The Emperor Has No Clothes

The NFL has always been a cesspool of idiocy and arrogance. At least to anyone paying attention. The Lions getting boned by incompetent refs in the 4^th quarter, leading to lynch mobs being formed, blood orgies in the streets and one dude even calling sweet, gentle Ty Schalter a fucking retard (Excuse me, it was actually YOU ARE A FUCKING RETARD) for daring to suggest that the Lions probably could have played a little better despite the dicking they got from the refs, was just the latest in a long line of examples of the NFL’s rotten bullshit.

The truth is that it has been there for everyone to see for a long time now. Lions fans are already intimately familiar with it. Just go back to the Process of the Catch nonsense that stole an obvious touchdown away from Calvin Johnson in Chicago. That’s what makes this so hard for most Lions fans, I think. It’s not just a revelation of a combination of incompetence and arrogance by the NFL, but a confirmation. And it happened at both the worst possible time, and the time when long-suffering Lions fans expected it to happen. That is a terrible combination that leaves grown dudes and lady dudes shivering and shaking like broken junkies, sniping at each other bitterly and imagine dark deeds involving Emperor Goodell and a trash compactor.

It’s not just the incompetence. Refs in all sports suffer from that particular malady, and hey, we all make mistakes. To err is human, blah, blah, blah. But it’s the NFL’s almost unbelievable arrogance that is at the core of this rotten business. It manifests itself most obviously, and most publicly, when something like this happens. Or something like the Process of the Catch ruling. The NFL obviously fucks up, but instead of owning up to it, they just try to remake reality to fit the horrible New World that they have created with their inanity. It’s why I’ve compared the NFL’s rulebook to a Necronomicon. It’s a dark wizard’s tome that only fell sorcerers and wicked magicians can read. The Emperor clears his throat as the rabble starts to get out of hand, and the Minister of Propaganda, Mike Pereira, rolls his bones, smears cow blood on the face of a baby, watches the pigeons for signs and then declares the NFL’s obvious misdeeds just.

But it also manifests in other, more insidious ways. It can be as simple as the NFL fining dudes for not wearing Official NFL Merchandise during press conferences. Years ago, back when Jon Kitna was with the Bengals, they fined the dude for wearing a hat with a cross on it during a press conference. Kitna, for those who don’t know, is big into the Jesus thing, which… whatever, that is his deal and you have to respect that. But the NFL didn’t give a shit. They fined him because it was not an NFL Licensed and Approved cross, which… that’s some shit, isn’t it? I mean, that’s some straight out of the Bible money lenders in the temple kind of shit. That’s old school wicked fairy tale villain kind of nonsense.

And then there’s the Ray Rice incident, or any number of off the field incidents over the last several years, which have finally laid bare the arbitrary and ridiculous nature of Emperor Goodell’s punishments. He’s set himself on the throne and just arrogantly waves a dismissive hand at anyone who bothers him, offering barely thought out dictates that people are not allowed to question. It all depends on his mood, whether or not he’s paying attention and what he thinks he can cover up. It’s arrogant and stupid, and, well, those two things often go hand in hand. Hell, next season he’ll probably decree that a contract dispute can only be resolved by cutting a baby in half.

But it’s not just the NFL. No, the NFL is just the root of the problem, the festering poison that effects anyone else who spends too much time around it. NFL insiders soon end up exhibiting the same diminished mental faculties as a dude who fell asleep in his running car with the garage door closed.

All you have to do is look at how NFL insiders dealt with Jim Harbaugh’s move to Michigan. Their arrogance and lazy dismissal of what was happening right in front of them was almost shocking. It was a mirror image of the attitude of the league that they love and cover. While Michigan insiders were adamant that something big was happening, never wavering in their coverage of the deal for weeks and months, the NFL insiders refused to even acknowledge the possibility because no one leaves the NFL.

That shit is chilling. That’s a rotten, fucked up attitude right there, the sort of thing normally seen only in cults. NOBODY LEAVES THE NFL. That was the refrain heard from countless reporters who couldn’t imagine a better world outside of their twisted utopia. It was arrogant and stupid at the same time. Sound familiar?

