Dominic Raiola Is A Dumb Asshole

Dominic Raiola is an asshole. That is not exactly a revelation to anyone who’s been paying attention, but it still needs to be said, especially after the fiasco earlier today against the Bears, which, well… just look at the above.

I mean… come on. This, of course, is just the latest in a long line of assholishness (assholery?) from Raiola. Here’s a little primer put together by my old pal Andy Isaac over at Uproxx in case you need a refresher. I’ll wait while you take a stroll through bad memory lane.

That was written in the wake of Raiola’s ridiculous attempt to take out the knees of Patriots defenders during a fucking kneel-down play (he failed, because . . . well, of course he did, which pretty much sums Raiola up, both as a player and a human being) and Isaac tweeted that out today with a note that it was time to update the post.

That’s the sad reality of following Raiola’s long and pathetic career. You’re constantly having to update that mental picture of him to account for whatever dumb goon bullshit he just pulled. It’s fucking ridiculous.

But the worst part about Raiola isn’t that he’s an asshole. He’s a dumb asshole. Just ludicrously stupid. He isn’t like one of those sly, wily veterans from the ‘70s who would twist a dude’s dick off at the bottom of a pile. No, he just does this shit openly, for everyone to see, and then he gibbers like a moron to try to rationalize it. He’s a fucking fool.

Fools come and go all the time in the NFL. It is basically the National Fools League. Lions fans get this perhaps better than anyone. Charles Rogers, Titus Young . . . look, I could go on forever here and we’d all be reduced to a pile of tears and ash by the time I was done, so let’s just not do that, okay? The point is, is that these fools usually blow up and then get kicked out of the league and sent to jail or the nuthouse or to get their brains studied after they strip naked on the highway and start waving a gun around. They don’t last more than a decade, and they certainly don’t last with one team.

But Dominic Raiola has, and really, that about sums up the many, many issues the Lions have had as a franchise during that same time period. He’s been with the team for 13 years, and most of those years have been terrible. Joe Buck finally did something worthwhile when he pointed out during the broadcast that during Raiola’s 13 years with the Lions, 10 of those years have seen the team lose 10 or more games. Holy shit! I mean, there’s losing and then there’s whatever the fuck that is. Raiola is literally one of the biggest losers in NFL history.

But we also have to deal with the fact that he’s figuratively one of the biggest losers in NFL history. That is a combination that is too odious to bear. This is not the story of some asshole who everyone forgives because he leads the team to glory on the football field. No, it is the story of a dumb fuckup asshole who loses all the time and incredibly still not only keeps his job but maintains his place as the wise old elder of the franchise. This is so messed up that when people wonder why I burned out on the Lions, I should just point at it and scream THIS! THIS! FOR FUCK’S SAKE THIS!

It’s not really a secret to anyone who’s followed me for a while that I have kind of dialed back my fandom the last couple of years, and I think this is one of the biggest reasons why. I still watch the Lions and I root for them to win because I can’t not. They are my team, for better for worse, through sickness and in health until death do us part. But let’s face it, there’s been a whole lot of sickness and if that sickness had a face, it would be Dominic Raiola’s.

His soul is made of burning garbage, wasted tears and a whole sewer’s worth of shit. He looks and acts like a dude who smells like stale Funyons, cheap beer, old smoke, sweat and regret. He challenges his own fans to fights and he makes it embarrassing to be a Lions fan. He is Lions Disease made flesh.

Most of the time, assholes are forgiven by their own fans, who rationalize their behavior and develop a persecution complex that allows them to imagine that their poor picked on boy is just the target of unfair harassment. It’s what fans do. But the incredible thing about Raiola is that Lions fans hate his fucking guts probably more than opposing fans do. He’s a goddamn loser, a hideous ghoul plaguing our hearts and souls for more than a decade now and he just won’t go the fuck away. He’s a dumb asshole who deserves every bit of vitriol he gets and more. He is what makes being a Lions fan Not Fun. He makes the whole team feel so goddamn unlikable and hard to root for. He doesn’t just need to be run out of town, he needs to be strapped to the back of a flatbed truck and paraded through the streets while fans pelt him with trash and then a priest needs to come in and do an exorcism. Fuck Dominic Raiola, I will see him in hell.

