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Cranky Heroes and Collapsed Halos:Why I Love Football
The ocean of balding, fifty-ish heads swiveled as one unit towards me as I finished asking my question about football of the great (sort of) Lenny Dawson, HOF quarterback who set a Chiefs season record of 30 touchdowns in one season. A record that stood until 2018. Not bad.
The men stared at me. I waited.
We were at a conference in Snowmass, Colorado. Mid-June, 1985. Bunch of cable guys. I was working in sales for the nascent satellite industry. Denver is a hotbed, being ground zero for satellite uplinks due to our location smack in the geographic middle of America.
Dawson was our motivational speaker. True to his gender and his generation, he had made a number of Polack jokes, racial slurs and a few other indignities. The boys were eating it up. Star-struck. Boys do that.
(Okay, okay, I can see an audience full of idiotic women doing the same thing if Kim Kardashian showed up, but I digress)
I was the only woman in the room.
Let me back up here.
As a Boomer, women in my generation generally were not football fans. Not usually. We…