Duality

Obviously, the big news this week was that Matthew Stafford signed an extension, which immediately was used as an opportunity by everyone to hoot and shout and fling poop at each other while a clown with an oversized gavel tried in vain to impose order on a world gone mad.  None of this is a surprise really, not when you consider that this is just the way we deal with everything now.  It doesn’t matter what it’s about – politics, sports, murder trials, jokes, commentary about jokes, jokes about jokes, asparagus, jokes about asparagus – we immediately retreat to intractable corners devoid of all nuance and start hurling abuse at one another and refuse to concede even the barest idea that there are reasonable points to be made somewhere in the vast cosmos that exist between us.

This is just the way of things, I’m afraid, in this, the age of the twitter screecher.  So of course when Matthew Stafford signed his extension you had one of two reactions – you either had the people who insist that he is the greatest thing to happen to Detroit and possibly even mankind and think we should all give him our first born in exchange for his flawless talents, and you had the group that refuses to ever believe that anything will ever get better and thinks Stafford is just another heretic without virtue who should be beaten about the head with socks filled with batteries, tied up in a burlap sack and dumped into the Detroit River while an elderly witch doctor reads from the Necronomicon and loudspeakers play old Ozzy Osbourne records backwards in order to appease the devil spirits.  In other words, it is just like every other goddamn thing we talk about now.

Even trying to discuss this in any sort of rational way feels sort of useless.  Nobody wants to hear this shit.  They just want to yell and scream and tear at their hair and beat their breasts and show everyone that THEY REALLY CARE AND HAVE OPINIONS THAT WE ALL NEED TO KNOW ABOUT but what the hell, I am a man who walks a different path, and attempting to speak True Things seems to be my destiny even if nobody can understand me because I’m speaking a different language.

Here’s the deal – Matthew Stafford getting that extension is probably a good thing.  I won’t say it’s definitely a good thing because if last year taught us anything it’s that we don’t know what in the fuck is going to happen for sure.  After all, last year at this time we thought that Stafford was just going to fly a fighter jet into the stadium every week, do some barrel roles, hang out with Maverick and Goose, shoot down Clay Matthews and Jared Allen over the Indian Ocean and then celebrate homoerotically with Val Kilmer.  Instead, he showed up looking like he just stumbled out of a Morrissey concert, never really got going at all and ended the season with a bunch of questions hanging over him.  That happened.  It did.  And to deny that in any sort of way is to make love to denial, which is the way of the shameful dude and lady dude and you are better than that.  Okay, maybe not, but goddammit, I am not going to let you get away with being lazy.

But the extension is still probably a good thing because for all the nails I chewed down to the nubs last season thanks to Stafford’s endless malaise (and by that, I don’t mean fingernails, I spent most games chewing on actual nails) he’s still got an absolute bazooka for an arm, his teammates seem to still have his back, he’s like 14 years old still and despite what we saw last season he is still the dude who ran onto the field against the Browns even though his shoulder had been eaten by wolves and was supported only by silly string, hope and adrenaline, and threw the game winning touchdown pass with no time left on the clock.  He is still that guy.  He is.  He is also the dude who led miraculous comeback after miraculous comeback in 2011, led the Lions to their first playoff berth since the Rutherford B. Hayes administration, threw for a gazillion yards and had me gibbering like an idiot about how I wouldn’t trade him for any player in the league. 

Some of you are nodding your head in agreement, saying YES NEIL FINALLY THAT IS WHAT I HAVE BEEN TALKING ABOUT while others are shaking your heads sadly and saying NO HE IS A BUTT FROM BUTT CITY AND BURN HIM BUUUUURRRRRNNNNNN HIMMMMMMMMM but you both need to shut the fuck up and pay attention because it’s not as simple as all that.  For everything that I just wrote in the above paragraph, for all that ridiculous, highly stylized rapturous praise, there are real reasons to worry too.

And that’s the problem.  You’re not allowed to do both at the same time.  At least not according to the Mob with their torches and pitchforks and pitchforks that shoot torches.  You either build monuments to an ideal or you take your pants off and start pissing and shitting all over everything.  Well even a monument builder has to defecate at some point or else he backs up, his system becomes poisoned and then he dies when his insides explode like a giant poop bomb because he has literally become full of shit. 

