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A FAN’S NOTES, THE RUMPUS SPORTS COLUMN #45: Postseason, Hooters

Brian Schwartz — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 11:18:45 +0000

My friend Snake (he specifically requested this pseudonym) is an English professor, a Tennyson scholar, and a rabid New England Patriots fan. In my experience he tends to favor dive bars that serve cheap booze. He grew up in Britain but does not care about English football: he much prefers the American game, the violence, the velocity. Snake has a black belt in, I think, karate, so maybe that’s part of the appeal of NFL football for him: bodies colliding and tumbling in space, over and over again, the choreography of hand-to-hand combat stretched across a hundred-yard field. At any rate, when I told him last weekend that I thought we should watch some football together, Snake suggested Hooters as the venue. I half-seriously requested my wife’s permission, and when my wife asked “Why Hooters?” I told her because of the large TV screens, and she shrugged Okay and continued fixing our two-and-a-half-year-old daughter a snack.

I went to Hooters.

By the time I arrived—the place is on 56^th Street, several blocks north of Times Square, which I guess is where it belongs—my friend had already found a table for us and finished off a plate of Buffalo shrimp. I had never been to Hooters before. I brought a list of questions with me (sample question: What lines from Tennyson best describe Hooters?) but I saw pretty quickly that Hooters is not a hospitable environment for mystery. Instead, Hooters is a place to watch sports while surrounded by recent college graduates who have been asked to dress like extras from an old episode of Miami Vice.

Still, during the NFL playoffs, some sense of mystery always abides. Snake and I discussed, for instance, the very limited spectrum of emotions on Joe Flacco’s face. Flacco, the cocky but inconsistent quarterback of the Baltimore Ravens, was sitting on the sidelines after throwing a touchdown, and as the TV screens at Hooters showed close-up views of Flacco in repose, we struggled to find the right word to describe his mien: was Flacco inscrutable? Was he nonplussed? What did nonplussed mean, exactly?

We didn’t come up with any satisfactory answers for those questions, but before the game was over I found tentative answers to a few other questions I’d brought to Hooters that day.

***

What is Hooters?

The servers at Hooters, who are all female, wear very short orange shorts. The color of their shorts, I noticed, was comparable to the shiny orange of the Denver Broncos’ uniforms, but not quite the same. Without exception the servers wore pantyhose as well, usually a shade darker than their skin, maybe because they wanted to feel more clothed. Their shirts were tight. The servers talked to each other and to the kitchen workers more than they talked to their customers. I felt somehow relieved by this.

***

What, if any, behaviors or topics are “out-of-bounds” at Hooters?

“Tom Brady pisses blood the day after every game,” Snake, the black belt/Patriots fan/Tennyson scholar, told me at one point.

Where had Snake heard this? How did Snake know this?

“Brady said it himself—he pisses blood every week. All the players probably do. Brady does, at least.”

***

How is the food at Hooters?

The Hooters menu makes a big deal about spiciness, and there are fireball graphics and titles like “9-1-1” and “Three Mile Island” to describe the various levels of chicken-wing heat. But if you order mild wings, the server in her tight shirt tells you, “You probably want medium. Mild is 95-percent butter, it has no kick at all. Medium is like mild here.” And that encapsulates the Hooters experience, in an odd way: medium is like mild.

***

How is the service at Hooters?

A few tables away from us, a youngish father with a shaved head was feeding a bottle to his squirming baby son. The father was trying to find a comfortable baby-cradling position while keeping his eyes on the TV screen to see the Ravens-Broncos game. He was there with his wife and his (or maybe his wife’s) white-haired parents. Why was this family sitting at Hooters? Didn’t they have a home? A while later, I saw the new father approach a waitress. “These wings aren’t hot enough,” he huffed, holding the plate under her face. The young woman looked miserable as she took the plate from him and walked back to the kitchen.

***

Why does Hooters exist?

At halftime, a teenager came in with his father; the boy was wearing a Hooters t-shirt. His shirt had already been inscribed with several different female signatures—I could see the name Lisa on his back in big letters, the “i” dotted with a green marker heart. Under the watchful, approving gaze of his father, the teenager asked every waitress who walked by to sign his shirt. The busy young women all obliged, bending and smiling and touching the boy with different-colored markers. At one point, I saw the father suggest a spot near his son’s left pectoral, so the waitress had to lean across the boy’s front. The father smiled. The son smiled. But, no, Teen Guy at Hooters. No safe fun fake ritual with your dad at a franchise restaurant is going to give you a sexual identity.

***

What lines from Tennyson best describe Hooters?

Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,
Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes;
Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies.

I would be happy to write that on a t-shirt for you.

A FAN’S NOTES, THE RUMPUS SPORTS COLUMN #44: The Immortal Head-butt

Brian Schwartz — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 21:45:44 +0000

What if one of your worst moments as a human being was sculpted into a 16-foot-tall bronze statue and displayed in front of a shopping mall? Or a Parisian art museum?

