There are still lots
of dark clouds hanging overhead, and the sad reality is that sooner or later,
Reggie is probably going to fall off the wagon too. After all, there’s really no such thing as a
former junkie, is there? - from I Don't Know
It’s pretty clear that the Lions are a different team with
Reggie Bush in the lineup. That’s my
main takeaway from today’s game, other than ARRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH
FUCK. With him, they can sort of
overcome their junkie nature and do just enough to make us overlook all that
dumb asshole bullshit and just concentrate on shiny, happy things like puppies
made of gold and wins over the Vikings.
Without him . . . well, without him, the Lions are basically the same
goddamn team they’ve been for a while now and there’s no use going down that
dark road into the nether regions of the soul.
It’s a thin line between love and fuck this, yo.
I was kind of torn after the game, because on the one hand
there were still signs that the Lions had come out of their existential
malaise, and so I didn’t want to do the whole SAME OL’ LIONS HEE-HAW HEE-HAW
jackassery that is so tempting to engage in, but the more I thought about it,
the more I realized that this was almost entirely due to Reggie’s
presence. He just gives them one more
playmaker, one more presence, and that’s enough. Really, it’s a testament to that thin line that
separates everyone in the Dumb Asshole League.
Right, about the Dumb Assholes, nothing overly ridiculous
happened, and by that I mean Ndamukong Suh didn’t cannibalize anybody and Jim
Schwartz didn’t wander onto the field in his underwear and start blowing
whiskey fireballs at the refs or anything, but there’s no way I can honestly
sit here and say that it was a clean game.
It was a cumulative Dumb Asshole effort.
The Lions lost largely because they fucked up at the worst times, which
isn’t that much different than any team that loses in the Dumb Asshole League,
I guess, but it’s something that we’re nauseatingly familiar with as Lions
fans. I guess this means maybe we’re
looking for it, but really, does it matter?
They still happened and the Lions still lost. Bill Bentley’s “fuck it, I’ll just shove him”
pass interference near the end of the game was the difference between the
Cardinals scoring the go ahead touchdown to go up by 4 and having to attempt a
50+ yard field goal to go up one. It made
a difference.
Before that, you had the cavalcade of drops which have come
to define the Lions receiving corps, a thousand penalties, both deserved and
undeserved, and horrific field goal play.
It all made a difference. Change
just one of those things and the Lions win the game. But they didn’t, and, well, here we are.
Of course, there was also the assorted incidental bullshit
that is always just there, so much so that it is basically white noise by this
point and I barely even notice – the ridiculous conservatism at the end of the
first half with a minute left to go and three timeouts, the throwing short of the
sticks on third (and one rage inducing fourth) down, which we used to call the
Joey Harrington special around these parts, and just the general all-around
boobery that happens when you employ dudes like Brandon Pettigrew.
In the end, it came down to poor special teams, terrible
penalties – again, both deserved and undeserved (Ride or die, Willie, ride or
die) – dropped passes and blah, blah blah.
Look, I could write the above about dozens of games over the last few
years and it would fit. Hell, for all
you know I’m just copying and pasting what I wrote after a different game. And that’s the point – this is all too
familiar, and no matter whether you’re riding the Hope Train or jamming with
the Failure Demons on “The Song Remains the Same”, you can’t really do much but
shrug your shoulders and say “Oh well, on to the next one.”
And that’s because there’s no real point in getting angry,
in dragging out the brass knuckles and going to town on the Lions or on the
culture of this goddamned football team, the coaches or anybody else. Because this is just what we’re stuck
with. We know it. It’s not going to change, and even in my
optimistic salvo just before the game, in which I renounced Satan and started
flirting with the angels again, I basically said that we are forever flawed and
doomed and that our hearts would get broken because this is just who this team
is, and eventually we’d find ourselves locked in a prison cell of our own
despair, behind walls made of broken dreams and idiot hope no matter how often
we furiously tried to dig our way out with a spoon. And this game is just another brick in that
goddamn wall. I don’t like it, but there
it is.
This is not about the war between Hope and Fear, this is
just about accepting who and what this team is – it’s a team of junkie
assholes, and even when they’re trying to maintain, sometimes they’re gonna
break our hearts. I have no grand
delusions about this team. I want them
to win and do well because they’re my team and I’ve made peace with the fact
that there are simply things I’m going to have to live with. Basically, I’m the parent that wanted their
kid to go the med school and make the whole family proud, but now I’m just
thankful that he hasn’t OD’d and I gave him a big hug and told him I’m proud of
him because he got that job at 7-11.
