Parade
Image courtesy of @marko2dan
I’m going to grandstand for just a little bit, and gift every sports dad in the world (free!) the sports equivalent of the birds-and-the-bees talk. “You’ll know you love a team, baby, when you’ve watched them tank.”
I have a few simple rules when I take up yet another sport, or (as you’re intimately aware) when there’s enough turmoil in my life that I feel it’s time to swap allegiances. You’ve got to love the uniform, is both an aesthetic response and a moral one. If the colours feel good the first time (For no apparent reason, “I’m gonna go with the kids in blue”), then the second time (you like this colour when it’s on the television) is chemistry. I also try not to root for the bandwagon team, believing maybe it’ll help me strike up conversation, extend it, if I stumble into the right bar and mumble yeah: Oilers born and raised, bub, what’s it to ya?
I kid a little bit. The exception to the rule was those damned New England Patriots, whose Belichick-powered offensive and defensive acumen (as a newcomer to America’s most lucrative sport) I found absolutely mesmerising. I have tried and failed several times to quit this team. I have tried to make myself a Raider, a Charger, a Bear, a Cowboy, a Jet (urgh), a Bill (yuck!!), and I’ve even zagged against the bandwagon grain and hollered shoot, fuck it: maybe I’ll just enjoy life for a little bit and toot 49ers. I have tried and failed to talk myself into a retirement, near a stadium, in several American cities. But none of these fields is Foxboro, and too much of my DNA is Patriots. The glorious grumblecore of a Coach Belichick media session, the Masshole origins of the phrase LET’S GO, and that navy jersey first and foremost: the one that for so long in American football marked the arrival of the bad guys.
How Shakespearean, that it’s come to this. Yesterday, if Belichick had delivered just once more a joyous stomping of the rival New York Jets, yes those New York Jets, in a trademark New England blizzard, some of us might not be praying Jim Harbaugh brings his circus to town. How Shakespearean, that I have fallen in love once again with America’s most violent, most conniving, and most Republican pastime — despite my discomfort with many elements of remotely competent defensive play, and my personal need (each time I’ve swapped colours) to see just how much money a team owner gave the very first Trump campaign.
We had a good conversation yesterday about how the casual chatter of a man like Aaron Rodgers — an esteemed quarterback indeed — creates vacuums in which truth can be dismembered, and in which disenfranchisement (of women, of minorities, of non-conformist genders) can be trivialised. I suppose it’d be lazy of me to call any of that fascism. We throw the word around a lot, even when we, good liberals, are also pumping streaming money and halftime snacks into distractions that galvanise falsehoods like the American dream, and hard work, and grind; as though there is any remaining semblance of a level playing field. As though football doesn’t help taper over the violence rendered in too many African-American communities, and as though all sports are not (in themselves) a convenient rug — beneath which to hide inflation, fleeting economic opportunity, and globally evident inequality.
On Sundays I disappear for about six hours, into all the commercials and replay coverage, and I resurface on Monday with emotional fuel for social and professional deficiencies I cannot address without football metaphors. And I love it. I love it, even though the sports writers log back about off-field misconduct in the off-season — even though I saw that feature in the Times about how CTE splits a man’s brain open, as easily as if it were broccoli.
I tell myself I love it because it’s beautiful. To watch two athletes find each other across the maelstrom of a broken snap, to watch the preconceptions of a coach like Belichick infiltrate the gaps in opposing strategy. I love the commercials too, because they take me right there: into all the sports towns I may never inhabit. I know which insurer middle class families will go see in the morning, before they invest in something ‘generational’. I know who most young Americans will order pizza from, in between downs. And when that ball sails through the air again, like a jet-fuelled drone if launched properly, I tell myself everybody will go home to their wives and kids if the play executes the way it’s supposed to.
We were meant to do a whole bit, you and I, once we started that basketball podcast. Towards the end you’d ask me for NFL gambling picks, because I’d be the football guy begging you eternally to come check out the scenery. I secretly hope you never will.
Go (sigh) Patriots.
