If Football's a Religion, Why Don't We Have a Prayer?
Philadelphia, Its Faithful, and the Eternal Quest for Sports Salvation
Chapter One
Friday, December 17, 2004
Twelve and one. How was that for a chest-bumping way to open a season? Twelve victories and one freakin' defeat. A city with more confidence and less experience at heartbreak would have felt invincible, not imperiled. Philadelphia was different. Tranquility was a base on the moon, not some cocoon of serenity in which anyone here nestled. Uproar, dispute, that was Philly's natural state. This was the place where Charles Barkley claimed to be misquoted in his own autobiography. The city where David Lynch, the filmmaker, went to art school and found a haunting, exquisite fear. Apprehension. That's what Philadelphia did best. Eagles fans could sense ruin the way a woolly caterpillar could intuit the harshness of winter. They felt a waver in destiny's forecast like an ache in old bones.
"If it's an airplane, it's always going to crash, it's never going to land," Butch Buchanico, the Eagles' director of security, liked to explain about the local spo ... read full excerpt from If Football's a Religion, Why Don't We H ebook
