Posts Tagged ‘nfl’
Sunday Protests
One of my all-time, never fails thrills is a pre-game flyover. I get serious chills and a full coat of goosebumps every single time. Doesn’t matter what event follows, or why I’m watching. Unexpected, surprise fly-overs are an even more special treat, that “oh, you’re kidding…I get to see this even AND I get a fly-over?” It’s like getting dessert first at a Michelin starred restaurant. Never having served in any of the branches of our military I have no special call to feel this way. Yet goosebumps arrive on cue whenever a particularly moving rendition of our National Anthem is played, or if I hear Kate Smith or Ray Charles singing one of our other patriotic anthems.
It should come as no surprise, then, that I am quite completely conflicted about the recent protesting of professional athletes done during these tiny interludes of observing our shared nation. I do get, as should all thinking individuals, that the protests themselves are not directed at either the anthem or the flag, and certainly not toward the men and women who have served in the defense of the historical values that these symbols represent. I truly love these tiny moments of patriotic sentimentality. They are, for me, similar to saying “Grace” before our evening meal: a tiny vestige of a once much larger experience.
Sporting events of all kinds used to be a much bigger presence in my life than they are today. Whether playing or watching, it was weird to not have some sort of game front and center. Once I hung up my various sporting implements, and even when I moved away both literally and figuratively from the teams of my youth, I could usually find some sort of sporting event to have on as background noise on a given day. The fact that I watch fewer games, and almost no football, at a time of unprecedented activism on the field is therefore purely coincidental.
Still, I do think about sports, and major sporting events are still a rallying point (or at least a conversation starter) in most walks of my life. To say that this next statement has me conflicted doesn’t really measure up to the truth: the on the field activism of athletes makes me avoid the discussion of sports entirely. It’s not that I feel the athletes have no place expressing their opinions, nor that I necessarily disagree with the opinions they are expressing. The heartfelt conviction that a particular group has been singled out for mistreatment is a righteous cause to which very public individuals could lend their support. By choosing the venue of a sporting event they have removed my ability to choose whether or when I will engage the topic.
By choosing to do it in the manner that they have chosen prevents me from experiencing a tiny thrill that used to at least feel like it was free.
So what? Isn’t that the point of protest, to make the safe and the secure a little bit uncomfortable? Sure, I get that. I really do. It makes little difference to those protesting to learn that people like me really do set aside time to consider the merits of their grievance; creating discomfort is part of the point. Having twice scrubbed my own workplace of all political activity, making it clear that our team is to avoid the creation of similar discomfort in our clients, I sort of feel like my patronage is being abused I guess. Kind of like that old joke “I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out”, except it’s a political expression upending my expectation. Certain jobs just don’t mesh with political action in the workplace. Who wants to see their local police officers in uniform and protesting anything at all? Can you imagine listening to your surgeon expound on some controversial topic just as you slip under anesthesia?
You could very well read this and say that my bleating is nothing but one more example of “White privilege” (funny, given my name), the smug mutterings of someone safe and secure and as close to immune from the dangers being discussed. I would understand your position. I would disagree, but I would understand, and more than that I would inherently realize that no amount of discussion on our mutual parts would change your mind. All good. I’m uncomfortable, and a little bit unhappy, and maybe that was always the point.
The risk is that my discomfort may make me stop listening. That’s probably not what the protesters are aiming for.
On Football
Randy texted me about the exciting finish to the ND/Stanford NCAA football game. It made me smile. Not the result, not even the topic, but the excitement. A parent is only as happy as his least happy kid, and at that moment one of my kids was very happy. Randy’s football playing days are long behind him, but the game still brings him joy.
Me? Not so much.
Oh sure, there was a time when football never seemed to be any lower on my list of wonderful things than 2 or 3. I was a medium-sized fish in a puddle as a high school football player, but I didn’t have the game out of my system when I graduated. Accepted at one Ivy League school and waitlisted at another, I turned down both because I was too small to have any chance of playing football at that level. Instead I went to a very old, very small school and played a bit all 4 years. Now done as a player I was nonetheless still enthralled by all other things football.
Many of my closest friends were met on the freshly cut football fields of my youth. Wins and losses followed on those fields, most of which I’ve long forgotten. Indeed, I’ve written before that it is only the losses I remember, especially those that resulted from some personal failure in a game. A fumble, perhaps, or a blown coverage. And yet there is no escaping the fact that those countless hours at practice, in the locker room, and on the field are in large part responsible for who I am, the adult I’ve become.
It’s a powerful thing, football. Families rally around a favorite team. Lifetime friendships are renewed and strengthened through shared fanhood. Annual calendars are set only after the team’s home schedule is published. The game itself is exhilarating to both play and watch. At least, it was. I find myself finding all kinds of reasons not to watch football games now. Not consciously finding “big picture” reasons like domestic violence or performance-enhancing drugs so much as tiny reasons, like Beth wants me to tag along to the barn, or Abbie the world’s smartest (and most easily bored) dog would like an adventure kind of reasons. Football of all sorts played at any and all levels has sunken to a kind of triviality, easily trumped by a trip to the grocery store.
No one thing is responsible for this falling out of love, as it were. This fall is different from the last, and the one before only in that it is now glaringly obvious that football holds for me no essential attraction by itself. Looking back my only surprise is that it took me so long. Why didn’t I begin to turn away as my friend the ER doc buzzed through Dan’s shoulder pads with a saw in order to get him into the MRI? Or when I walked onto the field after Randy knocked himself out cold with a helmut-to helmut tackle to force a fourth down, his first concussion? I was still young, still sure that the game would bring my sons what I thought it had brought me.
