Conflicted Super Bowl XXXIX pits our columnist’s two favorite gridiron teams BY CHIP YOUNG

The child is father to the man.

How can he be? The words are wild.

Suck any sense from that who can:

The child is father to the man.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

IN DECEMBER 1960, a 10-year old boy, screaming wildly, stood next to his uncle at Franklin Field in Philadelphia as the last seconds ticked off the clock with the hometown Eagles leading the Green Bay Packers, 17-13, in the National Football League championship game. Below on the field, Eagles linebacker and living legend Chuck Bednarick lay on top of the Packers ball carrier, Jim Taylor, in a pile of bodies inside the Philadelphia 20-yard line, practically saying to Taylor, "You aren’t going fucking anywhere until this game is over."

In February 2002, a grown man stood screaming wildly with his friends in his living room as the New England Patriots’ Adam Vinatieri kicked a field goal as time expired, giving the Patriots a 20-17 win over the St. Louis Rams in the Super Bowl. The cheering was so loud, for so long, that a phone ringing 10 feet away in the kitchen, with his mother calling with congratulations after the ball went through the uprights, wasn’t audible.

You have probably figured it out by now. The child and the man are one and the same. Moi.

When the Eagles play the Patriots in Soopah Bowl XXXIX this Sunday, February 6, this old boy has a severe conflict of interest of the sporting fan’s variety. The 1960 Eagles were living gods to a kid who loved sports. The title game was the second NFL game I saw in my life. The first came after my father walked up to me as I was raking leaves in the backyard on a beautiful October Sunday, and said, "Do you want to keep raking leaves, or go watch the Eagles and Colts play today?" Yes, the Baltimore Colts whose quarterback was Johnny Unitas. The rake went one way and me the other — each about five feet off the ground.

My father died a week before Christmas that year. But he had already instilled in me a love for sports of all kinds, from the ridiculous (the Philadelphia Phillies of that era) to the sublime (the Iggles).

That is why I was in the stands with my Uncle Mack, a lifer Marine and my dad’s best friend, who became a surrogate father to me. His wife, Gertrude, was my mother’s favorite sister. (Hey, they had no choice in the name game, essentially. They grew up on a farm in Ohio, and my mom’s name was Olive, which she switched to Molly when she moved to Florida 20 years ago, since she was tired of having people laugh when introduced to her. Where’s the pimento, baby?)

Mack’s interests coincided somewhat closely with mine: HO trains, fishing, chess, and drinking beer. He ran me through the bars at Quantico and other noted Gy-reen posts while he tried to see how many Buds he could down while feeding me quarters for the pinball machines. At times, my mother was somewhat appalled to come home from an afternoon shopping trip with Gertie to see Mack and me playing chess at the kitchen table, each with a full beer beside us. Similarly, Mack didn’t want a Nancy-boy for a nephew, so he would occasionally see how far he could move a 10-year-old kid across a freshly waxed kitchen floor with a playful punch to the shoulder. Averaged about 12 feet, if memory and aching biceps serve me well.

The Iggles were the biggest thing in the universe those days, and I still don’t know how Mack got the tickets for the game. Bednarick was a larger figure than God, and he still is in Philly. He’s from Pennsylvania, flew more than 30 missions over Germany as a gunner in World War II, went to Penn, got into the NFL Hall of Fame in 1967 and was feared (first) and respected (second) as a player. He was the last 60-minute two-way player at center and linebacker. And in one of the most memorable plays in NFL history, Bednarick laid out the NY Giants’ halfback Frank Gifford like a corpse in a crucial Giants-Eagles game, the fiercest football rivalry in sports at the time. Gifford was so shaken he took a full year off from football, coming back as a wide receiver, and forever looking over his shoulder for number 60 in a white and green jersey. Bednarick was captured in a famous Sports Illustrated photo leaning over Gifford and pumping his right arm, which many mistook for reveling in Gifford’s major concussion. As big Chuck eloquently explained later — being an Ivy League grad — he was simply exulting and yelling, "This game is fucking over!"

Bednarick, while at Penn, worked with my father at Foremost Dairy in Philadelphia. My dad liked him and said he was a stand-up guy, so the Young family was Bednarick’s number one cheering section. He played along another irascible old bastard, quarterback Norm "The Dutchman" Van Brocklin, one of the first pure passers, who would spit in your face if you sacked him. With little wide receiver Tommy McDonald from Oklahoma, Bednarick and Van Brocklin were the Iggles’ Holy Trinity. In the championship game, McDonald, who always wore short sleeves, made an incredible catch on a pass from Van Brocklin in the end zone, ending up neck-deep in a snow bank. If you couldn’t love those guys, you had no soul.

So now my Iggles have to play the Patriots for the Big Trophy in the NFL. Talk about a conflict of the heart.

But child is father to the man, as Gerard Manley Hopkins put it so well, so long ago in the late 1880s. My father, beloved, is long gone. So too my Uncle Mack, equally adored. And the Eagles of today are Donovan McNabb, Jeremiah Trotter, and Terrell Owens, not Van Brocklin, Bednarick, and McDonald. But the qualities pointed out to me by my father and uncle in the 1960 Eagles are exactly those of my current heroes, who wear a caricature of Elvis, rather than wings, on their helmets: respect for opponents, never-quit mentality, nose-in-your-face attitude, and overall class and determination. From the group introduction of the team to the way they always handle themselves, the New England Patriots are the grown-up version of my first-ever pigskin role models.

Go Pats. I am sure my father and Mack will be shouting the same thing from high over Jacksonville on February 6.