Sorry, I’m getting a little carried away, but . . . you know what? I’m not sorry. Fuck that. A lot of people will probably write a lot of things about Dominic Raiola this week, but every damn one of them will try to take the responsible tone of a Serious Journalist and try to sanitize all of this nonsense, and in doing so they will miss the point. Because the point isn’t that Dominic Raiola is a jerk who does irresponsible things for dudes like Joe Buck to tut-tut. The point is that he is a hideously dumb asshole and a colossal fuck-up. This isn’t a smug, moral issue. This is a “Hey, fuck this guy,” issue and that deserves to be said out loud. Or in print. Or in fake print on the internet. You know what I mean.

It’s not like this a new thing that we’re all figuring out. We’ve known this for years, and frankly, I’m just sick of having to put up with it. Fuck you, Dominic Raiola, you are impossible to root for and you have infected my team with your stench for long enough. Get thee gone, foul beast!

Getting carried away again. But that is what Dominic Raiola inspires. He doesn’t inspire Hope or Confidence or any of the shit you would expect from a veteran of his stature. He inspires wild gibberish and biblical ranting. That’s your team leader? Come on.

It’s embarrassing as hell watching him clown his way around the field, in the locker room and, yes, in wars with his own fans. Can you imagine being his teammate, knowing what an asshole he is, and knowing that he’s wrong all the damn time? How can you fight next to someone like that? He’s firing up the other team – notice how the Bears sparked right after his buffoonery – while his own teammates probably struggle to back his dumb ass up. You can talk about it all you want, about loyalty and all that jazz, but it’s tough to really summon up that righteous fury you need to back up a dude like Raiola. He is Wrong and everybody knows it and that calls into question your whole damn thing, which is not the state of mind you want your dudes to have, you know?

This is getting weird and existential, and I’m speculating on the mindsets of overgrown millionaire man-children, which is probably a hideous mistake, but it’s just human nature. These dudes have to hate playing with a dumb asshole like Raiola. They have to. And this has been going on for 13 fucking years!

By the way, do you know who followed Raiola at Nebraska? Richie Incognito. That’s right, for almost a decade, the Nebraska offensive line was anchored by Dominic Raiola and then Richie Incognito. Good Lord. That’s not really relevant to anything, I just wanted to point it out because, well, goddamn! Actually, you know what? It is kind of relevant, because I think it helps to explain Raiola a little bit.

He was a star at Nebraska, the same school that produced Incognito, stairwell menace Lawrence Phillips, alleged rapist and all around degenerate Christian Peter, and, yes, Ndamokong Suh. It is basically the crucible within which assholes are born. It is an asshole factory, and so it shouldn’t really be a surprise that Raiola is the way he is. Besides football, the only thing to do in Nebraska is drink, menace the townsfolk like fucking Frankenstein and sodomize each other with corn. Corn Sodomy was probably Raiola’s major.

Look, this whole thing has been kind of rambly and about as ranty as it gets, but don’t let all of my ridiculousness take away from the main point here, which is that Dominic Raiola is not just an asshole, but a dumb asshole, which is a lethal combination that will kill your fandom dead. Or at least leave it a twisted, mangled perverted version of what it once was. He is no goddamn fun to root for. It’s fucking exhausting. He is everything you pray you don’t get stuck with as a fan, and he is certainly not someone you ever expect to be married to for more than a decade. He is the past of the Detroit Lions in all its tragic despair, and it is infuriating to watch as he drags that past into the present like a mangy dog dragging his shitty ass all over the carpet.