Of course, they were wrong, just like the NFL is so often wrong. And just like their beloved NFL, they immediately tried to reshape the story to fit their bullshit narrative. It was pretty clear that Harbaugh and Michigan were a match made in heaven all along. The insider stories that have come out make that clear. But oh no! That doesn’t fit with the NFL’s vision of the world. They say the world is flat, so fuck you, Columbus. First, it was Harbaugh is never leaving the NFL for college, then it was Harbaugh turned Michigan down but changed his mind after a desperate Michigan made a last minute offer of a bajillion dollars that no one could match, then it was Harbaugh will still stay in the NFL because he’s only using Michigan for leverage (an idea which never made sense given that Harbaugh pretty much had his pick of jobs in the NFL, he didn’t need to use Michigan – a lowly college team according to NFL insiders – when he had several NFL franchises ready to try to outbid one another), and then when he finally took the job and made them all look like fools, it was that Harbaugh only did it for the money, and when that was proven to be bullshit (Harbaugh is making the same amount he made with the 49ers) they turned around and said that it was because he couldn’t find a job in the NFL, which… what the fuck? That level of intellectual dishonesty is staggering, usually only seen in, well, the NFL.

But the NFL can’t change reality, no matter how hard they try. And neither can its slappies, those Defenders of the Shield who have allowed themselves to be coopted and perverted into little more than propagandists, mouth-pieces for a corrupt regime intent on greedily raking in as much money as it can and glorifying its own image at the expense of everyone else, from the fans who make its existence possible to the dudes who concuss themselves into an early grave for a few tosses of the coin from the Emperor and his minions.

The NFL won’t acknowledge reality, and will try to change it to meet some alternate-universe bizarro-world that they’ve cooked up for themselves like meth-heads in a dirty trailer. They’ll tell you that somehow that bullshit call against the Lions was justified. It’s gotten so bad, though, that even Mike Pereira can’t bring himself to lie and twist the truth for his Emperor. He admitted it was a bad call, which probably means he’ll be hauled away for electro-shock treatment and “reeducation” by the Emperor’s goons.

The NFL will still try to twist it, to somehow make all their bullshit “true,” and if they can’t, they’ll just try to sweep it under the rug and pretend it didn’t happen because fuck your memories, peasant. The Emperor makes reality.

And doofuses like John Clayton won’t acknowledge reality either. They’ll still say shit like Harbaugh took the Michigan job as a “soft landing” because the NFL which was so hot on his trail only hours before, so hot in fact that one dude tried to claim that the Raiders would give him $16 million a year (no, really, an “insider” actually “reported” this) suddenly had no room for him and he was forced to lick his wounds with a lowly college team. (A college team that routinely draws over 100,000 fans, has an alumni and fanbase that any NFL franchise would murder small children for, is laden with tradition and is a financial powerhouse that can pay their coach whatever they damn well please, but… okay, sure, it’s just the Minor Leagues) But why wouldn’t the insiders do this? Why wouldn’t they lie and twist and play intellectual shell games? The world that they live in, the world of the NFL, has made those things into virtues. They are merely doing what daddy taught them.

But anyone with eyes to see and a brain to think can see reality, can see just how rotten and absurd the NFL has become. It has been this way for a while now, and you can even make the argument that their arrogant bully tactics are at the heart of the league, interwoven in its origins and its staggering growth through the years, much like a crime family. But regular people are starting to see this shit. The Emperor has no clothes and while his advisors and the Baghdad Bobs who cover him and his kingdom insist that he’s got on the finest of furs and the best silks from all across the world, the peasants can see him standing naked in the window, his doughy ass hanging out for all the world to see.

The NFL isn’t going anywhere. It’s too big and its sheer momentum means that it will remain the Big Boss in the sporting world for years to come. But that doesn’t mean that I have to pretend that it is righteous or good or worthy of my adulation. Fuck the NFL. This isn’t about my team getting screwed or throwing a hissy fit because I don’t like what happened. I blame the Lions for fucking up that game just as much as I blame the refs. Well, maybe not just as much, but I’m certainly willing to say that they could have done a lot more to make sure that call would be little more than an unfortunate and irritating footnote.

