January 26, 1986 was Super Bowl (XX) Sunday. I listened to the game as I drove my 1966 VW Bug from Auburn (where I’d just pulled a shift in the news department of KAHI/KHYL radio) to my friends the Muth family at Pacific Union College (PUC) in Angwin.
The night before, I’d covered the Sacramento Kings basketball game.
Why was this a big deal?
Well, I moved to PUC from Australia with my parents in May of 1977. Over the next year, I fell in love with America’s three main sports of football, basketball and baseball. I didn’t watch them much on TV (my family didn’t own one) but I read a lot of books about them. I had an intellectual approach that many adults appreciated.
So I got to know America, in part, through sports. I was living on a Seventh-Day Adventist college campus and as such I was largely removed from the real world.
Adventists tend to have little influence. They are healers and retreaters. Their kingdom is not of this world. To become one with the church is to remove yourself from history.
I loved history and wanted to play a big part in it. It was important to me to go down in its books, to be bigger than my father and all my classmates who didn’t accept me.
One of the ways I connected with the world was through sports. I resolved to be great one day. Great in this world. I wasn’t particularly adept at moving socially in Adventism. I never had a real girlfriend. I thought my true home was outside the church, where everything would be much much better.
Thanks to my father’s controversial theology, we were pushed out of the Adventist church in 1980 and into what my father called “the invisible church of Jesus Christ”, which didn’t have much practical community.
In eighth grade, I decided to become a journalist. When I finally got to cover professional sports for KAHI/KHYL radio in the summer and fall of 1985, it was a big deal to me. It was proof that I had made it. I had left the church and I had made it in the big world. And I was sure to get laid.
I went to Candlestick park a couple of times that fall to cover San Francisco 49er football games against the New Orleans Saints and the Dallas Cowboys. I went into the lockerrooms after the contests and interviewed the players. I was big time. I even rubbed shoulders with San Francisco Chronicle sports columnist Lowell Cohn.
Now I drove up to the Muth home and they were inside watching the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl and I got to talk about interviewing Tom Landry to a pretty brunette named Lorie W. She wore white sweats and she seemed to me like an angel.
When you’re new to a place, they’re less likely to know you’re a loser.
Lorie represented possibility to me. She was an opportunity to step outside of my limits and to begin again my search for connection, for living from the inside.
I was feeling pretty crook that week. I’d been sick for the previous couple of days but thought I was getting better.
I stayed with the Muths for five days. I enjoyed lying on their couch and listening to their extensive collection of CDs. The soundtrack from Chariots of Fire (the one movie I enjoy more each time I watch it, five times so far) was my favorite. I loved the hymn Jerusalem.
And did those feet in ancient time.
Walk upon England’s mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land
I was an atheist at the time but yearned to believe in something. This Jerusalem, this city on a hill shining a light for the world, sounded grand. It sounded like PUC, my paradise lost.
I felt like Lorie was my Jerusalem. She was my chosen one. She stirred me. She seemed like the ideal wife. I heard that many of the guys at Monterey Bay Academy wanted to marry her.
That Super Bowl Sunday, Lorie gave me her phone number. We decided to go to a movie that week.
On Tuesday morning, the space shuttle Challenger blew up.
On Wednesday evening, I picked up Lorie from the PUC girls dorm and drove to St. Helena where we saw The Jewel of the Nile.
When we came out of the movie, we saw that I had left the lights on in my car. Luckily, it still started. As I drove up the hill, the car reeked of gasoline every time I turned a tight corner.
Reluctant to spend money, I drove for many months with this leaky gas tank until finally getting it fixed.
Anyway, those five days at PUC were the bright spot of my next few few months, or perhaps my life. That cold flu thing that bothered me at PUC turned into full-blown mono and held me in its shackles until summer.
Only I would get the kissing disease without having done any kissing.
Two years later, I felt like I came down with a relapse of mono. Only this time it was known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) and it never left.
Lorie ended up becoming a psychologist and she married a Jewish psychiatrist and they have kids together.
In the 25 years since Super Bowl XX, I’ve repeatedly fallen in love with women who remind me of her. I’m absolutely defenseless against demure wholesome and brilliant brunettes.
At Sierra College in June 1988. Four months into my CFS.
