Arena football

The only time I've been to watch an indoor football game was when Stephanie, Vincent, and I went to the Civic Center in Tallahassee to watch the Tallahassee Thunder play in their inaugural season. But Louisville has an Arena Football 2 franchise, the Fire, and the Kentucky Seminole Club had arranged an outing there. Vincent didn't want to go, and I got there late and so I got some activity points walking around Freedom Hall (where the University of Louisville basketball teams play until the $500 million arena next to my work is finished (see "Friday is for "I") and where we've seen some concerts) (at the fairgrounds) looking for them (reminded me a little - in that regard - of Stephanie's Florida State graduation and also the Van Halen concert - for a different reason). A very modest Seminole crowd was there - including our friends John and Sarah - who are both local Republican operatives (we talked about the downtown arena here and going to see the Thunder in Tallahassee).

The game was a somewhat slow and (for Arena football) low-scoring affair. The game is played on astroturf, on a 50-yard field. Extra points and field goals are hard to make because the space is so small. There is no real out of bounds, but players do get called out of bounds when they slam into the side of the playing space. When the ball bounces off of the tall net that separates the air space between the field and the seats behind the goal posts, the ball is still in play. John - he used to have season tickets - said some of the players play both offense and defense, and so there are even less than 22 players on the team. The players, John said, get paid just $200 for a game - $250 if they win - Obviously, they need day jobs. Local corporate sponsors do provide in-kind perks - Low-cost housing at the apartment complex that we looked at, free food at some local restaurants. Don't know if the dance team or cheerleaders get paid or get those perks. Most of the players played for college teams, and there is some regional bias. Ironically, the opposing team was the Albany Conquest (Albany had an Arena football team when I was there - it played in what was then called Knickerbocker Arena, the (at the time) new downtown arena (where I saw Tom Petty perform) -but the team had a different name then, and I never saw them play). So, for example, there were a lot of players from New York State and Northeastern schools, including one player from the University of Albany and the quarterback, from RPI (Rennsalaer Polytechnic Institute, across the Hudson River from Albany in Troy). The Fire players looked less like football players - some were awfully big and some were awfully small. As in all such minor league sports game, the contests and paraphernalia/hullaballoo around were a big part of the show. Cheerleaders signed posters beforehand. During halftime a Miss Louisville Fire contest was held, and Mayor Abramson awarded the winner (a white Indiana University grad - who said - although the mike for their quick impromptu speaking competition was virtually inaudible - she was the "total package) and the runner-up (an African American woman who said she should be the person who represents the team during the next year because she too was "on fire"). A very long stretch limo drove onto the field and deposited the contestants there.

I stayed for the whole game - even though I felt bad leaving Vincent home - because it got interesting at the end. A long pass by the second of two quarterbacks the Fire coach had played tied the score with a minute to go, and we thought we were headed to overtime. But the Conquest scored a touchdown with 10 seconds to go (the clock almost never stops during most of the game - except for these long apparent "TV timeouts" (what TV? these games aren't on TV) and except for during the last couple of minutes of both halves, when they stop for everything). Then the Louisville quarterback threw up the Arena football equivalent of a Hail Mary pass when there was three seconds to go. He threw the ball at the net behind the end zone. It bounced off the net and into the hands . . . of a Conquest defensive player. And so Albany won the game. Albany seemed more enthusiastic and had dominated most of the game, and so this seemed fair. At that point the crowd - never that big (though John said Louisville is just abuot the biggest city that has an AF2 team - most cities this big with Arena football teams have Arena Football League teams - (like baseball's AAA - like the Bats) and these attact somewhat better players (like Kurt Warner who went on to win a Super Bowl MVP award for the NFL's St. Louis Rams). Most of the AF2 teams the Fire plays come from smaller cities with smaller arenas. Games both at Louisville and elsewhere may attract 8,000, but 8,000 doesn't look like that many in Freedom Hall, which can seat 20,000 plus.