You can’t buy an 88 Vikings jersey in Minnesota in 1974. You can buy the 10 of Fran Tarkenton or the 44 of Chuck Foreman, but if you want the 88 of Alan Page, your mom has to find a blank purple football shirt and have the numbers ironed on. As far as I know, my mom is the only one who ever did. The jersey becomes my security blanket, what psychologists call a “transition object,” the item that sustains a child in moments away from his mother. I have worn the shirt until it has begun to disintegrate in the wash.
I am alone among my friends in worshipping Page. I know only that he is recognizably great—the way he pulls runners down one-handed, as if pulling the cord to signal a city bus to stop. When he removes his helmet on the sidelines at the Met on a winter day, his Afro steams, as angry heads do in cartoons.
When we return to school in September, my classmate Troy Chaika invites me to a Saturday night sleepover at the Airport Holiday Inn. I can meet the Vikings when they check in and, if I ask politely and address each of them as “Mister,” get their autographs, a prospect that Troy presents as no big deal but which thrills and terrifies me in equal measure.
Every night for two weeks, toothbrush in hand, I practice my pitch to the bathroom mirror: “Please, Mister Page, may I have your autograph?”
Time crawls, clocks tick backward, but after an eternity, Saturday comes. Mom—God bless her, for it must pain her beyond words—allows me to leave the house in my 88 jersey. It is literally in tatters, the kind of shirt worn by men in comic strips who have been marooned on a tiny desert island with one palm tree. Even I can see it looks hillbilly.
So I take my place in the lobby of the byzantine Holiday Inn, a low-slung maze that requires a map at checkin. BIC Cristal in one damp hand, spiral notebook in the other, I recite my mantra rapid-fire to myself, like Hail Marys on a rosary: PleaseMisterPagemayIhaveyourautograph? PleaseMisterPagemayIhaveyourautograph? PleaseMisterPage…
Moments before the Vikings’ 8 p.m. arrival, Mr. Chaika cheerily reminds me to be polite and that the players will in turn oblige me.
“Except Page,” he adds offhandedly, in the oblivious way of adults. “Don’t ask him. He doesn’t sign autographs.”
Which is how I come to be blinking back tears when the Vikings walk into the Holiday Inn, wearing Stetsons and suede pants and sideburns like shag-carpet samples. Their shirt collars are great wings that flap as they walk. These are truly terrifying men, none more so than Page, whose entrance—alone, an overnight bag slung over his shoulder—cleaves a group of bellhops and veteran teenage autograph hounds, who apparently know to give the man a wide berth.
The players retrieve room keys already laid on a table for them. Page picks up his and strides purposefully toward the stairwell. I choke as he breezes past, unable to speak, a small and insignificant speck whose cheeks, armpits, and tear ducts are suddenly bursting into flames.
It is to be an early lesson in life’s manifold disappointments: two weeks of excruciating, Christmas-caliber anticipation dashed in as many seconds. Though I have now seen Page outside a television set for the first time in my life, I can’t quite believe he’s incarnate. So—my chicken chest heaving, and on the brink of hyperventilation—I continue to watch as he pauses at the stairs, turns and looks back at the lobby, evidently having forgotten something at the front desk.
But he hasn’t forgotten anything. No. Alan Page walks directly toward me, takes the BIC from my trembling hand, and signs his name in one grand flourish in my Mead notebook. He smiles and puts his hand on top of my head, as if palming a grapefruit. Then he disappears into the stairwell, leaving me to stand there in the lobby, slack-jawed, forming a small puddle of admiration and flop sweat.
I am instantly aware that it will be impossible to improve upon this experience, no matter how long I live. But Troy Chaika and I try anyway: tucked away in our room at the Holiday Inn, with his father checking on us sporadically, I pass the rest of the night in a blissful blur of room-service milkshakes and the kind of late-night television that is ordinarily off-limits to me.
Sometime in the night, I realize that the jersey Mom made me—the wash-faded, moth-eaten, hillbilly garment she let me leave the house in, against all her instincts and upbringing and better judgment—is what caught the eye of Mr. Page. Any other garment in this condition would have been thrown away—“pitched,” as Mom puts it—long before it reached this state.
There is a radio between the beds and we leave it on all night, another illicit pleasure, and the songs on KDWB are incorporated into my dreams, so that in the morning I don’t know if I really heard or just imagined Paul Simon singing, sometime in the middle of the night in the Airport Holiday Inn: “My momma loves me, she loves me. She gets down on her knees and hugs me…”
Summer has one last gasp. Evel Knievel tried to jump the Snake River Canyon on September 8 live on closed-circuit TV, shown to a paying audience in American movie theaters. We weren’t allowed to go. A week later it is on Wide World of Sports, and we get to see it with our own eyes.
We already know that he didn’t make it, but that hardly matters to us as Evel arrives at the launch site. It is six hundred feet above the Snake River Canyon, so he is delivered by helicopter, the way all big events in America are now going down: Watergate, Vietnam, M*A*S*H. They all begin or end with our hero getting out of or into a chopper.
Evel decamps to his trailer with his wife and three sons. Watching Wide World of Sports in a fever of anticipation, I think how terrifying and wonderful it would be to be one of Evel’s sons. To have Dad on your lunch box. Just the theme music—“Spanning the globe, to bring you the constant variety of sports!”—makes my skin prickle with excitement.
Evel is carrying his customary walking stick. As every American child knows, he has broken every bone in his body. Whether this happened all at once or one by one, none of us can say. All at once, I think. Mike McCollow thinks one by one.