The Natty, Depression, and Doing It Again

I thought there was a 0.0% chance Notre Dame could lose the National Championship when I booked a hotel room that, unbeknownst to me, had a strip club in its basement. It is called Hotel Clermont. It is in the heart of Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward neighborhood. And, to be blunt, it is…awesome.

I know what you’re thinking. But Alex, you’re married! You write about your two daughters all the time! How could you stay at a hotel with a strip club sans wife and kids with a clear conscience? Well, let me set the stage.

By sheer generosity of good friends, on the Friday before the big game, I was given a ticket. I could probably write a novel on Devon Levesque, the guy who bought and gave me the ticket with no strings attached, but I’ll just say that he’s an insanely interesting and successful dude (did a backflip on Mt. Everest, bear-crawled a marathon, started and sold a few companies, etc…). He bought 8 tickets to the game. I was not originally part of the 8 because I bring nothing to the table. Money, mainly, is what I don’t bring to the table. Sure, I can bring some laughs, but a $4,000 ticket is about $3,900 over budget.

I’ve known Devon for a while, we are good friends, and we have a mutual best friend – Sean Smith, my Irish brother from earlier Notre Dame posts. By the grace of the Football Gods one of the original eight dropped out, I was given the 8^th ticket and a spot in one of the already booked hotel rooms. I didn’t care if I slept in a bed, on a cot, or made nice with the homeless and slept outside in front of the stadium. I had a ticket, I booked a flight, I was going.

The next day, about two hours before arriving at the airport, I come to find out that the hotels are booked for Sunday-Monday. I am to meet up with two lunatics who also have Saturday flights - Sean Smith and another friend Rob Doran – in Atlanta and we are going to wing it for a place to crash. I haven’t wung (?) anything in quite some time. You don’t wing anything when you have kids. You Your wife has everything planned out, you she prints out confirmations, you she double and triple checks everything you she can think of, and still, you she ends up missing something. But wing it? It’s been years.

In Rob’s words, we didn’t care if we slept at a fucking LaQuinta as long as we were in Atlanta, Georgia. But Rob was able to procure some information from someone he knew who used to live in Atlanta. The person recommended a few hotels in a cool area and I picked the first one on the list, booked it with Hotels Tonight for a quarter of the price (highly recommend Hotels Tonight), and didn’t think anything of it.

Fast forward about four hours and I am hammered drunk. A few airport cocktails, a few plane cocktails, and anxious nerves coursing through my veins about the game had me cross eyed by the time I touched Georgian soil. To distract myself from the general nausea I felt I had to chat up the passenger next to me, a young Notre Dame fan, and forcibly make him convince him to sign up for my Substack. Mystery passenger, I hope you’re reading this (and sorry).

When I got to Hotel Clermont it looked like the party was just beginning. Mind you, it’s 11 PM, a whole two hours past my bedtime. There are people outside smoking and drinking and the lobby gives off Chateau Marmont vibes. My first thought was this is the type of hotel that rock stars go to trash and die in. When the concierge gave me a Miller High Life with my room key I knew my intuitions were correct.

Next stop was meeting my friends at a bar called Ladybird. I’d come to find out this place was fantastic but at the time I was already pretty hammered, didn’t care about the place, and was just happy to be on solid ground surrounded by people who were fired up about the game. That fire pushed the night into the wee hours and around 2 AM we found ourselves back at our hotel. By this point, multiple groups of people on multiple occasions had told us that if we were staying at Hotel Clermont we had to go to the Hotel Clermont basement. That there was no choice in the matter. We had to see the strip club. We had to watch Blondie’s show. To say the least, we were intrigued (and closer to bed, thank God).

Now fellas – it’s at this point where you text your wife exactly where you are. She is asleep, sure, but she needs to know you are still alive when she wakes up to two kids smacking her in the face. You text your wife and say I am back at the hotel. You say there is a strip club in the basement. You say you want to go to bed. You say you miss her. You keep constant contact no matter the time of night. This is the only way. And then, when you enter the strip club after getting patted down (this is still Atlanta after all), and you understand what kind of strip club you are in fact entering, you text your wife a play by fucking play.

Me: Holy shit, there really is a club in the basement of our hotel.

Me: Holy shit, it really is a strip club.

Me: Holy shit, the strippers are all over 60.

Me: Holy shit, the strippers are all obese.

Me: Holy shit, this is the craziest place I’ve ever been to. Thanks for letting me come.