Matthew Stafford has problems.  Denying that isn’t going to do anyone any good.  As it stands now, you’re not allowed to criticize his mechanics without being labeled a Hater or an Idiot.  You’re just supposed to accept that he has an unorthodox delivery and it’s never, ever a problem because… reasons.  But the dude’s mechanics are shitty and they do cause problems.  I can say this because I have eyes, because I have watched his mechanics degenerate at times to the point where he is almost literally throwing the ball underhanded on every other throw, not because he has to out of necessity but because he’s gotten himself all fucked up.  I mean, there is a big difference between flipping the ball in a [note: I refuse to say the name of that one dude for fear that he will take it as an invitation to either make another comeback, or worse, send me dick pics but you know who I’m talking about, the infamous Dr. Bert Fever, number 4 in your program and number GO THE FUCK AWAY in your hearts… yeah, that dude] manner because you have a 900 pound out of control werewolf on steroids bearing down at you on a crucial third down and just aimlessly flipping the ball like you’re playing slow pitch softball simply because mechanics are for pussies.  Make plays, yes, but that means that you have to actually, you know, make plays when the situation demands it and Stafford’s mechanics were faulty enough that it hindered him from doing just that at critical times last year.

So, yeah, I think the mechanics thing is a legit thing to discuss.  Pretending it isn’t just because you’ve assigned yourself the label of Stafford Defender against the rampaging hordes of Stafford Haters doesn’t do anyone any good.  It’s okay to say “Look, he’s still my dude and I think in the end he’s gonna be fine but I sure hope he gets all this other bullshit straightened out because if not we might be in some trouble.”  That’s all I’m trying to say.

The sad fact is that we live in a world in which people even feel the need to spend several days arguing with strangers via their robot surrogates about the details of what amounts to an accounting decision.  We are all trifling idiots, gossipy fools bitching about Sheila’s new hairdo at the nail salon.  I mean, what’s the alternative?  Do you seriously just want to wash your hands of Stafford and say LET’S JUST MOVE ON because, uh… it’s a little more difficult than that.  No.  The thing we should be talking about is how does this coaching staff make Stafford better?  What can they do to fix the legitimate problems?  How can they maximize his obvious talents while minimizing his weaknesses?  Of course, in the end, there’s nothing we can do about any of that either but at least that cuts to the real heart of the issue instead of dancing around it with nonsensical bitching and moaning about Stafford himself.  After all, we have seen that he is capable of being The Dude.  Anyone who’s denying that, who is falling all over themselves to point out his record against good teams, is being willfully dishonest.   Because the Lions are still kind of a shitty team – they are, don’t fucking lie to yourself here, they finished 4-12 last year – and shitty teams don’t win football games regardless of who the quarterback is.  The games that they have won – and especially the games they won in 2011 – were won in large part due to the fact that Stafford put the team on his back (with a little help from St. Calvin but everyone needs a friend)  and carried them to victory.  Pretending that those didn’t happen is yet another lie in service to the Dark Lord of Preconceived Belief.

Of course, then you get into a sort of chicken or the egg argument about whether the Lions were shitty despite Stafford or because of him and then it’s all just people yelling and screaming some more and look, we’re never gonna change anyone’s mind so why do we bother?  Fuck if I know.  I suppose it’s because we’re fans and that’s just what we do, and it’s necessary to do these things if only because it’s necessary to express our own feelings , to vent, to somebody, anybody.  There is a feeling of dumb accomplishment in gibbering like a mad person simply for its own sake, in saying GODDAMMIT HERE IS WHAT I THINK if only to keep your own brain from cannibalizing itself.  I suppose that’s all I’m doing here, and if someone else sees this and it makes them feel like they’re understood just a little bit better, or that they can rest their own brains a little bit because these idiot words somehow closely match their own ephemeral feelings better than anything else, then so be it.  So be it.  That’s the point and that’s why we do this.

That is kind of a weird tangent to go off on, unfocused and badly in need of an editor, but Talk Hard is all about taking the editor out back and blowing his brains out.  Talk Hard is about weird digressions and meandering journeys like this one because sometimes that’s the only way to figure all this shit out – by taking a walkabout of your own brain and your own soul.

And maybe that’s what last season was for Matthew Stafford – a necessary walkabout, a journey through his own brain, his own soul, his own flaws.  Maybe he needed to fuck up and make all sorts of dumb mistakes because it is the only way he’ll ever be able to come to terms with them, to fix them.  Maybe that’s what last season as a whole was about for this Lions team.  Maybe they needed that, to realize that they had to be better, that they couldn’t make all the dumb mistakes they had been making all along and then rely on miracle comebacks, on Stafford’s bazooka arm or St. Calvin’s heavenly ways to bail them out when the time came.  Or maybe not.  I don’t fucking know.

