I’m incredibly proud of what we achieved together, but I owe Watford far more than Watford owe me. I was chairman throughout the worst period of my life: years of addiction and unhappiness, failed relationships, bad business deals, court cases, unending turmoil. Through all of that, Watford were a constant source of happiness to me. When I didn’t feel I had any love in my personal life, I knew I had love from the club and the supporters. It gave me something else to concentrate on, a passion that could take my mind away from everything that was going wrong. For obvious reasons, there are chunks of the eighties I have no recollection of – I struggled to remember what had happened the next day, let alone thirty years later – but every Watford game I saw is permanently etched on my memory.

“I traveled the next morning to my see my maternal grandmother. This is the grandmother I am named after. It is our custom that when we are to embark on a long journey, we must seek the blessing of our living elders as well as our ancestors. My grandmother and I prayed together. I could feel the joy, anticipation, anxiety, and hopes of my family. I was carrying the dreams of our people.

There is no evidence that there was anyone (other than perhaps Carroll Rosenbloom) who imagined that Frontiere— a former Las Vegas chorus girl and lounge singer who’d been married five times by her early 30s— would one day become known as Madame Ram, appear in an American Express commercial as a savvy business icon, oversee the “Greatest Show on Turf,” and win a Super Bowl ring. Neither Graham nor Frontiere fully clicked into frame as business leaders until after age 50, and they flourished in line with their encodings well into their 60s and 70s.

Writing these words 50 years after I got back on that Greyhound bus in New Mexico, shot through the heart with the knowledge that there would never be a father there, I no longer feel the furious condemnation that drove me so hard. I now see that he simply didn’t know the right questions for fully seizing the amazing gift of his one life to live. I wish I could go back in time and give him those questions before it was too late. But alas, I cannot. So instead, I offer them here to you. And I take them for my own.

Chapter 6: Victory in our Lifetime: Marriage

“‘What else should we have done?’ he responds, his voice calm and even. ‘We weren’t burying our heads in the sand. We were saying we’ve got this good thing going on, and even if we don’t know where it's going to take us, let us commit. Because love is about committing.’ I guess no one ever really knows how a marriage will unfold. You just take a chance. You bet on your love.