It sucks because I can’t just pretend like he doesn’t exist. I can’t just surgically remove him from my mind’s vision of the Lions. He’s in there, and he’s not going away. And so all I’m left with is an alternative in which I cheer for the Lions in spite of him, which diminishes my fandom, and let’s face it, this is a fandom that wears on you anyway. It isn’t easy being a Lions fan. We don’t need Dominic Raiola around to make it even harder. I just want him to go away, but with my luck, he’s probably got another decade left in him, and sometime in 2024, when he and Jared Allen are jerking each other off on the field in an asshole singularity, a black hole will be produced which will finally suck the remnants of my sanity and fandom inside and all that will be left in the ensuing Void will be a voice cackling incessantly at me and then Raiola’s face will appear like the hologram head of the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz and I will know that God is dead. Fuck you, Dominic Raiola, you killed God. You probably stomped him to death and then taunted Jesus.

Until then, go Lions, I guess. Except for Dominic Raiola, because he is, and always will be, a dumb asshole.

A Confederacy of Assholes: An American Story

 Photo stolen from Bleacher Report because it was the first one that came up when I image searched.

The world of combat sports (and fake combat sports, although who can really tell the difference anymore?) is seedy and degenerate, filled with hucksters, carnival barkers, fuck-ups and reprobates, misfits and wild souls who can’t live amongst decent folk. They are the descendants of freak show geeks, traveling the highways of America looking to astound the next town full of rubes with a touch of blood and a whole lot of good old fashioned ritualized violence. In short, that shit is about as American as it gets.

Of course, that’s why people love it so much, even the weird fake shit that no one will admit to in public. But fuck all that, it is a sad pose by sad people too afraid of being made fun of, and . . . you know what? This wasn’t supposed to turn into this so let’s just start over, shall we? Okay? Okay.

CM Punk, pro-wrestler extraordinaire and renowned curmudgeon, signed to fight professionally for the UFC on Saturday, and . . . yeah, I don’t blame you for being confused. I mean, that shit’s just weird. It would sort of be like Tom Cruise bursting into the Pentagon and announcing that he’s got this shit just because he whipped up on some Russians in Top Gun. Of course, Tom Cruise is just insane enough to actually try something like that, so maybe that isn’t the best analogy. Hail Xenu.

Or maybe it is. After all, if there is a fake fighting dude with that sort of irrational self-confidence it is CM Punk. You see, CM Punk is a gigantic asshole. I say that almost in admiration. Almost. The dude walks around with a gigantic chip perpetually on his shoulder, and it’s not really all that hard to imagine him bursting into Dana White’s office and announcing “I got this shit, Dana!” while White immediately begins calculating the best way to make the most money before Punk gets his head removed like a Pez dispenser.

I mean, let’s face it, people are going to tune in to see this freak show. You might scoff at that, but never underestimate how many people love pro wrestling and will want to watch Punk either succeed or fail. Pro wrestling is hard to understand if you don’t grow up watching it. That’s because it’s essentially a passion play for children, old people and idiots. No offense. I’m one of those idiots. But that’s because I was one of those children.

It’s hard to explain the appeal to people and that’s largely because I can’t explain it to myself. I could get defensive and start bellowing bullshit about Shakespeare or “You don’t understand how athletic these dudes really are!” but that is largely posturing. The truth is that it is a cartoonish theater of the absurd, and even when it is at its worst, I can usually enjoy it ironically. At its best, I get swept up into it like a water-brained idiot. And usually, I reside in some weird purgatory between those two extremes, mostly hoping that maybe, just maybe, that something will catch fire and I’ll lose myself to the rhythm of the beat. That’s because at its best, there might not be anything better than pro-wrestling.

I know that sounds hyperbolic and insane, but it’s true. When it gets it completely right, pro-wrestling taps into something primal and ridiculous and child-like, and again, I could get really obnoxious here and start talking about universal themes and human nature and narrative structure, but I am not a completely loathsome asshole and so I’ll just say that sometimes pro-wrestling is just really fucking fun.

So people will watch this CM Punk fiasco, and Dana White will light cigars with burning $100 bills and laugh as Punk is concussed and taken away to receive speech therapy. And that’s the irony of this whole goddamn thing. You see, CM Punk is escaping Vince McMahon and his WWE empire largely because Vince McMahon is a notorious asshole. Just like Punk. And assholes, well, they tend not to get along with each other. That shit is just inevitable.

