Story:
This hat here is from an American team named Arizona Cardinals. It’s an American football team, which is not a very well-known sport in Greece, it’s the one with the mellon-like ball and the helmets and the chest protection and so on. In English it’s called American football, the Americans call our football “soccer”, to separate them.
Giorgos tells us that he works as a programmer and has been teleworking since 2000. He explains that, during that time, he used to work for an athletic website as the technician manager and that was always interested in sports, but, those days, even more so.
I decided to put up a satellite dish at my house, which also received the signal from various channels, not only Athenian ones, but also Spanish, Italian, whatever you wanted. I started watching baseball there. Baseball is the one where you hit the ball with the bat. I really really liked it and I think Greeks and baseball would make a good match.
At some point I started watching American football because they would show one match per week on Spanish television and it intrigued me, and, slowly, I started really liking it. It’s a team sport, because there are 11 players that need to do a specific task at each moment. If one of them doesn’t do it, the whole effort will collapse, so you need to be very punctual with what you’re doing. When you’re very punctual, it means you’re a team player, because, in order for a team to work, each person needs to do what they’re responsible for.
When I started watching it, in 2003, I didn’t have a team, until, in 2006 – 2007, this team grabbed my attention because of 2 or 3 players that were in the team back then. This team has a very big history. The teams in the United States migrate often from one state to the other. They were the ones that started from Chicago, one of the first two teams to start the championship, more than 100 years ago, and then they migrated to Saint Louis and were renamed to Saint Louis Cardinals. That’s where the baseball team was formed, which has maintained the same name. The football team moved once again, in ’85, to Phoenix, and was renamed to Phoenix Cardinals, and, again, in the ’90s, to Arizona and was renamed to Arizona Cardinals. Cardinal is this bird, there used to be a lot of them in Chicago, although there have hardly ever been any in Arizona, but the name remained.
In Greece, the fans of this team must be 3-4 in total, they don’t sell their merch here, you will find merch from the Yankees, from baseball, for instance, but you won’t find anything from American football. At some point, the American Football League decided to host 2-3 matches every year in London. This begun in 2009 – 2010 and in 2017 they sent the Cardinals. I thought that since I will never go see them in Arizona, I’ll go see them in London, I mean, it’s closer. I arranged the trip, I went there for three days, I saw the match, I went to buy a hat at the shop there, meanwhile there were a lot of people, because the arena had 70,000 seats and was almost full, everyone was rushing to buy things and I arrived too late. I said, this can’t be real, the match is over and all I have is a single hat I had bought from a stand, which wasn’t even official, it didn’t even have a bird. I was leaving the next day, but I thought I should look, because I would definitely find something in London. Eventually, I found this and another one, as well as a beanie, and I brought them.
Giorgos mentions that his grandparents are from Adrianoupoli and that, after the Greco-Turkish war they went to Istanbul and, later, the family was separated. His parents moved to Athens. He tells us that he owns a lot of paintings, portraits that he doesn’t recognize and that he has no way of finding out their identities, as both his grandparents and his mother have passed away.
