Philadelphia Eagles

The Philadelphia Eagles are the football team around which several of the novel’s most important connections to Roberta Muldoon take shape. Formerly a tight end for Philadelphia, Roberta carries the team into her friendships, her memories of her playing career, and the way others respond to her transition. The Eagles also frame Duncan Garp’s recollection of her after her death: a televised game becomes the occasion for a public tribute that recognizes her as Roberta and honors her contribution to people with complicated lives.

Roberta’s Football Past

Before her sex reassignment, Roberta played tight end for the Philadelphia Eagles as Robert Muldoon, No. 90. Her career is not a mere detail of her former identity: it remains a vivid, durable part of how she tells stories and relates to Duncan. At the beach, she tries to play catch with him, but his depth-of-field problem makes the football difficult to judge, and she soon hits him in the face. They abandon the game. Roberta instead draws the plays she remembers in the sand, recounting touchdowns, dropped balls, offside penalties, and punishing hits. Her accounts make the former player’s body and experience present without forcing Duncan to succeed at an activity his injury has made hazardous.

In one recollection, Roberta describes a game in Dallas against the Cowboys, when a player known as Eight Ball came up on her blind side. The story’s language meets Duncan’s own vulnerability: he has a blind side for life. Roberta notices the implication and deftly changes the subject. The football memory thus becomes more than sports reminiscence; it gives her a way to share a past with Duncan while showing care for the limits imposed by his injury.

Friendship, Spectatorship, and Hostility

Roberta’s attachment to the Eagles continues after her playing days. She tosses a football with Duncan for hours and promises to take him to a game, though Garp worries about the plan. Roberta is a target of angry hostility, and Garp imagines dangers at a vast, roaring Philadelphia stadium, including the possibility that Duncan might disappear in the crowd or be abused by a child molester. His fear reveals how Roberta’s public visibility makes even ordinary pleasures—football and a father figure taking a child to a game—feel exposed to threat.

Some of that hostility arrives as hate mail. One letter writer tells Roberta that he has supported the Eagles all his life, but will switch allegiance to the Giants or the Redskins, and even travel to Baltimore if necessary, because she has supposedly perverted the team’s offensive line. The letter turns fandom into a weapon for policing gender and sexuality: the writer treats Roberta’s former position as evidence that her life after transition has corrupted the team. Another woman grotesquely wishes that the Oakland Raiders would gang-bang Roberta, imagining sexual violence as a way to force her into womanhood. A Wyoming high-school tight end writes that Roberta has made him ashamed of his position, prompting him to change to linebacker. These responses show that the team’s meaning is contested: for Roberta it is a real athletic past, while for detractors it becomes a stage on which to express resentment toward her.

The Eagles and the Fields Foundation

Roberta’s football background also informs her role in conversations about the Fields Foundation. When the foundation considers helping Mrs. Truckenmiller, whose relation to Jenny Fields’s killer could make the decision a matter of public scrutiny, Roberta asks whether the woman might be a habitual exploiter rather than someone seeking independence. Her suspicion is that a careless award could make the foundation appear foolish and compromise its purpose. The room’s attention to her judgment reflects a distinctive double perspective: she can think like a woman and like a Philadelphia Eagle. Her experience in the team’s male sporting world does not erase her knowledge of women’s vulnerability; in this discussion, the combination helps her interrogate appearances and reputations.

A Posthumous Tribute

After Roberta’s death, Duncan watches professional football with Jenny on a Sunday afternoon in the hospital. The game comes from Philadelphia, where the Eagles are about to be badly beaten by the Cowboys, but the result is irrelevant to him. Before kickoff, the flag is lowered to half-mast for the former tight end Robert Muldoon, and the scoreboard flashes the number 90. The ceremony ties Roberta’s public recognition to the position and number through which many fans first knew her.

The broadcast’s language marks a change. The announcer calls Roberta a fine athlete with a great pair of hands. Struggling to explain what she meant to people beyond sport, he finally says that she did a lot for people with complicated lives. The words surprise Duncan, and the announcer himself, but they are delivered with dignity. The moment grants Roberta a public memorial that acknowledges both her athletic career and the significance of her life to people whose experiences do not fit simple categories.

The ceremony also prompts Duncan to imagine his dead father celebrating alongside Roberta, as though she could hear her own eulogy. In that imagined scene, Garp and Roberta would find humor in the announcer’s awkward phrasing, and Roberta would roar with laughter at Garp’s irreverent imitation. The Eagles’ kickoff resumes the game, but Duncan’s attention has shifted from the score to the people the broadcast has briefly brought together: his parents, Roberta, and the wider community of complicated lives. The team’s lasting narrative significance lies in that double function—as the setting for Roberta’s athletic past and as the public stage on which her memory receives belated recognition.