JordanandKarin.com

I'm not sure how it happened, but at some point early in elementary school, I got hooked on the NFL. I didn't really watch it much, but I read all of the NFL yearbooks and decided that I was going to be the next Joe Montana. In fact, every Friday during the 45-minute recess, I was Joe Montana (the other quarterback was Dan Fouts - he threw for a lot of yards, but I got the titles).

Anyway, somewhere along the line I became more a basketball guy. I never game up on the quarterback thing until, well, I got benched after my first series in the first varsity game I started at quarterback. I've stayed a 49ers fan all along, however, through very good and very bad, so when I noticed earlier this year that the NFL schedule included a 49ers stop on Monday night in Arizona, I jumped at the chance to come full circle and attend my first NFL game (with H.I., a lifelong 49ers fan due to his Bay-area upbringing). Of course, the problem is that the 49ers today are a bit more like the Washington Generals than an NFL team, but as it turns out, that only added to the experience.

A few years ago, they built a new football stadium in Arizona. I guess you know that if you watched the Super Bowl last year, but it looks a bit like a space ship, and you can see the thing from miles around given that it's sort of in the middle of nowhere in the West Valley.

Since we work in the East Valley, I figured it we'd have to leave early to make a 6:30 kick-off time. We headed out the door right at 4:00, made a quick stop to grab some water (they are kind enough to allow you to bring one tiny water each into the stadium), and by 6:00 we were finally there. Well, by "there" I mean that we were exiting the freeway at the stadium. They decided it was a good idea to color-code all of the parking lots there, which is handy I'm sure if you know what the colors mean. We didn't, so we took at stab at Orange, which looked reasonably close to the stadium - maybe a 5-10 minute walk.

As we pulled in and looked for a spot, H.I. noticed that everyone but us had an orange parking pass hanging from their rear-view mirrors. We couldn't really turn around, so we asked a lady directing traffic there if a pass was required. Sounds like a dumb question, I know, but she told us that it didn't matter and that she'd seen a lot of people come through without passes. We proceeded to park, but as we pulled into our spot we observed that we hadn't seen a single car without a pass, so we asked someone else, who told us that we had to park in the visitor parking another exit down on the freeway and directed us out of the lot. The moral of this part of the story is that there are no dumb questions, just dumb answers.

Anyway, put firmly back into our place, we headed for the visitor lots. As we exited the freeway yet again, the stadium was still relatively close, so we weren't too worried. However, as we followed the signs to the Brown lot, the giant stadium slowly began to fade into the horizon. The Brown lot is apparently a school parking lot, complete with school buses to take you back over to the stadium, which is the dim light in the center of this picture:

After disembarking from our big yellow bus, we were met with a long line of people waiting to be searched on the way in. As it turned out, the search was just a quick pat-down of your ribcage area, which apparently is the only place one would conceal a weapon. This killed our chances of seeing kickoff, which wasn't really a bit deal until we heard in the concourse on our way to our seats that the 49ers had just returned it 105 yards for a touchdown.

Given that the long journey to even get to that point had robbed us of the opportunity to eat normally priced food, we only waited about a series before heading back down to the concourse for some quality stadium food. I somehow have a talent for picking the slowest lines at sporting events, and this was no exception. Once again, I'll state that I'm glad people are given an opportunity for employment, but I am amazed sometimes at how hard it can be to put an order together in a place that only has about four items on the menu. Anyway, at least they offered decent value for the price, relatively speaking (I stuck with nachos, but this was the beast H.I. scored for about $6):

We found ourselves surrounded by a lot of 49er fans, but the giant a few rows down from us was a hometown Cardinals fan. The stadium actually has a rule against "excessive standing," which I think refers to frequency and duration but might eventually be appended to apply to any standing by someone Shaq size or larger. It was sort of a mini-wave all the way back every time this guy stood up. My vantage point was largely unaffected, actually, but the same was not true for H.I.

Meanwhile, we had a 49er fan behind us apparently closely related to Andrew Dice Clay. He was nice enough to take a picture of us, but as the beer began to take effect and the 49ers got to work at giving the game away, he "wove a tapestry of obscenities that as far as we know is still hanging in space" over Glendale.

It was nice that the game was close throughout, although fantasy football once again intruded on my ability to cheer for my team without reservation since I needed Larry Fitzgerald (of the Cardinals) to have a solid game and Tim Hightower (also of the Cardinals) to have a bad game in order to secure a win for the week. You know you have a fantasy sports problem when you see a guy get tackled in the backfield and you actually say things outloud like, "Nice - that's minus 0.2 points for the guy I'm up against this week."

Once it became clear that my fantasy life was safe, I checked into reality and starting pulling for the 49ers as I normally would. The problem was that by that time, they were trying everything they could to lose the game. They threw about three interceptions, two of which were negated by flags. I've never seen refs in any sports take as many mulligans as these guys did, by the way. It made your head spin a little bit listening to their explanations as to why they shouldn't have thrown flags in the first place ("tangled feet" were involved at one point, and later they charged the 49ers with an "excess time out").

To make a fairly long story short, at the end of the game we found the 49ers down five (after leading for most of the game) and driving, when the 49ers QB (whose jersey currently says Hill but will soon say something else) inexplicably pitched the ball to a Cardinal linebacker while falling down. Fortunatly the Cardinals had a momentary relapse to the old days and went three-and-out, and Hill (and a receiver named Hill) marched the Niners back down to the 1 yard line with about 50 seconds left.

Hill just had to spike the ball to kill the clock, but for some reason the 49ers starting doing some subsitutions, so by the time he did the Niners had killed about 25 seconds trying to count everyone up (which isn't easy on only 10 fingers). The refs were confused yet again and threw a flag ("when in doubt, throw it out" apparently), only to say "just kidding" a few moments later, which negated the spike and meant that the clock would run as soon as the ref set the ball (a few yards back from where it has been, no less) and got out of the way.

By that time, the 49ers had no idea what they were doing, and they went with the "run the ball up the middle" play (the short-yardage counterpart to "you go long") and got stuffed. Game over. I'm not sure who to blame for the loss. The 49ers "were who we thought they were," but at the end it looked like the lady in the Orange parking lot was running the show. We decided that the referees were probably snowbirds from Canada and were using the CFL rulebook by mistake. Either way, I wasn't too hurt - the loss moved the Niners a bit closer to a high draft pick next April.

After wandering around the outside of the stadium for a while, we found the little corrals that lead to our buses, which we realized only now were NOT school buses. Yes, they were yellow and had bench seats, but as you can clearly see, the signs just said "bus."