But I guess that’s kind of the whole point.  None of us fucking know.  And in the absence of that, you work with what you do know, which takes me back to the whole “What would you do differently?” question I asked before I got sidetracked with my own walkabout.  For as many questions as we have about Stafford – and it’s okay to have them, that is kind of the whole point here – we would be fools to not want to take the time to try to answer them.  After all, that is our best hope here, isn’t it?  Most of the dismay I see in the Lions fanbase seems to be a reactionary Ode to Fear, arising out of last year’s demolition of unrealistic fantasies.  What we desperately wanted to happen – and let’s be honest, in the wake of all we have been through “desperately wanted” and “desperately needed” have become pretty much the same thing – didn’t happen and so in order to protect ourselves, we have become reactionary and just decided to give up on the whole thing.  Which… fine.  If you want to give up, then I guess I don’t blame you.  Give up.  Go away.  Leave.  It’s a perfectly understandable position to take.  But that means you need to actually leave and shut the fuck up about the Lions because it’s none of your goddamn business anymore.  I respect your position here, respect mine by actually, you know, sticking to it.

But if you are still talking about this then guess what?  You’re still invested in this whole thing which means you owe it to yourself to be smarter than just saying “Fuck it…” which seems to be the default response to that question of what you would do differently.  Because if you don’t sign Stafford to that extension you are basically signaling that you’re done with him, that you have no faith and that you’re planning on moving on, which, uh, the last time I checked isn’t exactly the best way to deal with a QB whose head probably needs to get right.  A dude who needs to rebuild his confidence a little bit probably isn’t going to be helped much by telling him he fucking sucks and needs to pack up his shit and wait to be escorted out of the building by a security guard in some ambiguous yet all too near future.  I mean, it’s not like he’s Mark Sanchez.

And if you do feel like that’s the best route to go, then what?  Then what do you do?  Do you just blow it all up again and hope to get lucky with yet another rookie QB even though the Lions track record when it comes to rookie QB’s looks a lot like Spinal Tap’s record when it comes to drummers?  Do you look for a free agent off the scrap heap?  I mean… what?  Good quarterbacks are incredibly hard to find.  Elite quarterbacks are nearly impossible.  It requires a blend of luck and skill that even the best coaches and franchises struggle with.  Right now, we have a good quarterback – whatever your quibbles with Stafford’s mechanics, his head or anything else, the numbers alone qualify him as “good” – and we were lucky that his ship crossed with ours in the night because he’s an elite talent.  Now comes the skill part of that mixture.  Now comes the part where you have to take that elite talent and the luck we had in even getting him in the front door in the first place, and refining and building that into something better, into something truly elite.  That will take hard work on his part, on the coaches’ part and then some more luck when it comes to chemistry and all that intangible faerie shit that no one can really control. 

All of that is out of our control as fans.  We can’t really make things better, but we can add to the general dysfunction by being assholes about this.  We can sure as hell fuck up the chemistry and the mixture by treating Stafford like a hot piece of shit we found flaming on our front porch.  How the fuck is any of that going to help?  It’s kind of like having a really nice car that needs some work.  Somehow we lucked into a Ferrari that just needs a bit of tune up.  But in the minds of a lot of fans, tune ups are fucking hard and fuck that, let’s just leave it on the side of the road and then go used car hunting where maybe we can find a usable Chevy Malibu or something.  How in the fuck does that make sense?  You impatient dicks.

Of course, we can’t wait forever and at some point you do have to know when that car just can’t be fixed.  That’s what this season is all about.  And there might be something to be said for waiting until we see what happens this season to offer the extension.  I get that and it makes a certain sort of sense.  But then you also have to remember that these dudes are human beings and that from a psychological standpoint an extension vs. no extension might make all the difference in the world to someone like Stafford.  It’s a calculated risk but one that I think the team had to make.  Besides, it probably helps the team to know now what they’re looking at down the road instead of leaving it all up in the air and letting it become a distraction as the season goes on.  And hey, let’s face it, if Stafford does rebound then chances are good that this will eventually look like a bargain.  If he doesn’t… well, then the team is fucked anyway and we’re right back to rebuilding and salary cap issues are unlikely to be of any real import. 

Look, I don’t know what to expect this season.  I don’t.  I have no illusions but I will not revel in The Fear like a pig in its own shit either.  And similarly, I don’t know whether or not Matthew Stafford will take that next step.  But neither do any of you, and so anyone declaring that this news is either The Best News Ever or Worse Than the Holocaust should probably sit the next few plays out.  Stafford is talented but flawed, or flawed but talented depending on your point of view.  The key – as it is with all things – is recognizing that “but” is the important word in that sentence.  As long as he’s either just “Talented” or “Flawed” in your mind, you are living in a shitty place, a dangerous place, and you will end up being ruled by The Fear.  He is both and recognizing that bit of truth with him – and this team as a whole – is the key to moving forward without turning into a goddamn fool who nobody wants to listen to.  I like Stafford but I’m worried and I’m worried but I still like Stafford.  I just took 3,000 words to get to that singular point, but what the hell, at least I got there which is more than I can say for a lot of you.

