Football Thoughts 9/22

I had written a couple of football-themed posts last week, but faced with finishing them up and posting them here, I just wasn’t feeling it.

Perhaps it was because my beloved Steelers looked terrible over the first two weeks of the season, especially getting hammered by the hated Ravens in week 2–but I don’t so.

It’s been a real up and down season for my favorite teams.  The local high school has been masterful and dominant at home, with the players I knew personally having very good performances, but both of their away games have been resounding defeats. It’s good that they’re winning at home in front of family and friends, but those losses have to be just as difficult as the wins are gratifying.

My university alma mater, IUP, has been similarly up and down, losing an ugly one last week after an initial blowout win, then winning yesterday–albeit barely–over a feeble Lock Haven team.  It’s difficult to get excited about that, but until this weekend Pitt was chugging along behind an old school running back, James Conner, and a quarterback, Chad Voytik, with a heart of Everest proportions.  It is difficult not to cheer for a high character kid like Voytik, and his very young and inexperienced Pitt was 3-0 and looking like they’ll be competitive as the season moves. Still, they blew it Saturday against Iowa.  They just let it slip through their fingers  Pitt has been mediocre since–since forever, it seems–and just good enough to raise our hopes before dashing them with a late season collapse. I hope that’s not what we’re in for this season.

I realized Sunday that it is all the controversy over domestic violence and child-beating that has let the air out of my NFL fandom.  Jonathan Dwyer, the latest player to be accused, played for the Steelers until last year.  He allegedly gave a head-butt to his girlfriend when she turned him down for sex, then threw a shoe at their 18-month old for good measure. Not the best seduction tactic, eh? As numbskulls go, he’s worse than the spreadsheet guy. The idiot.

But seriously: you make a million bucks to play a child’s game, and you head butt a woman?  As I said: idiot.

He had a lot of promise, and a few good games, but never managed to stand out.  Still, I cheered for the guy.  I hate that most of all because I feel like I got played for a sucker. I hoped he’d get things going and succeed. Now, I hope to hear that he’s flipping burgers after a nice vacation in a very small room.

I was talking to a fellow today who was trying to make the point that lots of guys hit women and kids, not just football players, but the media goes after athletes because they’re famous–and because most of them are black.  While I wouldn’t rule out a racial factor in terms of enforcement, the argument that “lots of people do it” doesn’t carry a lot of water, and I told him so.

He said, “it’s that German word: Shay-don-froid.”

Schadenfreude?

“Yeh, that one.”

And I suppose it’s true.  Charles Barkley famously said that he was not a role model, and not coincidentally he has been one of Adrian Peterson’s more vocal supporters, taking the “its a southern black thing” route.  It makes me wonder how those folks feel, having Charles Barkley calling out the entire group as child abusers–but more importantly, Barkley is wrong about being a role model.  It’s not something he gets to choose, or dismiss.  Part of cashing that check and living in those rarefied heights–all for playing a child’s game–is the public stage.  For all an athlete would like to say that he gets paid to perform, not to be a celebrity, there’s a compact he’s making, an agreement to be our hero, to thrill us and disappoint us.  It should be no surprise, when they fail us so completely, not as athletes but as human beings, that we are compelled to cast upon them our amplified, collective scorn and disappointment.

Adrian Peterson has earned several hundred million dollars between his salary and his corporate sponsorships, all because people enjoy watching him run up and down a green carpet 16 weekends a year.  It’s a pretty good gig.

The Steelers played the late game, at 8:30 pm.  I wouldn’t have watched if it had been regular mid-afternoon game.  I had better things to do, like mulch the flower beds, and as it was I didn’t bother to raise my “Steel Nation” flag on the porch, but I did watch the game, though without my usual rapt attention.  There’s something about my fandom that died when Rice cold-cocked his fiancee, and I’m not sure that it’s going to grow back.  The Steelers won convincingly last night, with both LeVeon Bell and LaGarrette Blount running for over 100 yards–a rare feat, and just the sort of football I love: hard-nosed rushing.  At the end, I was pleased by not exhilarted, as I’ve been after some games.  I couldn’t help thinking of perspective: in the pre-season, the young, bone-headed Steelers running backs got busted for posession after firing up a joint in traffic, in broad daylight, in a fancy black camaro convertible–because nobody in Pittsburgh, a city that is not only still working out it’s racial issues, but as invested in it’s football team as any city in the nation, is going to notice a pair of  handsome, young, muscular African American dudes in an enviable car firing up a big joint at a red light.  Duh.  A lot of folks probably recognized these guys on sight.  There were calls for their suspensions after their arrest,  not so much for the drugs but for missing the team flight.  Now, compared to the alleged crimes of their NFL brethern, those charges are mentioned only as an afterthought, which actually is a good thing (but that’s another post).