Couch: Spartan Stadium, Section 5, Row 43, Seats 28 and 29 – an ode to my father
Graham Couch
EAST LANSING – Among the fondest memories I have of my father is from Nov. 4, 1995, the two of us bundled up, tucked in our seats at Spartan Stadium — one of those 3:30 kickoffs after daylight saving time ends, when the second half is under the lights.
Michigan State 28, Michigan 25. An improbable game-winning drive in the final minute.
College football doesn’t get much better than that. Life doesn’t get much better than that. Not for a just-turned 16-year-old sports nut from Lansing who adores his dad.
We weren’t a season-ticket type of family when I was a kid. Going to a game was a treat — an annual trip to see the Detroit Lions for my birthday or a neighbor popping over with a couple extra Spartan football tickets or walking over to see Sexton High School’s football team play because, well, that’s a heckuva Friday night in the Westside neighborhood.
The MSU football season tickets in 1995 were a gift beyond anything I’d ever asked for — easily beating out Castle Grayskull on Christmas morning 1983 or the Dunk-it indoor basketball hoop that revolutionized my parents’ living room a few years later. Nebraska, Michigan and Penn State were part of an awesome home slate in Nick Saban’s first year at MSU. We were going to be there together for all of it.
I can still picture that shiny perforated sheet of tickets. Six games in one year. I had never seen anything that beautiful. I never expected to be sitting in those seats 22 years later, without him.
My father, Christopher Couch, passed away unexpectedly at Sparrow Hospital on Aug. 6. He was 68. His 23rd installment of MSU football season tickets arrived a few days earlier, he’d told me.
So last Saturday, as MSU played Western Michigan, I watched from Section 5, Row 43, Seat 28. I needed to experience that view one more time, let those memories soak in. I sat with my mother, Susan, who’d been my dad’s primary companion at these games since I landed my first full-time job as a sportswriter out of state 15 years ago.
I could picture him next to me with his folded up copy of the New York Times. I could see him in his red windbreaker, which he usually accidentally wore when MSU was playing Indiana or Ohio State. I remembered the $20 bill he used to hand me just before halftime to go fetch a couple ice cream cookie sandwiches. He always remembered to ask for the change, a lesson he learned many years earlier. I could feel his hand on the back of my neck as we talked.
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My father was not born into the culture of big-time college football fandom. He was an English immigrant from Torquay in Devon who moved to Maine just before his 12th birthday in 1961.
He didn’t step foot in Michigan until attending Albion College. He returned for good in 1977, taking a job in Lansing as a bill analyst for the state House of Representatives, a job he’d hold the rest of his life.
His first MSU football experiences involved hearing the Spartan Stadium crowd cheer and groan from the MSU library as a graduate philosophy student in the early 1980s. Back then he’d carry me around in a backpack or on his shoulders. One of my earliest memories is resting my chin on the top of his head as we walked along.
I only realized how much of a fan he’d become when he kept our season tickets after I’d moved away. Because he’d never been angry at the Spartans after they lost, unless they lost in a stupid way. Even then it was a mild reaction and short lived. He didn’t boo people. It wasn’t his nature. He was so damn reasonable in every facet of his life. I counted on him for that.
This is what I said at his memorial service, part of it, anyhow.
“He was such a gift to this world. He cared about people, he listened to them. He didn’t waver from his moral compass. He was reasonable in thought and temperament. He was an awesome friend and companion.
"He could talk Shakespeare and Christianity, current events and sports. At least twice a year, he’d find a way to make the argument that Lou Whitaker belongs in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
"Whatever your cup of tea, chances are he knew enough about it to not just make conversation, but to enter your world. And if he didn’t know something that was interesting to you, he’d add it to the pile of books surrounding his chair in the living room, so he would.
"His humor was intelligent and well timed. I called him just about every day at his office. If he answered by his own name, I knew he was too busy to talk.
"Usually, he’d see my number and answer as someone else based on the events in the world that day, often as the public relations firm for a company or person embroiled in scandal. Or, if I’d written a critical column, he’d pretend to be the person or organization at the center of it.”
He knew how to connect with his children (I have one younger sister, Hannah). Teenagers can be aloof with their parents. Those season tickets in 1995 — arriving when I was still 15, about to enter my junior year of high school — assured three hours of conversation and common interest on those six Saturdays.
We sat through heat and rain and cold and the vomit from a fan behind us during the Penn State game in 1999. In the days before we had a cell phone, we had to wait for my mother to pick us up. There was no leaving early. At least once, she drove right past us in the rain as we walked toward her on Marigold Street.
I tried to get to one game a year with him after I graduated college. My childhood fandom had dissipated by the mid-2000s. But I loved his company and the way I felt sitting with him there. I knew I’d miss that when I took this job in 2012.
He liked being in Section 5, Row 43 — Seats 27 and 28 originally, which became 28 and 29 somewhere along the way. That’s as far as he moved in two-plus decades. He could have made his way inward from the northeast corner of the stadium. Those seats were good enough for him, he said. Plus, being that close to the visitors section, one group of fans was always happy. He didn’t mind every week directing visiting fans through Section 5 into Section 4.
In recent years, he and my mother enjoyed their own routine in those seats. Sometimes my sister or one of my uncles would go with him instead. But mostly it was the two of them.
After a good pregame walk from a nearby neighborhood, they’d arrive in time for kickoff and, with binoculars, spot me in the press box. I’d do the same from the press box. He’d stay in his seats at halftime, hoping my mother brought back an ice cream sandwich. Their conversations were mostly about the game, with my dad sometimes jokingly responding, “Don’t ask that in public,” to her elementary questions.
My mother’s not sure if we’ll give up the seats after this season. There’s a connection to him there she’d like to keep. He’d like it if we found good use for the tickets each week — a neighbor kid, maybe, or an old friend or sometimes my mother and sister together. I’d like to sit there again, too.
It’s a place we were happy together. And a gift that showed how much that meant to him.
Contact Graham Couch gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.