Stronger in the Broken Places

You watch the NFL and you start to make silent compacts with your own sense of morality.  You tell yourself it’s okay that dudes get crippled and end up finger-painting in a home while nurses spoon feed them apple sauce and they coo like babies at age 48 because they make millions of dollars and blah, blah, blah . . .

I’ve written about this before and I’m not much interested in analyzing those little shell games we play with ourselves to keep from vomiting into a bucket at the realization that we’re little more than assholes in togas sitting in the stands at the Coliseum giving the thumbs down gesture while Ray Lewis or whoever screams “Are you not entertained?” and then does that stupid bird dance before cutting a dude’s head off at midfield.  What I’m interested in talking about is the weird way those mental gymnastics have contorted our own sense of appreciation for what these dudes go through physically on a day to day basis.  I’m not talking the sort of life-altering mashed potato brain injuries that are all the rage these days.  I’m talking the subtle deterioration of the physical shell itself.  Because for as much as we’ve learned to mourn at the altar of brain injuries and appropriately tear our hair and beat our breasts for the lost brains of a generation of young men, we have become if anything even harder and more savage and demanding when it comes to other sorts of injuries.

I’m thinking particularly of Louis Delmas.  We all love Louis – or at least the idea of Louis – but the lack of actual Louis other than as a perpetually injured avatar for What Could Be But What Isn’t has driven most fans to bitter sniping.  Whether it’s blaming him for the audacity of trying to deal with his body falling apart or bitching him out because they think he’s stealing money somehow or shaking their heads in righteous indignation because he dares to get frustrated when he doesn’t have the answers to the same questions every reporter has been asking him seemingly since some hydrogen atoms fucked around and formed the sun, fans are all over his ass morning, noon and night.

This sucks because, trust me, no one is more pissed or frustrated by this sad state of affairs than Louis Delmas himself.  It’s a brutal league.  In some sense, every player knows that before they even suit up.  But for as much as we make a compact with our own sense of morality, these dudes do it a million times more.  They’re forced to live in at least some form of denial just to avoid weeping into their Cheerios every morning at the inevitability of their all too early physical destruction.  It’s not like they can just tell themselves “Hey, fuck it, I’ll die at 55 after pulling a gun in traffic because my brain doesn’t work but lol what the hell . . .”  No, they have to pretend just like we pretend and so when their bodies don’t cooperate it very likely comes as a shock to them.

And when it does, it’s got to be an impossible thing to deal with because all their lives their bodies have been the one thing that’s set them apart from everybody else.  These guys aren’t just decent athletes.  These guys are phenomenal athletes.  Their bodies are instruments of their singular will.  They have spent their entire lives telling their body what to do and then watching as the body carried out its orders.  It’s not something you can really understand unless you are athletic yourself.  And when that day comes when you keep barking out orders to your body only to have it laugh at you and say “Fuck you, buddy, I’m going home,” it’s absolutely awful.  You’ve lost not just an important part of who you are but perhaps the defining part of who you are.  Your body no longer works right and when you have spent your entire life running faster than a speeding bullet and jumping higher than the highest mountains, all while laughing and building your life around it, it’s got to be devastating.  Nobody wants to see Superman in a wheelchair, and no one less so than Superman himself.

I have at least a small bit of understanding when it comes to this issue.  I’m a pretty good athlete.  Not great, but good enough.  I’ve played lots of different sports, and been pretty good at most of them.  I understand my body’s movements, have always had excellent muscle control, and all that horseshit, and when my body is behaving itself I can kick all sorts of ass.  (While I’m bragging like a horse’s ass, I am also an excellent dancer with a terrific sense of rhythm and invented the Moonwalk when I was a baby.  Okay fine, that might be a slight exaggeration.)  I don’t say this so you’ll think I’m a jerk who enjoys blowing himself in print – although that’s probably true – but so I can set up the flipside.  You see, when I was a kid my feet and hands started to bother me and my friendly neighborhood doctor said something to the effect of “Well son, I’m afraid you have arthritis.  It’s a hereditary thing and you can probably take medication that will make you feel like shit but really, you’re fucked.  Here, have a sucker.”

