Why the Gunners?

I'm a Redskin fan. I'll wait while you finish laughing. It's always hard to say out loud. Sometimes you mutter it to groups of strangers in dark bars after someone has started opening up. It feels like a support group. I had nothing to look forward to, weekend after miserable weekend. I didn't go to a football college, so Saturday was a void of sorta hope and kinda don't care. When you watch weekend games for their fantasy value alone, you've lost a piece of yourself. I don't remember the day I stopped yelling at the ref during Redskin games. I don't remember when I stopped startling the dog with random bursts of applause. It slowly just slipped away. While I never stopped loving beating Cowboys, I was broken. But the EPL fixed me.

It was 2014 and NBC had taken over the rights to EPL. I had played soccer through high school and I was good, where being good was measured by being able to kick with both your left and right foot. I was gently approached by a friend that knew about my weekend problem. He knew I was spending my weekends cutting grass, reading books, waking up around 11AM and going to bruches. "It is your only chance in life to pick a team. Think of it, just picking a team. Not because you were born into it, not because you live there, but because you want to." England? Professional soccer? Saturday Morning?

There were more questions than answers but despair will drive you into the unknown. It was a begruding endeavor. Fueled more by the interest in early morning drinking than any particular want or desire. But there was that deep down need. Food, shelter, team (of overpaid infallible icons). Type in "picking an EPL team" and you are met with plenty of thoughtful, idiotic, snarky, innane, articles about how EPL teams match up with MLB and NFL teams and fanbases. Hours and hours were spent down that rabbit hole with little or no sense made of it. How do you just pick a team?

Eventually, fate made the choice for me. Packed away in the closet, were some soccer scarves my sister brought home from a trip to London long ago, around 1993? Arsenal in red and white, and Highbury in blue and red. They might have been giving them away outside of the stadium. But it was done. Sit back and let fate work. It is not like anything else. I wanted to write that it is like getting engaged, that one day you are dating a girl and then, suddenly, you would do anything in the world for her; hopefully that happened long before the ring. Probably more like having a child or getting a dog. I don't remember becoming a Redskin fan. It was always just there, just like food and water. I remember becoming an Arsenal fan. It was a shock. One moment you don't have a club and then you do. A fraction of a moment in time between before and after. But what could shake me and mold me to my core like that decision? To take on the team. They were my team. I have chosen my lot and it would define me from that moment forward in such a deep and profound way.

Like Fight Club, I began to size up everyone I saw on the street. Are they in? What do they do on Saturday morning? Cut the grass? And when you are new, it all comes in baby steps. You start seeing the badge or jersey or scarf and you don't want to say anything. You doubt yourself, 'maybe I don't know enough, or care enough, or feel enough, yet.' But after time, when you start to leave work early to stream Champions League games (Tottenham fans: that's a special league for winners) on your TV instead of your phone, and find yourself standing for 45 minutes of a 0-0 half, and learn how to scream 'not a card for me, not for me' at yourTV,' that you have made it a point of no return. The field is the pitch. You say that now. The game is the match. You live and die by Saturday morning, you hate Monday afternoon games, you scream for Aaron Ramsey to stay out wide (sell him, if he loves us he will come back one day when he can stay put), you start every morning of the off season with transfer news, and believe, again, that this year is the year, you've made it. And life is the richer for it.