I see them now, both of my boys, face down and immobile, and I shudder. I started to see them each time I saw a player go down in high school, or college, or the pros. I began to see that I valued those young men nearly as much as my own boys, and I started to notice that the game of football had become The Game. Those entrusted with The Game did not–do not–appear to share my feelings about the players.
The junior high coach carries the star running back to the bench, there to wrap the sprained ankle in the hope of returning him to the game. Junior High! In a high school freshman game, a rout, the first string defense is still on the field in the fourth quarter, the opportunity to play in a game slipping away for kids on the bench who may never get another chance, when the starting safety goes down with a severed spine on a play he should have been watching from the sideline. What was the first string learning at that point in that freshman game? Alumni and athletic directors and coaches at colleges noted for academic excellence openly opine that they cannot win without lowering the admission standards for football players, and just as openly run those kids off the team and out of their scholarships when they are no longer needed to win. The game in the NFL becomes more violent by the week, with ever more gratuitous violence magnifying the carnage wreaked upon the bodies of the players. Ex-pros roam the earth as a kind of walking dead.
When did football become The Game? When did the keepers of the game become keepers of The Game? When did football players as young as high school become little more than a modern stand-in for gladiators thrown into the arena for the amusement of the many and the benefit of a tiny protected few? I’d like to think that there was such a time, an inflection point when it did change, but I fear it has been ever thus. If that is so then I, too, bear some responsibility for what The Game has become. I did not turn away, or turn my own sons away, at the time of my own dawning awareness that The Game and its keepers cared naught for our sons at all, but only for themselves and their respective place and privilege. The ends (get a bigger coaching gig, fill the coffers of alma mater, protect the TV ratings) justify ever more distasteful means (alter transcripts, bury criminal behavior, obfuscate and evade when asking for public funds).
There was a time when my own playing days were long over when I still found myself on edge as the weather chilled and the smell of cut grass filled the autumn air. It was time to get ready to play football. Those days are in my distant past, and I find that I no longer even think about watching, indeed can no longer see myself watching, except as a vehicle with which I can channel the joy of a child who loves football. This may answer “why?”: I can no longer watch a game whose keepers have lost sight of the fact that someone’s child plays in The Game.
One wonders about the parents of gladiators past, when and why they stopped watching their version of The Game.
Beauty and Camelot
“Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger.” –Somerset Maugham.
What do you think? Is this true? Is it as necessary to the human creature to be nourished by beauty as it is to be sated? Or is Maugham saying that one is as keenly aware of beauty when it is present as one is of hunger? Is that the same question?
Or is hunger a metaphor? Is Maugham really saying that beauty is like desire or longing? Layered and complex, a more personal thing. You know, the old “I can’t tell you what beauty is, but I know when I see something beautiful.”
Do you remember those old Canon Sureshot commercials with Andre Agassi? It was a long time ago–he might have even still had hair. Agassi would do all kinds of silly stuff with a tennis racket, snap a few pics, and then stare into the camera: “image (pause) is everything!” Remember?
This week the United States marked 50 years since the assassination of JFK. Of note is that the image of Kennedy and the Kennedy White House as Camelot came AFTER his death; no one spoke of him or his administration like this while he was alive. It was his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy, who gave birth to this imagery. “There will be great Presidents again, but there will never be another Camelot.” The image has endured.
Was this true? Was Kennedy a truly great President in his too brief 3 years in the White House? Was his America truly Camelot, Kennedy as Arthur, leading from a place so pure that all who followed would surely be the better for it? We know so much more about him now, 50 years later, than any but his closest friends did at the time. Does our awareness of the reality of the man, so at odds with the image, taint our feelings about “Camelot”?
The answer to that, my friends, is much like Beauty; you may not be able to put it in words, but you know where you stand on the question, whether Kennedy was truly Arthur, or simply an actor playing the role.
But Camelot, ah now, Camelot is something different altogether. Young or old, Americans look back on that time as something truly different. Better. Hopeful. Expectant I think is the right sense. It was a time when Americans expected tomorrow to be better. Born high or low, most sensed that each day dawned with the likelihood of better. At least it seems that’s our sense of it looking back some 50 years.
For some there is a sense that this has been lost, and this was certainly a recurring theme in the reportage seen everywhere this week. After all, the verse from which sprang Jackie’s “Brandstorm” quote was written in the past tense as well: “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.” Is this true? Has Camelot come and gone, or is this, too, just an image?
Beauty and Camelot are much the same. Each can be considered an ecstasy, each as obvious as hunger or as inscrutable as desire. Indeed, each invoke a certain longing, something so personal as to be an irreducible part of who we are. We long for beauty, and we are nourished when we behold it. We long for Camelot, for ourselves and for most of us on behalf of our fellow travelers as well.
We must not let our longing blind us to the fact that, like beauty, in North America Camelot is now. Camelot did not die with Arthur; the “shining moment” was neither brief, nor did it recede into the myst like some modern “Brigadoon”. Look around you. See…really see what beauty has grown since November 23, 1963. Look in the middle where most of us live, not at the margins where lie the extreme. Arthur may have died, yes. He may or may not have been real, and we may or may not have seen one like him grace our round table since. No matter.
You live in a spot known as Camelot. Your shining moment is now.