These five texts were actually sent to my wife. There was a club in the basement, it really was a strip club, all the strippers were over 60 (at the very least), at least ¾ of the strippers were over 300 lbs., and it was the craziest place I’d ever been to. Blondie was the star of the show, a woman in her 70’s, who’s specialty was crushing a beer can with her breasts. You just can’t make this stuff up.

I went to sleep convinced that Notre Dame had to win the National Championship after such a night. Clearly, I had too much to drink.

The rest of the weekend was a sprint, a blur, a smorgasbord of drinks and food and snippets of conversations. There was an anxiety around every exchange. You were talking, in the moment, but just behind the thought of the next thing you had to say, or what someone just told you, was an even bigger looming thought. What would happen during the game Monday night? Who would win? How would they win? It was the only thing that was truly on my mind.

The weekend was like a time vortex and suddenly, as if it happened in the blink of an eye, all the distractions are gone and you are in your seat, 8 rows back on the Notre Dame sideline, and LOCKED into the game. I could barely eat, could barely breathe, could barely think about anything except the plays that were happening in front of me (and the beers that were going down my gullet).For the next three hours I didn’t move. For the next three hours I didn’t so much as get up to take a piss. Three hours, give it all you got, and Notre Dame becomes National Champions.

If I could live in the first fifteen minutes of that game for the rest of my life, I would. Notre Dame gets the ball first and they put a drive together to take the life out of the raucous Ohio State fans. I will give a shoutout to the few Ohio State fans that were part of our group. Good guys, just rooting for the wrong side is all. There was some good banter and I respect good banter. And Ohio State fans travel well. I’d say the stadium was 60-40 in Ohio State’s favor. Their fans were loud, their fans were passionate, and their fans were QUIET after that first drive. 18 plays, 9 minutes and 45 seconds, 75 yards ending in a touchdown for the QB Riley Leonard. If only the game could have ended there.

The next three possessions Ohio State scored and Notre Dame was stopped. I was down bad and starting to feel the effects of the weekend. Tears were welling up behind my eyelids. If I made one wrong move, if I decided to stop believing, I’m sure I would have broken down right there and cried. But I never stopped believing and I never will stop believing. Through my belief (yes, this is how EVERY fan thinks) Notre Dame made a late comeback and for a second I thought they might actually pull it off. But, alas, it was Ohio State’s night. My belief was not enough. The stadium was a mere half mile from the hotel and instead of walking the 15 minutes back in frigid temps I decided to pay a guy $100 to ride me back on a fucking bike. Pain and misery is the life of a sports fan.

For the second time this year my team lost at the pinnacle. Yankees lose in 5. Notre Dame lose 34-23. You would think at this point I’d stop taking this so hard. These are college kids for fucks sake. They played their hearts out. Yet here I am, two weeks since the loss, and finally able to write about it. Okay, maybe that’s not 100% truthful. The reason it’s taken me so long to write about it is because hangovers in your mid 30’s after drinking for three days straight take a LONG time to get over. I think I just started feeling normal today. But I digress…

Madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Yet every year, like every sports fan, I get my hopes up that this will be the year my team wins the whole damn thing. At one point, on the depressing flight home, I thought…maybe I should stop doing that. Maybe I should not get my hopes up. Maybe I should be a normal person. Maybe I should watch the game as a surgical, non-caring, robot. But where’s the fucking fun in that? I put it all on the line (with my emotions, of course) and either reap the rewards or get depressed for a couple weeks. The only way to be a fan, for me, is all or nothing. It’s been nothing this year…one year it might be all. Regardless, it’s better to watch sports with some skin in the game. It’s better to do ANYTHING with some skin in the game. Otherwise, you’ll watch the world pass you by in some fake, cool, nonchalance without having cared about anything and you’ll be lesser for it. Caring is actually cool.

The craziest part about this latest loss is I have one more shot at this. I am a Philadelphia Eagles fan. Yes, my three favorite teams have all gotten to their respective championships and right now they are 0-2. If I go 0-3 this will be the most legendary run of loser sports fandom this world has ever seen. It coincides with me starting a Substack and I will have to genuinely think about shutting this whole thing down before the losses get out of hand. But once again, I believe, and I will be losing my mind on February 9^th like I have for the last two championships. This is the nature of the beast. This is the nature of caring. If you can’t be there for the losses you don’t deserve to be there for the wins.

And fuck the Chiefs, amiright?!

P.S. – I’m actually still hungover from the Natty…

P.P.S. – Posts will be ramping up again once this hangover finally leaves me in peace.