I say this because I want you to understand that this is not the result of irrational anger of the lynch mob variety a la what we saw on twitter while it was all going down in real time. No, this is the result of years of arrogance, of heavy-handed megalomania, of having the NFL’s bullshit shoved down my throat for far too long. I see you, NFL. I will always see you. You are too big to miss. I am not going to make outrageous claims about burying my head in the sand and pretending that you’re not there. That would just be letting you get away with it. You see, I am a football fan. And you are fucking with that, and I don’t like it. You will not drive me away from being a football fan because you are not football. You are the NFL, and there is a world of difference between the two, and it’s about time everyone sees that.

The NFL is not football. Football is football. The NFL is a corporate wasteland of rotten souls and diseased brains. I am a football fan. The NFL can go fuck itself.

The Tragedy of Junior Seau, Jonathan Vilma and the Cynical Tyranny of Sheriff Goodell

I’ll let you in on a little secret: Raven and I are working on a football prospectus sort of thing, only it will be cool and interesting  – a football retardus, if you will.  In this will be included all manner of things – our All-ACLB team, our team breakdowns, and other assorted horseshit (boy, do I know how to sell these things or what?) – and we’re thinking about making it available via e-book when it’s all finished.  The reason I bring this up  - other than as a cheap shill to put the idea in your no doubt chemically-clouded brains – is because a few months back we started working on the All-ACLB team (before the idea for an e-book was conceived) and I wrote my parts for quarterback, running back and fullback (this was before I took a couple of months off from writing about the foozball due to epic burnout) and in these sections, the key theme is the NFL’s change from a smashmouth concuss everyone league to a pass-happy ballet.  Naturally, this is full of over-the-top bravado and the romanticizing of the physical obliteration of the typical NFL player all in the name of some fanciful warrior code.

Today, I feel kinda uneasy about all that.  I don’t mind saying that.  I mean, after all, yesterday Junior Seau picked up a gun and fired a bullet into his body and then rode his spirit horse off to Valhalla, all at the ripe old age of 43.  The obvious and, frankly, unavoidable conclusion is that at some point Seau probably had a conversation like this with the ol’ family doctor:

Doc: “Junior, I’m sorry to tell you this, but there’s a very good chance you will have full-on dementia by the time you reach 50.”

Junior: “Well, fuck this . . .”

Indeed.  Fuck this.  It has become harder and harder to reconcile my own fandom with the above scenario, because the inescapable truth is that we are all complicit in the destruction of a man’s life.  It’s dirty and it’s ugly and there’s no real way to justify it.  But at the same time, deep in my idiot heart, I feel all of that nonsense that we romanticize, that . . . hell, you know what?  Here are some excerpts from those All-ACLB pieces that I just talked about, just so you know what I’m gibbering about:

“Running backs.  They are a dying breed thanks to the ongoing pussification of the NFL and this has never been more apparent than right now.  In mulling over who I want to be on this team, I was struck by a simple and stunning realization: there are no great running backs anymore.  Not really anyway.  This is a league powered by quarterbacks now, a glorified flag football farce in which receivers run wild and free because it is a capital crime to so much as shove them.  Sheriff Goodell will roll up on you with his tin badge and his six shooter filled with lies and he’ll make your life a living hell if you try to Jack Tatum your way to victory these days.  Hell, now we know why Jack Tatum died.  His spirit saw this coming and it fled to Valhalla before the Sheriff came to issue him his state approved vagina and knitting needles.  Was that sexist?  Probably, but who cares?  I’m making a point.

