Make Everything New in the Imperative

One of the things that makes football so fascinating is that while much of the on and off field activity is analogous to life, the application of those “life lessons” is more subjective than it is anywhere else in sports. For someone who traffics in visions of what developing or unproven players could be, this makes the NFL offseason, one presided over by the “right way” cult, particularly frustrating. Free agency poses the even more confusing question of exactly where the line is between the hopeful “fresh start” and the graveyard of “he is who he is” lies, a question whose answer seems to depend on whether or not we like you all that much.

How else to explain the discussion of Kevin Kolb, who is apparently full of potential and just needs the right opportunity at the age of 26, while Tarvaris Jackson is a waste of money with similar stats and just one more year of experience? Why is Vince Young some sort of pet project with immense upside while Kyle Orton, who is a better quarterback in every measurable passing statistic, is basically a bargain bin castoff? How is it that sports, the ultimate meritocracy among professions, is infected in this respect with a sort of caste of haves and have-nots created by media contrivances?

This, of course, is the great frustration of anybody who wants to see even-handed consideration of athletes across a sport regardless of pedigree or hype. If that seems like a ridiculous “quest” for a sports fan, consider that it may be the only way to assure that any sport improves overall. When we allow measured potential and performance to act as the foundation upon which teams, and even leagues are built, we get a better product than we do when we manufacture stories outside of quantifiable measurements. Vince Young, for example, has put up solid, if unremarkable statistics while carrying the burden of a coach undermining him at every opportunity. How is that not just as good and important a story as the cautionary tale of an out of control athlete (debatable, and certainly insensitive to real mental issues) losing his ability to play the game (almost certainly false by any fair statistical assessment). We create stories that make for easy fits into well trod media themes instead of allowing reality, in the fullness of its context and statistics, to write new stories.

This cheats us as fans by telling the same old story, but it also cheats the athletes themselves. The “right way” retort of “play well and the rest will work itself out” rings hollow to anybody who knows just how much expectations have to do with the practical realities of life. Once history is allowed to settle, and this “history” is created more and more quickly in the up-to-the-minute sports media landscape, it becomes quicksand in which a player either passively, patiently survives (Kerry Collins is an excellent example of this) or drowns as he presses harder and harder to escape. This is why I look at the movement of players like Orton and Jackson and hope that maybe, just maybe they can meet (or in Orton’s case, continue to meet) the potential that hasn’t gone anywhere because it hasn’t had time to vanish yet. Tarvaris Jackson isn’t dead after five years (none of which involved a coach actually trusting him as a starting quarterback), and Kyle Orton’s last two years aren’t a fluke just because they’re different (whether or not they’re a product of Josh McDaniels, similarly etched in stone as an arrogant loser, actually being one of the best offensive minds of the past decade, is another thing). Yet here we all are somehow certain of the entirety of the careers people in their mid 20’s when most of us aren’t sure about how professionally developed we are right now.

So I choose to appreciate free agency, and every little move entailed by it, particularly when those moves involve careers that in any fair world would be considered sill nascent by onlookers (Vernon Gholston, best wishes to you in Chicago, and that’s coming from a Jets fan). Because one day, six years from now, I really hope nobody looks at this blog and says “well, that’s who he is, and that’s who he’ll always be.”

Suffocating

A team of world class athletes, one that is heavily favored to defeat its opponents, enters a championship tourney. They ride a wave of national media attention and the emergence of their controversial star to overcome hostile crowds and earn a shot at a championship. They proceed to lose, despite being heavily favored, in heartbreaking, confusing fashion, with their aforementioned star falling apart before our very eyes. In the aftermath, they become heroes and an example of the value in overcoming adversity, earning dignity in defeat, and their star became a face of the game worthy of admiration.

Or maybe, in the aftermath of the same story, they’re chokers whose failure somehow made us all more successful, who got what they had coming to them, and whose star became a punching bag for a media with an axe to grind. It really depends whether we’re talking about the US Women’s World Cup Team or the Miami Heat.


The truth about the label “choker” is that its application tells us more about who we are than to whom it is applied. After all, sports almanacs are littered with names like Manning, Rodriguez, and Mickelson, all of whom carried the label around until they proved they could, in fact, reach the heights of their respective sports. The label was, in fact, false, even as it was relentlessly etched into history by fans and the media. What we were left with, as with all witch hunts, was a picture of the people who worked so hard to see the truth obscured.

Of course, this could certainly mean that the label just doesn’t work at all if it’s so subjective in its application. Perhaps that’s the real issue here; when an athlete “chokes” it is meant to indicate some personal failing beyond the professional loss. This, of course, neglects to acknowledge that one cannot “choke” without reaching a level of competitive success that only a rare sliver of humanity, sometimes only one other person, has reached. But rather than appreciate a talented competitor at the most elite level of competition, or even a worthy foe if we dislike the person behind the professional, we craft a thru-way from the personal to the professional in our target, one whose traffic flows out of ourselves. In smashing statistical legacies and forcing one failure to bleed into the rest of an individual athlete's life, we unload our own subjective anger onto the back of that athlete's being. Their failure being a symptom of "choking" allows us to engage in total loathing of the professional and person by uniting the two with the bridge of the "choke", letting our personal dislike run between the two entities unchecked by mathematical reality.

