up to the green… so I’d kinda go over and kinda check and look up.”
“And we ended up losing, but I was essentially watching that game as I was playing. So that shows you kind of the level of fandom there is… whether that’s a good or a bad thing is yet to be determined over the next 10 years so we’ll see.”
It would seem that Jordan was remembering the Divisional Round game against the Green Bay Packers. No, not Dez’s catch. This was 3rd and 20. Aaron Rodgers not fumbling when Jeff Heath hit him. It sucked.
The final round of the 2017 Sony Open did indeed take place on January 15th which is when the Cowboys lost to the Packers, unfortunately. It is pretty impressive that Jordan was able to recall exactly where he was on course when checking in on the game.
Jordan was also correct that he was inside of the top five of the field at that moment. He wound up finishing in third place behind Justin Thomas (winner) and Justin Rose, but unfortunately his Cowboys could not have similar levels of success.
It is so interesting to think about how in this case a professional athlete consumes Dallas Cowboys games. Many of us have are rhythms and rituals associated with watching games, but there are fans of all sorts of different walks that have to find ways to make it work.
Hopefully Jordan is managing how to watch the Cowboys in the Super Bowl in the near future.