And so it was between Punk and McMahon. Punk’s litany of complaints is long and occasionally ridiculous, ranging from the almost hilariously petty to the “holy shit, that’s fucked up.” Whether it was bitching about how he was used as a performer, or getting fucked over by shady doctors who failed to diagnose a dangerous staph infection, Punk wasn’t having any more of that shit. The last straw came when he says he was fired on his wedding day via Fed-Ex (which is fucking hilarious in a Mr. Burns kind of way), which came months after he said “fuck this” and walked out of the company.

The whole thing is a huge “he said/he said” fiasco and the one thing that seems obvious is that it is a natural result of assholes trying to work together. Assholes gonna asshole, you know? But, like I said, that’s what makes this move so ironic. You see, Dana White is just as big an asshole – if not more – than Punk and McMahon. Basically, Punk quit his job because his boss was an asshole, and then went to work for another asshole. That’s pretty much the most American story there is. It is at the heart of our collective identity. We are constantly trying to escape one asshole and throwing ourselves into the embrace of another, all the while overlooking one horrific truth: we’re assholes too.

That still doesn’t make this any less ridiculous. Or hilarious. I mean, come on, the Punk/Dana White blowup is inevitable. Within a year, these two will probably be cutting dueling promos on each other via podcast about money, health issues and god only knows what else. I predict that by December of 2015, we’ll get Dana White calling Punk a “fucking faggot” while Joe Rogan babbles about aliens in the background. And don’t yell at me for that, either. That’s just what Dana White calls everyone. He probably greets his gardener with a pleasant “Howdy, faggot!” each morning. He is a vile and wretched dude who says vile and wretched things.

That should mix nicely with an asshole like CM Punk, a dude who’s so far up his own ass that he is basically an Ouroboros of a human being. You just can’t tell where head and ass begin or end. It is all just one terrible loop of head-ass. Any affront to his dignity – any at all – and he will declare holy war on Dana White.

And that shouldn’t take long to happen. After all, Dana White is notorious for turning on his fighters, especially when it becomes clear that they aren’t going to make him any more money. And while Punk will probably get people to tune in out of morbid curiosity, that is largely a one shot deal that ends with him knocked the fuck out or writhing in pain after some bro with neo-nazi tattoos catches him in a legit version of his own pro-wrestling finisher.

That’s what makes this so hilarious. Punk seems to be the sort of dude who almost fetishizes MMA. He has a white belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, which is the lowest rank, but that’s because he refuses any other belt because he subscribes to some ridiculous Mr. Miyagi vision of belts and the martial arts. He thinks he’s being noble, but really he’s just insulting his own sensei. It’s indicative of a dude who wants so very badly to believe in a myth, an idea of what martial arts and MMA represent. It’s totally ass backwards. He’s trying to find himself and nobility and dignity in a sport whose most recognizable public figure and advocate calls everyone a faggot, whose fighters are adorned in those jailhouse white power tats, and whose fans are as ridiculous and horrible as the worst pro-wrestling fans.

This is not a hit-piece on MMA or the UFC. I just wanna get that straight. I’m not judging that shit. Well, I am, but not any more harshly than I judge pro-wrestling, which is just as ugly, just as seedy and just as ridiculous. I just want to point out that it is not the bullshit Shangri La that Punk probably fetishizes it as. It will turn on him and it will spit him out and it will disillusion him just as much as the pro-wrestling world did. That’s just what happens when you’re constantly looking for something from the world. It just kicks your ass and mocks you until you are left with no other alternative than to admit that you’re just a bitter asshole.

But ain’t that America? That’s what we do. We race from one end of life to the other, desperately trying to cling to anything that validates our own hyper-idealized self-image, and then we reject and are rejected by those very same things as they fail to live up to our expectations until we end up either old and bitter or old and wise. We either learn or we don’t. We either come to terms with and accept that we’re just assholes trying to make our way in an asshole world, or we keep fighting it and believe that we’re somehow the Last Good Dude in that asshole world.