Being a stupid kid, I brushed this off and figured it was just something that would catch up to me in some ambiguous future.  My body still mostly behaved and everything was cool.  Of course, I would joke with my friends that I would probably end up in a wheelchair by the time I was 30 – both because of the doctor’s grim prognosis and because I lived like an utter hedonist jackass who would run through a brick wall just because it was there – and we would all laugh because the truth was that it seemed remote and distant.  Sure, sometimes my arthritis would creep up on me and my doctor and family were always after me to take drugs to postpone the inevitable but they weren’t the sort of drugs I was interested in at the time and besides, I didn’t want that stigma, that one that hangs over your head like a big neon sign flashing the word BROKEN over and over again for all the world to see.

And so I tried to outrun it, tried to make my body behave through sheer force of will.  Today, I am just past 30 and I’m not anywhere close to being in a wheelchair.  But I also hurt every morning when I get up, my hands and feet fucking hate me pretty regularly, I have to think long and hard before I decide to do something so simple as take a long walk on the beach for fear that by morning I’ll feel like an 85 year old man and so it goes.  So it goes.  It is what it is and it’s something I have to live with, both because it was in my genetic gift basket and because I lived like a fool for way too long.  The thing is, is that no matter how much I tell myself that it’s something I simply have to live with, there are some days that it hurts so bad that I literally scream like an idiot and start trying to make deals with devils to give me my body back.  To everyone looking on, I seem fine.  I hide it pretty well, mostly because I’m vain, but there are times when I just want to tell everyone to fuck off and then separate myself from my body and slam it against a bunch of jagged rocks.

So, yeah, I get what Louis Delmas is going through – at least a little bit.  I can’t imagine how horrifying it must be to have that happen when your body is literally the one thing that gets you paid.  To know what you’re capable of, to feel it, to think it, but then for your body to fail you when you try to execute – and not just fail you because of age but fail you before your time was supposed to be up – is a horrible, horrible feeling.  I’ll never bash Louis Delmas for having to deal with all this bullshit because he spends plenty of time bashing himself.  Trust me. 

This all feels overly confessional and I’m tempted to just delete all of this nonsense because this is not something I really like to talk about, and I’ll probably never mention it again after this.  You do it and people start looking at you like you’re somehow less than what you used to be – and in a sense, you are.  Some people scoff at you and act like it’s all in your head and that if you just tried harder everything would be cool, and some people pity you and act like you’re made of glass.  Both reactions suck, and I guarantee you that some of you reading this will have your perceptions of me altered by this.  You’ll say they won’t, but they will.  They will.  They just do.  I don’t want you to think of me as some feeble cripple because I’m not.  Like I said, I can still do everything I’ve always done, it just takes a little more thought and planning now.  I seem perfectly normal and can hang with everyone on the court or on the field still, it’s just that when I need that extra gear that I always had, everything sort of malfunctions now and there are days when I just have to shrug and say “I can’t go.”  It’s a pain in the ass.  I’m still an excellent dancer though.

The point is, is that’s what Louis Delmas has to go through every day.  His body has told him to fuck off but he’s not ready to fuck off.  Inside, he still feels the same as he always did and there are moments, glorious moments, when he can run flat out and nothing will hurt and those are the best days.  But there are days when he’ll wake up and he can’t seem to do anything without a limp or without feeling like a tiny little demon is gnawing at him with teeth made of fire, hatred and swords.  When that happens, it’s impossible really come to terms with any of it, because those good days prove to you that you’ve still got it and it feels so good that even the idea of walking away from it seems ludicrous.  You’re not a broken down old man, you’re just a dude who has some bad days, and as long as there are more good than bad you can hold your breath and hope like hell that every day will be a good one.  That’s what Louis Delmas deals with.  He knows he can still go, his coaches know he can still go, and his doctors know he can still go.  They all just have to hope like hell that tomorrow will be one of those days and not one of the little demons with fire sword teeth days.

And on top of that, he knows that the moment that those days outnumber the good ones, the moment the Lions have to tell him “Sorry bro, but you’re just not reliable anymore” he not only has to eat the humiliation of that moment, the feelings of failure that come along with it and the horror that comes from knowing that you are no longer irrevocably in control of your own physical destiny, he has to try to come to terms with the fact that it also means that his career is over, his life’s work finished.  And then what?  And then what?  He gets to sit home feeling like a broken failure, haggling with the team he once called his family over worker’s comp like poor Zack Follett while fans treat him like some sort of malingerer and talk shit about him all over the internet. 

So yeah, sometimes that will make a dude a little ornery.

Nobody wants to be healthier than Louis Delmas.  Nobody wants to be able to run on that field and launch himself like a missile at some poor fool more than Louis Delmas.  Nobody wants to look a reporter in the eye more than Louis Delmas, smile and say “I feel good, bro.  I feel good.”  Trust me.