This is, of course, incredibly disingenuous. None of us would like to have anybody catch us on a day when we were off of our game and extrapolate that moment into not only our careers, but our lives as well. If that same moment were used as damning evidence not only of our performance, but our souls, I doubt most of us would venture to accomplish anything that required any real risk. Still, our collective dislike somehow empowers us to put that bile on people who lose at what are glorified games, as much as they may be fairly or unfairly loaded with metaphoric meaning. Furthermore even that dislike is fueled by the subjectivity of a moment, a preference, or a single decision. Hope Solo publicly shames her teammate, then goes on to have an equally abysmal performance in an equally critical moment, and we wrap her in the flag to protect her from the realities of what she did in the distant and recent past. Lebron James puts on a bad hour of television and he is questioned not only as a player but also as a man. We make two bad decisions and hundreds more and nobody talks about them because they are, in the grand scheme of things, often not indicative of the whole of our lives. That’s the point, I suppose. The “choker” exists only in a world where mere moments can speak for entire careers or lives, and that’s a world that we aren’t comfortable living in, but are more than happy to build for our athletes.

Survival of the Fittest

Kerry Collins never made you feel quite comfortable enough for your liking as a sports fan. Certainly, he was built in every “safe” way an NFL quarterback can be built. Standing 6’5” and built with a cannon that had been groomed under one of the sacred cows of college football, Collins burst into the NFL after a single season of dominance at Penn State, taken with the fifth overall pick by the expansion Carolina Panthers. In two years, he led the Panthers to the NFC championship game on the strength of his stellar performance. In three years, his battle with alcoholism thrust him into public shame after an ugly racial joke made in a drunken state resulted in Collins being branded as a racist. In four years, he was benched and cut from the team after telling his coach that his heart wasn’t in the game anymore. After spiraling to the bottom of the castaway barrel in New Orleans, a drunk driving arrest should have been the end of a whirlwind career standing as a lesson in just how fragile everything around us is, and how we are often the engineers of destroying it all in a matter of moments.

That’s a good lesson, and an important one, but it’s less rare than what Collins wound up demonstrating. The next four years were, quite frankly, remarkable even before considering the success Collins achieved on the field. After the Giants took a flyer on Collins in 1999, Collins committed to spending the next four years in therapy. This would be admirable in the everyday working world; in the rigid psychological world of the NFL, where the admission of need or weakness is tantamount to admitting you are Not a Winner (“Not A Winner” is a trademarked property of the NFL media), it’s amazing. Over that time, Collins took the Giants to a Super Bowl, losing to the Ravens after an NFC Championship performance that showed Collins could demolish teams with his talents if given the chance. After a stint in Oakland, Collins drifted to Tennessee, where he once again seized an opportunity to lead that resulted in the Titans having the best record in the league. Over the last decade of Collins’s career, he climbed back to the peak of the NFL by believing that his personal demons and difficult circumstances couldn’t change who he was fundamentally: an unquestionably talented quarterback with a record that proved his ability.

I think we misunderstand how unbelievably difficult that must have been. Too often we look at the second or third chances a person is given and imagine that there is no real net gain for the individual involved, as if they simply return to a place they should have already been and deserve no credit for it. This is based on the fallacy that there are objective, static measurements for the success of a life. The reality, however, is that we make people into neat stories as quickly as possible, and in most cases people just accept them, or at least accept that this is how others will see them. In continuing to exist on his own terms, let alone succeed in the NFL, Kerry Collins earned our admiration. Quitter? Unquestionably defeated by a career of success with three different teams over 14 years. Racist? While there is no definite answer as to how Collins actually feels (the real danger of a label such as this), the idea that Collins would have 14 years of successful, positive relationships in a predominantly black league on five teams’ worth of players makes the accusation rings false. With each passing year, he buried the labels prematurely placed upon him instead of letting them bury him.

We don’t appreciate Collins because his career, despite its various peaks, isn’t marked by any fundamental changes in Collins’s style as a player. Throughout his career, he remained the same prototypical old school quarterback, changing only in terms of usage, not gameplay. Instead, what changed was Collins’s life off of the field. The four years of therapy stand out in particular as an example of a man who knew he needed to change how he approached life if he was going to be who he was at his core with any success. He recognized that if he just learned to survive long enough, his talent would win out, and so he set about the business of survival even when he was young enough that everyone could have expected him to try and change who he was as a player. In short, Collins proved that there is a value to just figuring out how to hang around long enough to be ready for the opportunities given to you. So while we may never look back on Collins’s career and think of any one shining moment of brilliance, there is a comforting glow that surrounds his entire body of work. It is the sense of a job well done, and one that should encourage all of us that if we just keep moving, figuring out what we need as people to remain who we are as professionals, becoming warriors of the mind, victory is never as impossible as it may seem.