This particular stop in CM Punk’s own asshole odyssey of self-discovery will probably end in asshole recriminations sooner rather than later. Aside from all the psych 101 bullshit, there’s also the fact that he looks like a beaten down heroin addict. He’s not. He’s actually straight edge, which means he doesn’t drink or do any drugs or anything fun. Still, he constantly looks like a dude who’s coming off a major bender, whose body is constantly on the verge of tapping out and whose bags under his eyes are ready to gain sentience any day now. He is a dude who looks like he has lived life, who’s suffered physically and mentally. The dude always looks worn the fuck out, like life fucked him and left him lying in the bed. I’m not judging him for that. I’m just saying, that is not really conducive to beginning a career in which you’re going to be fighting dudes who have been training to whip ass their entire lives.

Dana White himself says this is not a Brock Lesnar situation, and, well, no shit. Lesnar was a physical freak who made the transition from pro-wrestling to the UFC, and in between he stopped by for a lark with the Minnesota Vikings even though he’d never played organized football. No one is like Brock Lesnar. And even Lesnar ultimately failed! He flashed bright, beat up an old man 75 pounds smaller than him, won a title and then got his ass kicked and ended up back where he started, fake-fighting for WWE. Lesnar also had a championship amateur wrestling background. Punk doesn’t. He has experience rolling around the mats with the famed Gracies and hanging out with Al Bundy himself, Ed O’Neill (yeah, Al Bundy has a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and no, I am not even fucking joking) but that’s about it. This won’t end well.

Sure, White seems to already be managing expectations, which is a sign that he’s willing to be patient with this, but I’m guessing that patience extends only so far as people still are willing to pay money to see WWE Superstar CM Punk either shock everyone or get his ass beat by real fighters. That is a novelty that goes away pretty quickly, and once that does, he can either fight or he can’t. That’s all that matters, and if he can’t . . . well, then we’re into Dana White calling him a faggot territory while Punk rages on podcasts about how he was mistreated. Again.

But that’s what makes this story so fascinating, you know? Fascinating and ridiculous. It is the most American of stories. It is a story of an asshole convinced he’s surrounded by assholes out to get him, and today’s savior is just tomorrow’s asshole. That is how we operate as a people, as a culture. It is ingrained in our collective identity. We are a nation of rejects and misfits. Seriously, all of us are here because our ancestors were fuck-ups and/or wild stallions that couldn’t be broken. In short, assholes. That gives us a perpetual chip on our shoulder that we can never shake, and so we bounce between Vince McMahons and Dana Whites and we bitch and we moan and we try to prove to everyone – but most of all to ourselves – that we are actually Righteous and Good, even when we’re making complete fools of ourselves. Especially when we’re making complete fools of ourselves. It’s who we are, and that’s who CM Punk will always be. Good luck to him.

The Passion of Kosta Karageorge

Kosta Karageorge, a 22 year old with everything in front of him, is dead. No matter what you hear or what you read, including this gibberish, that’s all that really matters.

In case you didn’t know, he is  - or was – the senior walk-on for Ohio State who killed himself last week. Here are some details.

This is fucked up. Obviously. A few years ago I wrote a thing when Junior Seau shot himself. You might be able to find it in all that mess off to the right. You might not. I’m not even going to look for it because it doesn’t really matter what I wrote, just that I felt compelled to write it in the first place. Because here I am, writing virtually the same thing about Kosta Karageorge.

This was a kid with a history of concussions who shot himself. It’s impossible, in this day and age, not to make a link between the two. That’s fucked up and gruesome, but, well, here we are. And how do we deal with that? I don’t know. That’s the only honest answer I can give you.

Football is a brutal, dangerous sport. Unless you’re totally living in denial, you’ve wrestled with that reality over the past couple of years. I mean, how could you not? The stories of old dudes all fucked up are everywhere, and when I say old, I’m talking 50. This is not supposed to happen. And it’s especially not supposed to happen when you’re 22 years old.

