Four tragedies took place this weekend.
First, Rick Majerus, long-time basketball coach of Utah and, until his health condition no longer allowed him, coach at St. Louis, died Saturday of a heart condition. Even though it does not talk of the farce sports have become on so many levels, I believe not mentioning him in this article would be an egregious omission. He was 64.
Second, an anonymous Cleveland Browns grounds crew member committed suicide today at the team's practice facilities.
But it's the dual tragedies which impacted the Kansas City Chiefs that I feel the need to discuss here.
Jovan Belcher added his name and that of his girlfriend to the blood sacrifices to American corporate sport today. A domestic dispute ended in his girlfriend's (Kasandra Perkins') death yesterday, then Belcher went to the Chiefs' facilities and, with the coach and GM watching, killed himself.
That was the tragedy which led Jason Whitlock to write the following today for FOX Sports:
"In the coming days, Belcher’s actions will be analyzed through the lens of concussions and head injuries. Who knows? Maybe brain damage triggered his violent overreaction to a fight with his girlfriend. What I believe is, if he didn’t possess/own a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today.
That is the message I wish Chiefs players, professional athletes and all of us would focus on Sunday and moving forward. Handguns do not enhance our safety. They exacerbate our flaws, tempt us to escalate arguments, and bait us into embracing confrontation rather than avoiding it.
But we won’t. We’ll watch Sunday’s game and comfort ourselves with the false belief we’re incapable of the wickedness that exploded inside Jovan Belcher Saturday morning."
He's so right, Bob Costas said this at halftime of tonight's Sunday night game:
I want people to take particular note of this statement Costas made, in the vein of the fourth tragedy to occur this weekend, and the second involving the Belcher murder-suicide:
"Well, you knew it was coming. In the aftermath of the nearly unfathomable events in Kansas City, that most mindless of sports cliches was heard yet again, 'Something like this really puts it all in perspective.' Well, if so, that sort of 'perspective' has a very short shelf life, since we will inevitably hear about the 'perspective' we have supposedly again regained the next time ugly reality intrudes upon our games."
"Please, those who need tragedies to continually recalibrate their sense of proportion about sports will seem to have little hope of ever truly achieving perspective."
(And anyone who needs to grab that quote to slam it in the face of the people who swear fealty to football and to the type of people who play it can do so gladly.)
I have friends of mine who have largely sworn off sports because they have had "friends" dispose of their friendships when the very life and death of either the athletes or the people in their lives have no merit to these people who swear so much fealty to "the game" that they make Howard Cosell's statements from I Never Played the Game even more poignant:
"The fan is sacred, even as sports are. He pays the freight, thus he is an entitled being. The media people tell him this every day. Therefore, once within the arena, his emotions whetted by the Sports Syndrome, the fan adopts what John Stewart Mill found to be the classic confusion in the American thought process, the confusion between Liberty and License—a natural and probable consequence of which is fan violence.
….The essential point is that sports are no longer fun and games, that they are everywhere—in people’s minds, in conversation, in the importance we attach to it—and that they can affect the basics of our lives (to wit, the part of our taxes that may be directed to supporting a sports franchise, without our ever knowing it). Once I bought the Jimmy Cannon dictum that “Sports is the Toy Department of life.” I don’t now and never will again."
Hence, the fourth tragedy of the weekend: That a sporting event between the same Kansas City Chiefs, at 1-10, and the Carolina Panthers, at 3-8, was allowed to take place at all, less than 24 hours after this murder-suicide.
That we are so corporately-tied to this "sport", largely a "fantasy" which the people running it would tell you if you chose to listen to that -- I'll have an article about a very interesting video Brian Tuohy posted to his site to this very effect when time and RL chaos allow -- that you allow the lives of these people to be more worth wringing your fucking hands over than lives which are causing people who should be your friends and families to cower in grief...
... that's part of what Bob Costas was talking about tonight.
That's part of what Howard Cosell said 40 years ago. When the "Toy Department" is poisonous crap from suicidal workers at Wal-Mart, is that still good enough for you?
Really??
This is the anger I put into this blog. I see people like that every day.
I'd love to enjoy sports, but weekends like this expose to me again that this, largely if not completely, a complete fraud used to mask, if not totally avoid, the realities.
Make no secret of this reality: I make no secret that I had better NEVER be allowed to touch a gun in my life -- else it be used as it truly is intended... an instrument of death.
You see, I accept that I am capable of that wickedness Whitlock talks about. I've been adjudged so in a New York court to someone I would've laid my life down for, as much as she did for me. Did time for it too.
So please forgive me if I don't see the hand-wringing, except for (as few will) Costas and Whitlock themselves. Though not perfect, they at least get that sports should be far less of what they are, and far more of what they should be.