Look, I love big passing.  There is a certain beauty in a perfectly run pattern and a tight spiral, in the hold your breath drop the bombs grandeur of a Matthew Stafford to Calvin Johnson symphony.  It is explosive, fireworks in July, easy laughter under the sun and everybody loves it.  But it comes at the expense of the running back, of football that is played beneath storm clouds.  It is a steelworker sweating in the dead of winter, his face blackened and cracked by years of hard work and muscle.  It is the last desperate push by an outnumbered Roman legion against the wild, undisciplined barbarian hordes.  The flag football world we are in now has a soundtrack filled with flutes and clarinets, with delicate ballerinas flitting about on tiptoes, giggling and chasing butterflies.  The lost world of smashmouth football, that world in which the running back is king, has a soundtrack filled with fat guys playing the tuba, with thunder and the last desperate breaths of men pushed beyond their mortal limits.  I’m just saying, we’ve lost any sense of balance in Sheriff Goodell’s funhouse of a league.  Everything is distorted and there are flutes trilling everywhere and goddammit, I just want one fat guy playing the tuba.  Is that too much to ask?”

Okay, so that’s one.  Here’s another:

“The fullback is more a symbol at this point than anything else, like John Wayne or red meat.  It is despised by modern society and pissed on as a symbol of a dumb, Neanderthalic world where men grunt and scratch their asses in the middle of the street and Don Draper chokes out a whore after downing a carafe of fine scotch before returning home to a steak and a smile from his doting wife.  To them, it is Clint Eastwood shooting a Vietnamese gang member after calling him a Zipperhead.  It is yesterday and the world of today with its plastic sheen and neon lights, with its smiling Sheriff with the tin badge and tin heart, finds it revolting and damaged, an affront to the New Americanism, that Vegas casino of the soul where people laugh like mongoloid idiots at fireworks in the sky and tweet their every vapid thought to robots who ply them with shitty Viagra, credit card offers and the promise of more money, bigger dicks and videos of cats playing the keyboard and engaging in insipid baby talk about cheeseburgers.  There is no room in this world for a man lining up across from another man, a crazed bloody smile on his face and willing himself forward on a mud-soaked field for nothing other than an extra inch or yard of anonymous glory, that unrecognized satisfaction of the soul that asks for nothing, wants less and revels only in its own fleeting and ephemeral existence.  It has no room for that man staggering to his feet, teeth busted and head ringing, laughing like some half-crazed Viking warrior because he won something simple and yet profound.  He won an inch, a yard, and he won it in a way that is black and white, simple in a way which is anathematic to today’s notion of progress, to today’s belief that everything that can be won can only be won so long as it is not taken from another.  But that is not the way of nature, and the fullback is nature’s avatar.  The natural way, the natural law, brutal as it is, is that to take another must give, that to win another must lose.  The fullback embodies this with a totality which is off-putting to the children of Progress and that is why they hate him and that is why he is disappearing.

All of that is obviously overly simple, dangerously simple in that way that all seductive ideas are.  The real world is more complicated, weirder and unexplainable.  But the football field is a place of simplicity, a place where those seductive ideas, those simple ideas, can be made real, where the world is black and white, where people bleed for something so trivial as a yard simply because it is a victory of the soul.  This is the essence of sport and it has been forgotten in the mad rush to frame everything in terms of progress, in terms of who we want to be as a people.  Football, and the grunting blood death of a fullback slamming into a linebacker for the want of a simple yard, is meaningless, utterly meaningless.  And it’s because of that that it means everything.  And that’s why the fullback deserves to be – no . . . needs to be – celebrated.”

The thing is, is I stand by every one of those words.  I feel that deep in my gut.  I feel that they are very, very right.  But the tragedy of all of this is also that they are very, very wrong.  As a romanticized ideal, they are honest and beautiful.  In the real world, Junior Seau kills himself because his brain was destroyed by . . . by what?  By an ideal?  The reconciliation of those two truths is nearly impossible and just leaves me sort of sitting here and shrugging because I don’t have the answers and neither does anyone else. 

People will tell you that they feel strongly one way or another, that they know the answer.  These people are lying, either to you or to themselves, or more likely to both you and themselves.  What they “know” is actually just a rationalization of their own personal prejudices.  Their conclusions are merely justifications for decisions they’ve already made, justifications for the wild passions of their own hearts.

Reality and truth are messy and ephemeral, passion and reality often irreconcilable, and that’s when you end up with tragedy.  And that’s what all this is: a tragedy.

