Skip to main content

Bread and Circus

--For a friend's Facebook friends who suggested they take out a bounty to "kick me in the nuts"--


On April 10, 2005, Al Lucas died after being hit during a kick-off between the Los Angeles Avengers and New York Dragons .  I'll admit, I didn't know that before I started working on this, but it's a fact that while his mom was pregnant in 1978, I missed a block during my pre-youth group tackle football game, causing my youth group leader to sustain one too many hits, and I watched as his knee twisted and his tendon snapped.  My missed block; his broken tendon. My guilt; his walking with a limp for the rest of his life.

I'll admit that I pretty much stopped caring about football after watching the Denver Broncos get trounced 55-10 by the 49'ers. The payoff wasn't worth it.  I'd be angry for days and suffer the constant ribbing from people who "hated" the Broncos and watch as the real news cycle was buried under the constant barrage of speculation, conjecture, any minor bit of information that dictated that Denver was a Bronco town and football was news item number 1.  It didn't make sense to get this worked up over a game; and while watching a team be successful was fun, it, in hindsight, is basically bread and circus.  Don't get worked up over the war in Afghanistan; the Saints are in the Super Bowl. Don't get involved in stopping the Keystone Pipeline; Peyton Manning is now a Bronco. Don't bother watching the slow erosion of women's rights and liberties; Tim Tebow is now a Jet.  Don't worry about why your income has stayed relatively flat; the Saints had a bounty program.

Wait...what was that?  The Saints had a bounty program that rewarded players for injuring opposing team players?
When I apologized to my youth group leader, he was more than gracious and didn't blame me even though I was clearly instrumental in his injury.   He had to have surgery to repair the damage and hobbled around the church for months or watched from the sidelines as we threw our bodies with bandon.
But knees heal...sort of...or at least you recover some semblance of normality so that your life goes on.  Yet, in football, there is a 75 percent chance of getting a concussion, and once you've had one concussion, you're twice as likely to get another. Yet, the Saints had a bounty program to injure other players.

New England's Darryl Stingley was hit by Oakland's Jack Tatum, his spinal cord was broken between the 4th and 5th vertebrae and he spent the rest of his life in a wheel chair--19 years before he died at the age of 56.

So when you take a sport as brutal as football and put a bounty on players' heads to take them out, you really are playing with their lives. Yet maybe I'm not sympathetic to the plight of the Saints fans, and a year suspension for their head coach?  A year is not enough.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"That's Scaughtland for ya!"

The United Kingdom Up at the top of that map, basically the top half, is a tiny nation with a big footprint.  With roughly the same population as Minnesota, Scotland has a land mass the size of South Carolina, yet there are more people in the United States that have Scottish and/or Scotch-Irish ancestry than live in Scotland. My family is one of those. In the course of growing up, I was indoctrinated to celebrate my Scottish ancestry (primarily by my grandmother but we'll talk about that later).      So a year ago, my wife took a trip with her mother to Japan.  I looked at the pictures that she posted, and when I'd talk to her on the phone, I noticed something.  She was happy.  This is not to say she's always unhappy, but this was different.  She was having a good time, engaged in the world, curious, and happy-like no matter what the challenge.  And traveling to Japan with her mother posed some interesting challenge...
Post a Comment
Read more

Keith Jarrett: The Koln Concert and What it says about Creativity

Life is about listening.   Sometimes what life is saying comes at you in in strange ways.   On Friday, I was reading this story on Salon.com and it mentioned that few jazz musicians have the same clout as they once did.  Of the few who still draw considerable audiences, it mentioned Keith Jarrett .   I don't know Keith Jarrett, but I've been trying to school myself on jazz for the better part of a year now.   Since I'm relatively new to this jazz thing, I want to make sure I'm really listening to what people think of as "great."   With that in mind, I bought a book:   The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings .   Under Keith Jarrett they mention the album,  The Koln Concert as his best album (part of any enthusiasts' "Core Collection").   So, when I saw the album while perusing Mecca Records in ABQ, I knew I had to buy it.   Life was talking. The Koln Concert  (So, go ahead and ...
2 comments
Read more

Volume 7 & 8 of What if the Beatles never broke up?

 With the commercial success of Band on the Run and Venus and Mars , Paul had all but erased the demon of being "merely" the cute Beatle.  He had his own success, with Wings, and could stand his own compositions up next to what he did in the Beatles.   Wings at the Speed of Sound went to number one on the strength of "Let "Em In" and "Silly Love Songs," which I chose not to include because in this project the critique that lead to its creation may not have been an issue.  Instead, I include his great, "With A Little Luck" that came out in 1978 on   London Town and the great single "Mull of Kyntyre," which is so damn Scottish its easy to see why it was a hit in Great Britain but no where else. I certainly don't agree with the contemporary critics who characterized George Harrison's Thirty Three and 1/3 as his "best release since All Things Must Pass."   In fact I think the earlier releases of Living In The Materi...
Post a Comment
Read more