And before we wrestle with the whole concussion thing, let’s take a moment to really let that sink in. This was a 22 year old on the verge of graduating from a major university, with a lifetime ahead of him that was probably looking pretty damn good. Being a football alum at a power school is sort of like being in a version of the Illuminati. You’ve got connections great and small, and rabid fans will throw you a job just so they can pant at you and take frequent bathroom breaks to “work off” their mania. This is a dude who had a lot going for him.

And yet, his story ended with people finding him literally dead in a dumpster. Jesus Christ. Just take a second to imagine things from his perspective. Look at what he wrote to his mom in that link up above:

“I am sorry if I am an embarrassment, but these concussions have my head all fucked up.”

That is heartbreakingly awful. This is a dude with seemingly everything going for him who had his brain so twisted that he apologized to his own mother because he thought he sucked, then apparently climbed in a dumpster and shot himself. Speculating in these sorts of cases is an awful thing, but sometimes it’s the only way to really humanize it, you know? And it’s hard not to speculate, given the symbolism, that this poor dude literally thought he was a piece of trash. I mean, he climbed into a fucking dumpster and then killed himself.

That doesn’t happen unless your brain is seriously fucked up. And, apparently, Kosta’s brain was fucked up in that way that has become sadly all too familiar to us.

Concussions suck. They are awful and a butt. I got a concussion when I was 12. I flipped up off of a skateboard and landed on the sidewalk face-first. I went home and vomited violently all over the damn place. I felt like I was dying. I had a solid headache for a month after. My mom took me to the hospital where I was diagnosed with a “mild” concussion. Well shit, I can’t even image what a severe concussion is like then.

And I really, really can’t imagine what getting concussed multiple times must be like, or how it fucks with you, especially when you are under constant pressure to “shake it off” and get out there and perform. Apparently, it’s enough to climb into a dumpster and kill yourself.

The problem a lot of us are wrestling with is how we deal with the fact that, as fans, we root for and enable a sport that is responsible for these sorts of things. At least if you’re not a complete ghoul. Of course, it’s not just football. Virtually every contact sport, from hockey to even pro-wrestling, is dealing with this right now. It’s just that football is the true national pastime, and so it’s going to be the one everyone focuses on. That’s just life in the fast lane, yo.

And what’s really scary, I think, is that Kosta Karageorge wasn’t some old burnout who couldn’t take it anymore after a lifetime of getting his head slammed into by giant hill beasts had turned his brain into something approximating pudding. No, he was a walk-on who never played in a game and had only been on the team for one year. And still, he apparently suffered multiple concussions. Yes, he was on the wrestling team before then, but unless they were practicing tombstone piledrivers and chairshots to the head – always a possibility at Ohio State – I’m going to go ahead and say that his concussion problem was probably football related.

And now he’s dead and if you’re a fan, how do you deal with that? Well, some will flip out and claim that watching football at all is “problematic” and that everyone who does so is an irresponsible ghoul with blood on their hands. Others will get pissed and defensive and claim that everyone should shut up because FOOTBALL FERGODSAKES FOOTBALLLLLLLLLL and pretend that concussions are a conspiracy made up by the Illuminati and aliens in order to make us softer as a people so that we’ll be more inclined to cooperate when the invasion comes.

These are both obviously dumb and reactionary, but hey, that’s absolutism for you. Of course, that’s just how we deal with everything these days – by turning it into a binary debacle in which you have to pick a side and then blindly support said side. God even knows what sort of ugly carnage would unfold now if the “less filling” vs. “tastes great” beer commercial debate of yore was unleashed upon us.

And the really sad thing about this is that this sort of binary argue-about-everything bullshit means that this will just become more grist for that particularly loathsome mill, and it will get caught up in the news cycle, and a couple of months from now everyone will have forgotten it and will all be arguing about whether that farting dog from that Taco Bell Super Bowl commercial is racist or not. And that’s particularly obnoxious here because you know who’s not going to forget? Kosta Karageorge’s family and friends. His poor mom is going to go to sleep every night for the rest of her life with the image of her baby boy climbing into a fucking dumpster and shooting himself, obliterating his face so much that the only way the cops could identify him was through his tattoos.

