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SCC Friends and Football submitted by a Senior Community Connections volunteer (Names have been changed to protect the privacy of members) My volunteering “responsibility” was to call “Jack”, a blind man, once a week for a chat which I did for a couple of years until he moved out of state. Now I call once a month. I often picked him up and took him to SCC events, and we very quickly developed a caring friendship with lots of shared interests. One of our favorite topics was sports, especially football. Jack has a photographic memory and could tell me the history of teams and players with brilliant accuracy. It was great entertainment for us both to share our thoughts on our teams’ strengths and weaknesses and their likely success for the season. So it was natural for me to invite Jack to our annual Super Bowl party that first year. His son brought him to my home, and both were introduced to 10 of our friends who shared our big- game excitement. Part of our tradition was to have everyone participate in the “Super Bowl Squares” game where players were able to put their initials on random squares in a grid by contributing money to the pot with a chance to win in each quarter (i.e., their selected numbers were closest to the actual score of the game) with the largest cut of the pot given at the end of the game. We encouraged Jack to play and of course, guided him to select his squares since he can’t see. Jack was tickled when he won the first quarter and even more delighted when he won the third quarter. But when he won the prize money for the end of the game score, the entire party of friends cheered as Jack jumped up and down smiling from ear to ear. The whole game was completely random and Jack had “blindly” beaten the odds by winning 3 of the 5 chances for money- a total of $400! One of our friends kiddingly said to Jack, “Unbelievable! It was so nice to meet you, but don’t come back next year.” Jack donated all of his prize money to SCC.