Zinedine Zidane knows how that brand of shameful memorializing feels. Zidane, the former soccer star who led France to its only World Cup championship in 1998, became a French cultural icon in the ’90s. He led France’s national team from his position in central midfield, controlling the ball deftly, switching directions with superhuman quickness, displaying near-divine precision when he passed the ball. Thanks to all this, Zidane—whose parents were from northern Algeria—was the best-known player on a racially and ethnically diverse team that made many French citizens feel as though their nation had transcended its colonialist history. The son of immigrants became a hero to soccer fans all over the world, but in France Zidane’s biography made him more than a sports figure with a cool name.

In 2006, eight years after leading France to world football dominance for the first time, an aging Zidane powered the French team to yet another World Cup final. What he’d lost in youthful quickness, Zidane made up for with his ageless sixth sense for placing beautiful, curving passes at the feet of sprinting teammates. Zidane had come to occupy that hackneyed but irresistible sports archetype, the savvy veteran, with an extra dash of style and power. But throughout the final match of that 2006 World Cup, the Italian defender Marco Materazzi baited Zidane by saying nasty things about the French star’s sister. In the second half, an increasingly agitated Zidane—maybe forgetting that millions and millions of people were watching the match—lashed out with a ferocious head-butt, hammering his skull straight into the defender’s sternum, sending Materazzi sprawling backwards, shouting in pain.

This is the very moment that the French artist Adel Abdessemed captured in a giant bronze sculpture that now stands outside the Pompidou Center in Paris. The enormous sculpture captures the contours and wrinkles of the two players’ jerseys, the grounded, goat-like stance of the butting Zidane, the graceless backward flop of Materazzi. The imposing twinned statues are all dark metal, a bit H. R. Geiger-ish in their sleek violence (and also, as Scott Sayare nicely observed in the Times’ Artsbeat blog, the sculpture echoes some giant, bleak Soviet-era sculpture). Abdessemed, the sculptor, who claims Algerian heritage similar to Zidane’s, told Sayare that the soccer icon’s attack “offered us a rapture” because Zidane, in that moment of aggression, “expressed himself as a man.”

I remember just where I watched that World Cup final in 2006. I was standing in the backyard of a Brooklyn bar called Cherry Tree, holding a pint of beer. The game was being projected onto a mostly taut white sheet, and the moving images of the action were pale and sometimes hard to see in the summer sunlight. I was following the match in a distracted way, talking to friends, drinking, thinking how nice it was that people could bring their dogs. I’m pretty sure someone was trying to roast a pig in a shallow trench back there, which would have drawn some portion of my attention, too. But at one point I looked up at the screen and saw it—saw something: was that Zidane? Was that Zidane head-butting somebody? The ghosts on the screen were difficult to make out, but yes, the replays made it clear: Zinedine Zidane, one of the world’s most admired athletes and one of my personal soccer heroes, had violently head-butted an opponent and then been red-carded—thrown out—of the World Cup final. I was stunned.

Now, six years later, a gigantic sculpture of Zidane’s disgrace looms outside a Paris museum and library complex. What to make of this? I admire Abdessemed’s sculpture, or at least I admire its conceptual roots, because I think the artwork shows something about the mythical status we accord our most talented athletes. Maybe portraits of shamed or injured sports stars are as close as we can come to resonant religious images in our century. But the sculptor’s contention that this moment amounts to a “rapture” seems wrongheaded to me. Both men played their part: Materazzi’s weird, elaborate pseudo-Iago act remains villainous as ever, and Zidane’s response still seems immature and shameful. But beyond the sculpture, the rapture is still there—in the memories of Zidane’s play, the moves he produced impromptu, eluding and eliding, gliding around the field like a ghost who became more substantial (and somehow quicker) when his feet touched the ball. There is no easy redemption in Zidane’s story, nothing like Barry Zito regaining championship form for the San Francisco Giants after blowing it for so many years. But Zidane’s awful lapse of judgment is not an egregious Lance Armstrong-esque fall from grace, either. The rapture of the French midfielder’s play is still there in the collective memory of those who watched him; you can see it, too, in the documentary Zidane: A 21^st Century Portrait. This strange and strangely compelling film used 17 different cameras to record Zidane’s movement and stillness during the course of a single 90-minute game. The movie is slow at times, but Zidane’s transitions from expectant jogging to sudden bursts of skill are where the real rapture lies. And no one can bronze those subtle flickers of intelligent play, which is at least partly why they’re beautiful.

A FAN’S NOTES, THE RUMPUS SPORTS COLUMN #43: Mohawk Mama

Brian Schwartz — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 19:01:02 +0000

Perhaps you’ve seen the photograph of Italian striker Mario Balotelli embracing his mother after scoring two emphatic goals in Italy’s recent 2-1 Euro semifinal victory over Germany. In the picture, we see the back of Balotelli’s mostly smooth head, along with a wisp of the cottony, peroxide-dusted Mohawk that has become his trademark. We see his mother’s face, her eyes closed, her expression full of mysterious motherly emotion as she cradles her son’s head in her age-spotted hand, wrinkled fingers spread protectively over her boy’s cranium. Is it too much to suggest that this picture of Balotelli and his mom seems in some ways to belong with the Italian pantheon that includes the work of Botticelli and Raphael?