That is depressing as hell, but only if you let it be. If you just accept it for what it is and try
to move on, I think you’ll find that you really appreciate the moments of
genuine joy that still pop up. I was
cheering like a fiend for the Lions in this game. I wasn’t sneering or saying “See! See! Look, they’re a bunch of no good fuckers!”
every time they did something wrong, which is where my head and my heart had
been for a while. Watching the Lions had
ceased to be fun for me. Even though
they lost this game, I wanted them to win, to do well, more than I had in a
while. It was weird. But the important thing, I think, is that I
finally rooted for them to do well on their terms, not mine, which might not
make any sense, but fuck it, the Lions just lost in obnoxious fashion – again –
so I’m allowed to not make sense. It’s
in the handbook.
This was fun for me to watch because I finally let my grand
dreams of the future go. I finally
stopped worrying about what it all meant in the big picture and just rooted for
them to win a goddamn game because they were my team. Of course, then they lost and I had a brief
moment where I stormed around and made sounds like a donkey getting reamed by
an elephant, but what the hell, at least it was an honest reaction rooted in
the immediacy of the moment and not tied up in the “This is what I want to see
because THE FUTURE OF THE ENTIRE FRANCHISE HANGS IN THE BALANCE” kind of
gibbering I had begun to do, which I think was born out of my own grandiose mythologizing
I have done here, in which I have gibbered about Fate so much that you’d think
I was Kyle Reese proselytizing to Sarah Connor.
Look, the Lions are a mediocre team filled with mediocre
players and a few superstars. Sometimes,
those players – both the lousy ones and the stars – act like Dumb Assholes, but
that doesn’t really make us special. It
just makes us the Arizona Cardinals. And
sometimes, you beat teams like the Cardinals or like the Vikings because you
have just one more weapon. And sometimes
you lose because that weapon falls off the wagon and stands around on the
sideline looking sad because that’s just the sort of thing that happens in the
Dumb Asshole League. There are no grand
lessons to be learned from this game, no desperate horse rides in the middle of
the night to warn the townspeople like some degenerate Paul Revere to be
made. There is just a dull shrug and a
twinge in the heart, a sort of quiet, sad longing about what might have been
that gets ground up and mashed by the weight of reality and the notion that, in
the end, none of it really matters other than as a curio, a diversion to keep
us dogpaddling so we don’t recognize that we’ve already drowned.
The Lions are not the worst team in the Dumb Asshole
League. And they’re not the best. They are a coin flip of a team, a team that
sometimes beats the Arizona Cardinals and sometimes loses to them. They are a team that I will root for to win
because I like hoping for the best, even if that best gets lost somewhere in
the clouds of uncertainty once you start playing real teams and start having
real goals. They are a team that I root
for because I am a fan and this is what we do.
Reggie Bush ran and he made me happy, he smiled and kept us
from getting fired from the 7-11, and then he got hurt and that made me sad,
and the manager came in and found us shooting up in the bathroom and chased us
out of the store with a broom and we passed out in the bushes before our mom
came and picked us up, smiled sadly, sighed and laid us in our bed, kissed us
goodnight, told us she loved us and then went and laid on the couch and watched
Castle until she fell asleep.
Neil, I feel the same way you do. All my hopes of this team EVER being great are over and I have to face reality and just leave my emotions aside, win or lose. I can't put all my heart into this team anymore because, in all reality, they will just let all of us down. I have been a Detroit sports fan since I was born and this team has always been closest to my heart. You would think if any professional sports team is due for some luck, it would be THIS TEAM. It's like WCF made a deal with the devil when he bought this team on the same day Kennedy was assassinated. Maybe that is not a coincidence at all. This team has the same tragic luck as the Kennedy family. Keep up the good work Neil and continue to track this Greek tragedy that we call the Detroit Lions.
ReplyDeleteThanks, man, that Kennedy angle fits the spirit of this place perfectly and I'm amazed I've never written about it from that angle before.
ReplyDeleteSigh. Your writing is too pure and full of truth for me to deny it any longer. This team will always be this. If they continue to throw the ball to Pettigrew on third down, I may even be able to desiderata myself into having the wisdom to not care any more.
ReplyDeleteI've got to agree with Derek though that it feels more like a WCF thing than a Lions one. They were amazing before he bought them or so I've been told, and maybe I'm just a half-blind, rabid optimist but I can't picture this incredible malaise and ineptitude continuing if say, Mike Ilitch owned the team. Something has to be stronger than smack.
Clearly, at the very least, we need to bring in a young priest and an old priest to cleanse us of these demons, and if that means throwing holy water in WCF's face while screaming "The power of Christ compels you!" then so be it.
ReplyDeleteYeah...that kind of sounds like a porno, and one I'm scarily interested in watching. Bill Jr can be the pizza boy.
ReplyDeleteWay late....
ReplyDeleteBut that was the absolute worse case of ritual suicide I have ever seen them commit.