It was meaningful  –  in that way that diametrically opposed ideas that occur at the same time, and in so doing throw the raw truths of both ideas into stark and brutal focus, are meaningful - that on the same day Junior Seau decided that happiness was a warm gun that Sherriff Goodell took it upon himself to arbitrarily suspend a handful of Saints players for their participation in that bounty bullshit, the most notable of course being Jonathan Vilma’s year-long exile.  It threw a lot of things into focus for me.  It made me realize some things that I think had been brewing in my head – and in my heart – for a long time.

This isn’t about player safety.  Not really anyway.  This is about the NFL’s desperate need to protect itself from lawsuits.  Roger Goodell, long the NFL’s chief marketer, understands these things.  His chief goal – perhaps his only goal – in all of this is to protect the NFL from a PR standpoint.  When people laud him for “protecting the integrity of the league” as I heard Stephen A. Smith gibbering on about earlier on ESPN, I cringe, because what Goodell is doing is destroying the integrity of his league.  Instead of taking real, productive and proactive steps towards dealing with this problem, he’s cannibalizing his own, whipping the very people most affected by these head injuries: the players.  And he’s doing so capriciously, changing rules in the middle of the season, deciding all on his own, like some sort of petty tyrant, who should be suspended or fined and for how long.  He is the Roman Emperor standing in the Coliseum, prepared to either give the thumbs up or the thumbs down.  That is not “protecting the integrity of the league.”  That is a vicious and naked attempt to hijack the integrity of the league for the benefit of some surface-level public relations victories.  It’s vitally important that people understand that distinction.

Jonathan Vilma and the gang will be forced to jump on the cross of public opinion just so that the NFL doesn’t have to actually do anything or change anything.  Because, the reality is this: the changes the NFL needs to change are changes that happen off the field, not on it, and those are the changes the NFL is notorious for refusing to make. 

But back to Vilma for a second: think about it for a moment, what was he supposed to do?  Sure, there is a noble and fanciful sentiment out there, propagated by the self-righteous, that he should have somehow rebelled against his own coaches, thrown down his helmet like in some movie and refused to play under their draconian and vicious system.  You know what that gets you in real life?  Cut.  It gets you cut.  It gets you a bus ticket out of town and a reputation as a malcontent.  For someone whose career window ends right around age 30 or so, that’s a problem.  That’s a big fucking problem.

But instead of recognizing that, it’s easier for the Sheriff and his posse to ride up on Vilma, the easy target, the target that can’t really fight back (don’t even gibber about the NFLPA, which is about as neutered as a suburban puppy), pistol whip him and drag him back to town behind their horses while the townsfolk cheer and say “Job well done.”  And then the Sheriff nods and rips Vilma’s Wanted poster down off the wall while those cheers swell, and he tears it up as if to say “Caught me another one.”  Indeed, Sheriff.  Indeed.

Meanwhile, Junior Seau puts a gun to his chest and prepares for his final flight into the great unknown not because someone tried to concuss him, because of any bounty program or anything like that, but because he spent an entire career delivering hits, because he spent an entire career doing all of those things which are integral to football, from taking dozens of blocks every game, from the slow wear that erodes and erodes and erodes until there is nothing left but a fading memory, a hazy, terrifying tomorrow and a gun.  That’s how these things happen – not as a result of some spectacular hit, but as the result of the ordinary combined with time.  This is the result of football, good clean football, not some outlaw bounty program.

But that’s a hard thing to confront.  It’s easier to just put spurs to horse and ride down the evil outlaw Saints.  Of course, this is all speculative and Seau’s suicide might not have anything to do with head injuries.  But, let’s face it, it probably does and even if it doesn’t, enough players have been affected like this over the years that it’s an issue.  Seau and his suicide – as callous as it sounds – is just a doorway to this issue.