That is really ugly, but I want you to see it that way. I want it to be humanized so that you can’t just shrug and move on to the farting dog. You will anyway, but shit, at least try. But that doesn’t mean that you have to be reactionary about it either, you know? It may be hard to believe given the state of our interactions, but human beings are highly complex creatures with the ability to hold two opposed, often contradicting, thoughts and ideas in their heads at the exact same time. It’s okay to be worried about this and think we have to figure something out while still being a fan. It’s okay. You’re not a monster, you’re not a hypocrite, you’re not an enabler. You’re a human being, trying to make sense of an insensible world.

I’ve been reading the book The Last Headbangers by Kevin Cook, which is about football in the 1970s and the wild spirit warriors who played it. Naturally, it’s pretty insane. These dudes were fucking nuts. They were all taking steroids, popping pills, uppers and downers, lefters and righters, goofballs and gallantballs, and the whole Raiders team was being shot up with horse testosterone and injecting primitive HGH from human cadavers. Saying it was fucked up doesn’t even begin to describe that shit.

But they did it, and they also beat the shit out of each other on the field. I’m talking knocking each other out with plaster casts, playing with concussions so bad that they were essentially knocked out on their feet, and other gruesome details. And most of them did this for $30,000 a year, not the millions we’re talking today. They basically killed themselves for football. Hell, the Raiders Hall of Fame center, Jim Otto, had to have so many surgeries after he retired that the nerves in his leg were destroyed, so he had the doctors amputate it and replace it with a prosthetic with the Raiders logo on it. That’s both completely insane and completely badass. And, well, there it is in a nutshell.

It’s completely insane and completely badass. It’s okay to recognize both aspects. It’s okay to celebrate one while trying to figure out how we get a handle on the other. Because it’s not okay that a dude like Kosta Karageorge is dead. There’s no reason for that shit. But we’re adults and adults can handle the dichotomy of hating that while also admiring a maniac like Jim Otto.

I don’t know the answers. Nobody does. I mean, on the one hand, I can sit here and tell you that adults make their own decisions and that if these dudes want to kill themselves for the glory of fucking football then, hey, go with god. But on the other hand, you have stories like this, in which studies show that kids playing football show brain changes even without getting concussed all the damn time. That’s scary shit. And you can’t really rationalize that. And you shouldn’t try.

The only way forward, as with all things that make us uncomfortable, is by simply acknowledging that they exist and that there is no reason for it. There is no defensible reason why Kosta Karageorge had to be found in a dumpster with his face blown off. There is no defensible reason why Junior Seau had to call his spirit horse. There is no defensible reason why middle-aged men are wandering around like senile 90 year olds, broke as hell from all the medical bills. It’s abominable and ugly and gross and any other word you want to use for it.

But football is fun and exciting and you aren’t going to stop watching it. That would be its own sort of denial. You have to be able to accept that you love and enjoy a sport that has consequences for the people who play it. That doesn’t mean you need to whip yourself or wear a hair-shirt or bray like a jackass to anyone who will listen about how your noble sacrifice to quit watching will change everything. That just makes you an egomaniac. You aren’t helping anyone or anything. You’re just assuaging your own dumb miserable guilt.

Cheer and celebrate these dudes because they are out there making a choice. And then when they’re done, cheer and celebrate them getting help. Cheer and celebrate and encourage the NFL, the NCAA and everyone else to do anything and everything they can to get at least a fraction of a handle on this. Turning away out of some sort of self-righteous indignation isn’t going to help anyone or anything. And that’s exactly what you’re doing when you adopt an absolutist position here either way. The only way this gets better is if we come to terms with ourselves and our own fandom and then go from there.

Look, I’m just a jackass gibbering on the internet. I don’t have the answers. If you ask me what the solution to any of this is, if you ask me if I have a good reason why Kosta Karageorge had to die, then there’s only one thing I can tell you: I don’t know. I don’t know, and neither do any of you. And that’s the only honest thing any of us can say about this. And that’s how this conversation has to start.