Incredible Video Shows Lifelong Penn State Fan Breaking Down in Tears After Being Surprised With Rose Bowl Tickets

A lifelong Penn State fan received tickets to the Rose Bowl and couldn't contain his emotion.

Not Available Lead
Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

Not Available Lead

This is what sports are all about: caring about something. Dean Yockey, a lifelong Penn State Nittany Lions fan, was surprised with tickets to the Rose Bowl.

The gift from his wife checked an item off his bucket list—he has always wanted to attend the Rose Bowl. Yockey broke down in tears when he realized what was happening.

The video opens as Yockey opens a box and removes a glass bowl filled with roses. His family asks, “what is it?”

Yockey responds: “I don’t know. It’s a rose bowl. What the hell is it?”

As Yockey puts the pieces together and questions how this is possible, the ensuing reaction is everything good about sports fandom summarized.

Yockey's reaction reminds us of Roger Angell's classic words in Game Time: A Baseball Companion: "It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitive as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look—I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring—caring deeply and passionately, really caring—which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naiveté—the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball—seems a small price to pay for such a gift."

Some believed Penn State, which finished 11-2, would slide into the College Football Playoff. However, the Nittany Lions narrowly missed the cut; Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State, and Washington made the four-team playoff.

Penn State impressively won the Big Ten, a conference that boasted four of the playoff's top-eight ranked teams. Behind head coach James Franklin, the Nittany Lions have finally fully returned to prominence.

Penn State will play USC in the Rose Bowl Monday, Jan. 2, at 5 p.m. You'd better believe Yockey will be there representing the navy and white.

Latest in Sports