So what are the answers?  I don’t know and, like I said, neither does anyone else.  The first steps are obvious, though, and they’re the steps the NFL refuses to take.  First, the league needs to invest heavily in helmet technology.  I’m talking some post-space-age Here Comes The Future shit.  They need to find a way to minimize the impact of the ordinary football play on these dudes’ brains.  Second, they need to channel a big chunk of all that money they are famously swimming in towards taking care of their players after they retire.  Because right now, it’s no different than the quote from North Dallas Forty: “We’re not the team, we’re the equipment.” 

By its own actions – its own refusal to step up and provide these guys with some kind of a comfortable life after football – the NFL has basically admitted that what they care about is not the health of their players but the PR battles that result when someone like Seau goes to greet the God of Death.  The solutions – better yet, the first step towards a solution – are things that cost money, though, and the NFL doesn’t spend money unless it has to.  The fact that they haven’t is an indictment of their actual priorities.

It’s tough to separate the idea of football from the often times too brutal and terrible reality of football.  I understand that.  I do.  And the only way, I think, that this issue is going to move forward, that something productive will begin to happen, is if we all acknowledge this irreconcilable chasm.  This is a complicated issue and none of us know how to really feel about it.  None of us have the answers because right now, there are no answers.  There are only questions.  The only thing any of us can do is to keep asking those questions, and to acknowledge that we need time to try to answer them. 

Unfortunately, for the dudes playing right now, time is something they don’t have.  It’s too late for them, and that’s an ugly and harsh truth.  But punishing them for it, hanging them high for the townsfolk to hoot at and jeer, is not the answer.  It’s merely the distraction and the façade the NFL wants you to fall for so that on that day when Sheriff Goodell takes the stand, he can look the jury in the eye and say with a straight face that he tried, man, he really tried and it’s not his fault that those barbarians can’t behave themselves.

The NFL is doing everything wrong to combat this issue, and they are doing so because they are reacting with the same hyper-reactivity that everyone else is, with the same sort of zeal and fanatical devotion to ANSWERS ANSWERS ANSWERS that everyone approaches everything with these days.  There is no time for contemplation, for thoughtful reflection, and that just adds to the tragedy of this whole thing, because as long as people continue to try to smash this issue with the hammer of self-righteous “truth” the longer it will take before anything productive is done to deal with it.  People just want to yell back and forth.  They want to win the argument more than they want to actually find answers.  They want to break this issue down to a simple battle between “teams”, just like they do with everything else. 

You don’t have to condone the demonization of the Saints and their players just because you’re afraid that if you say “hey, this is bullshit” that people will accuse you of not caring about the health of these dudes.  They are not the same thing.  You can be critical of the NFL and its superficial attempts to “clean up the game” AND be an advocate for serious change.  There is no hypocrisy in this.  I hope you get that after reading all this nonsense.  Because right now the NFL isn’t protecting its players, it’s selling them out.  It isn’t protecting the integrity of the league, it’s destroying it.  Right now, the NFL is one of the biggest obstacles in the way of real, meaningful, productive change.  The NFL’s refusal to take care of its retired players or to invest in technology that will help their current players – such as radically new helmet technology – given the amount of money the league rakes in is almost evil.  Actually, to hell with that, it’s not almost evil, it is evil.  You want to know why I’m so critical of the NFL and Sheriff Goodell?  That’s why.  Hang ‘em high, Sheriff, and maybe when the law comes for you, they’ll have too many dead bodies to wade through and you’ll be able to ride out of town on your horse.  But something tells me that when that day comes, even the damn horse will be ashamed to be associated with you.

This isn’t an issue about suspensions or bounties or vicious hits or anything like that.  It’s an issue about people, about people like Junior Seau, about dudes whose lives will be ruined before their fiftieth birthday.  Yes, it’s all a part of our compact with the game, the risks, the injuries, and these players willingly make their choices, and you have to respect that.  You have to.  But you also can’t ignore Junior Seau lying dead in his home with a bullet in his heart.  This is complicated and I don’t know the answers.  Neither do you.  You can love football, and you can love big hits and physical play.  And you can feel bad about them and you can continue to search for answers, and more importantly, continue to ask the questions that will lead to those answers.  It’s all any of us can do.  That’s not enough but there is no other way.  And that’s why this is a tragedy.