Thanks to TBDBITL, an OSU fan is made
My wife was eight months pregnant with our second child and I was delirious with the flu on the one weekend we had allotted to find a house here in central Ohio.
This was nearly 16 years ago, back when — I must confess — neither of us had any idea what a Buckeye was.
My wife’s conversion to a full-on fan of Ohio State was completed on Saturday. The clincher came not during gameplay, but halftime.
We moved to Greater Columbus from central Pennsylvania, which is solidly Penn State country. Neither of us attended a college where football mattered, so we weren’t Penn State fans either. At my school, ice hockey was king.
The weekend we came here to hunt for houses, it turned out, was the weekend of The Game. We didn’t know what The Game was, and as our real estate agent drove us through neighborhoods, we were struck by the strange number of garage parties going on. We also were struck by the giant inflatable man with the oval head standing sentry in one yard.
Perhaps, loopy from the flu meds, I was just hallucinating.
When we passed a second giant inflatable man with an oval head, I asked the agent:
“What on earth is that?”
“You don’t know Brutus?” she asked.
We did not know Brutus.
Our learning curve was slow. Early on in my reporting career here, I ran out to knock on the door of a house where a large shipment of marijuana had been intercepted.
No one at home, I told the city editor upon returning. But, I told her, a car parked in the driveway had a big silvery marijuana leaf emblem affixed to the trunk. Seemed pretty brazen for drug traffickers.
“You sure that wasn’t a buckeye leaf?” she asked.
“What’s a buckeye leaf?” I replied. We rooted for the home team. We watched the games on television, and through the years even made it to a few.
One of them could have been
Saturday’s game against Maryland.
Our neighbors wanted to give us their game tickets. It was a nice gesture, I told them, but we had too much going on. Maybe next time.
My wife ran out to pick up our daughter from ballet. I sat at the kitchen table, half-listening to the halftime report as I glued my eyeglasses back together, which is another story.
My head shot up. Did they just say the halftime show by the Ohio State marching band was a tribute to Rush?
I am married to the biggest Rush fan I have ever met. There’s a story about my wife in the second row of a Rush concert many years ago, screaming so loudly and persistently and insanely that singer Geddy Lee became visibly unsettled.
So when I realized that I had heard correctly, that The Best Damn Band in the Land had in fact performed a halftime tribute to rock legends Rush, my first thought was, “Oh no, we could have been there.”
And the 100,000 fans in Ohio Stadium would have heard a woman screaming so loudly and so persistently and so insanely that Geddy Lee would have become visibly unsettled, at his home in Toronto.
She didn’t believe me at first, when she and our daughter walked in the door. I found it for her on Youtube.
My wife and I are high school sweethearts, so I can tell you that in addition to being a Rush geek she is also a band geek. The collision of these two geeky worlds spelled sheer bliss.
She sat on the sofa, enraptured. If you are a Rush fan like my wife, you might know that legendary drummer Neil Peart loved to ride motorcycles. You might have even read all his books about his love of riding motorcycles, as my wife has.
If you are a Rush fan like my wife you also know that Peart died last year, bringing an end to a band that had done its own thing, trends be damned, for the better part of five decades. More than a year later, Rush fans are still hurting.
So when the Ohio State band morphed into a motorcycle, and those wheels started spinning, my wife was quite sincerely close to tears. I would find out later that this was a common reaction among Rush fans.
“The wheels are spinning!” she shouted.
And when the band took the shape of Peart, aka “The Professor,” hammering away at his drum kit, I would not have been surprised if she had floated off the sofa, out the sliding door, and clear on up to Canada.
By Sunday night she had settled back to earth on this side of the border, but she was still talking about it. She directed me to the online comments, which are extraordinary.
“My town is halfway between Ann Arbor and Lansing,” one fan wrote. “I am sending everyone in the Ohio State marching band 100% love and admiration today for their moving tribute to one of my favorite rock bands that continues to inspire me to this day.”
“I’m the biggest Michigan fan but I love the OSU marching band,” another wrote. “As a huge fan of Rush, I was almost in tears when they showed Neil on his bike.”
“As a Canadian, I can now comfortably admit that Ohio is officially my favourite of the 50 states after seeing this tribute...bravo.”
The performance also wowed the band, who tweeted, in their typical lowkey fashion, “We’re speechless.”
I see two obvious takeaways. First, it is near magic, the things that draw us together, be they music or the home team.
And second, if someone offers you Ohio State tickets, think long and hard before you turn them down. tdecker@dispatch.com @Theodore_decker