Medicine Is Always Poison to Something

This has been one of those weeks where I’m convinced I’m the only person who knows the world is round, which I understand is frustrating for the rest of you, but please try and comprehend how frustrating it is on my end. This is my perspective after a heated debate with a close friend over whether or not it is ridiculous that Braylon Edwards, a 27 year old former Pro Bowler whose stats have been achieved with limited quarterbacks or conservative offenses, was a significantly less sought after free agent than Mike Sims-Walker, a thoroughly mediocre wide receiver whose best season (which was two years ago) wasn’t as good as Edwards’s last year as a second target in a conservative Jets offense. Actually, the debate was whether or not the 49ers had essentially stolen Edwards for a $1 million base salary and no guaranteed money, which would slant the debate even further in my favor (I was decidedly pro-Braylon…surprising, I know). Still, I couldn’t make any headway with my friend. Not only did the 49ers not get a very good player at a bargain, the move was, in fact, a negative move, one that wasn’t “worth the risk.” This was my breaking point, beyond which nothing made sense. What could the “risk” of adding a 6’3” speedster who has steadily improved despite the offenses he has been in over the last three years be? Are we supposed to be afraid that Braylon Edwards will drunkenly plow an Escalade through the locker room? Because otherwise, I’m not sure how his "issues" have anything to do with the measurable fact that he is a good, potentially very good wide receiver, young enough to improve and available cheaper than Donte Stallworth, who drove drunk with significantly more serious consequences. You know, stuff that actually matters to whether a football team wins or loses.

All of this would appear to come back to our failure to accept that as much as we hate the idea of wide receivers being “divas”, our misogynist and negative term for anybody who is acutely aware of their own unique specialness, it’s practically ridiculous to think that anybody naturally gifted to be great at the position would NOT have this attitude. Consider the facts: the world moves in slow motion relative to your capabilities, you can likely dunk a basketball, and you are most likely taller than most people around you, and this is before taking into account the sort of body control and hand-eye coordination it takes to be great at the position. And somehow we get upset when players like Edwards bristle at not being appreciated as being special.

You’re damn right they do. And it doesn’t extend only to players whos e circumstances prevent their gifts from translating to success (though while we’re here: I see you Matt Jones). Randy Moss, one of the five best players to ever play the position, may not get into the Hall of Fame on his first try because he was a difficult person to work with. Leaving aside what this even means for a player whose only true “down years” took place in the hell hole that was Raiders football, in what fair world does professional worth become intermingled with “…and we don’t like you very much”? A world in which we’re seriously considering Mike Sims-Walker to be a suitable substitute for Braylon Edwards is not only one in which football is dragged back to 1950, but also one in which we’re all so much more boring because of how careful we all need to be about every damn thing we do. Is sports are escapism from the boredom of our real lives, why are we as fans settling for boredom in the way front offices put our favorite teams together

All of this is to say that I don’t understand how the league let Braylon Edwards slip into the ether of “headaches” the way they did Terrell Owens, an even better receiver who also can’t find work after a 983 yards, 9 TD season. A life lived in fear of what might happen if things go wrong isn’t really worth living. It certainly isn’t worthwhile when we’re talking about a place that should be better than real life, the fantasy world that is sports. And yet here we are, obeying the mantra of Bill Parcells and the Rooney family (who still manage to populate the world’s least publicized unlikable roster) that there is a right way to be great, as if being great wasn’t enough.

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.