Media coverage of Mario Balotelli tends to portray the young footballer as a Jekyll-and-Hyde character, a split-in-two figure: half soccer maestro, half egomaniacal monster. Depending on the moment, he’s either Super Mario or Stupid Mario. There are reasons for this reputation. Despite his undeniable talent, Balotelli is unpredictable in the worst and the best ways. As a striker, his sudden swerves and bursts of speed catch even experienced defenders like Germany’s Philip Lahm off-balance and out of position. So Balotelli is capable of scoring dramatic, often important goals. But as an emotionally immature 21-year-old who has been a high-profile soccer player since his teens, Balotelli’s volatile decisions on and off the pitch have also led to well-deserved ejections and other problems, such as house fires. Last spring, the day before an important match with his British Premiership club team, Mario’s house was set ablaze when someone ignited a bouquet of fireworks in the first-floor bathroom. Apparently Balotelli blamed the fire on a friend. But when someone comes over, hauls a load of fireworks into your bathroom and tells you “Seriously, don’t worry,” it’s probably your fault if your house burns down. And so sportswriters and soccer analysts, when confronted with a match in which Balotelli will appear, are quick to pose the following question: “Who will show up on game day—Super Mario or Stupid Mario?”

This question is frustratingly lazy. Of course it has entertainment value—it’s provocative—for some of the same reasons that Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde is still a compelling story. Vladimir Nabokov once noted that while Stevenson’s lurid little book is simplistic and slapdash, it also has a narrative power rooted in its suspenseful presentation of a split personality. The Jekyll and Hyde story “is beautifully constructed,” in Nabokov’s estimation, “but it is an old one. Its moral is preposterous since neither good nor evil is actually depicted… they are taken for granted, and the struggle goes on between two empty outlines.” Nabokov reveals his preference for the more modern sensibilities of Gogol and Kafka, whose fiction finds ways to question whether a character’s coherence is more complicated and subtle than a dramatic binary. But for sports analysts, in this age of media coaching for professional athletes and carefully tailored public personae, a binary personality actually seems like a lot to work with. And so they have found “two empty outlines” for Balotelli and his antics.

But that’s not enough. Balotelli, who is of Ghanaian descent and was adopted by Italian parents, has an unusual background for an Italian soccer star. And he has an unusual burden. In Europe, football fanaticism is still wrapped up in racist and nationalistic rhetoric to the extent that there are official movements to monitor and respond to derogatory chants and jeers that spread through the stands during matches. The FARE initiative is one response to the ugly songs of ignorant fans—you can apply to be a FARE monitor online, and unfortunately you’ll most likely be busy if you get the job. Incredibly, in the Euro 2012 tournament that ended with Spain’s 4-0 spanking of Italy, fines were levied for monkey chants directed at black players by Spanish fans and bananas thrown by Ukrainian fans when black players took the field. This ceremonial racism is part of the context for Balotelli’s behavior. On top of this, Balotelli is worshipped whenever he scores a goal, showered with money because of his star potential, but then completely reviled when he does something wrong. In some ways, then, Balotelli is merely an impulsive 21-year-old mirroring the fanatical public when he acts out his various mood swings. Unfortunately, in some of these moments, Balotelli climbs inside the empty outlines that commentators use to describe him.

That’s one reason the image of Mario Balotelli embracing his mom is moving. Presumably his mother knows him not as two characters, Jekyll and Hyde, but as a complex, gifted young man who has been both buoyed and bruised in his rise to fame. She might well clutch him and hope to protect him. The peak of international sports stardom is treacherous enough when it’s not paved with banana peels.

A FAN’S NOTES, The Rumpus Sports Column #42: The Miracle

Brian Schwartz — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 19:00:01 +0000

A few weeks ago, I stayed in on a Friday night reading Hannah Arendt’s essay “What is Freedom?” After spending some time mulling over the dilemmas Arendt raises in her essay (for instance, What good is freedom if we don’t act on it, if it’s only in our minds?), something happened: I took a break to quickly check the evening’s baseball scores and saw that Johan Santana, the ace of the New York Mets’ pitching staff, was taking a no-hitter into the seventh inning of a game against the St. Louis Cardinals.

For those of you who don’t know, the Mets began their 50^th season in Major League Baseball this year without a single measly no-hitter to their credit. For Mets fans, that amounted to half a century of franchise history with no No-No. (The San Diego Padres were the only other Major League team at the start of this season that had never pitched a no-hitter.) That night, though, I began to get this feeling in my gut. As I tried to return my attention to Hannah Arendt’s essay, I began believing that Johan Santana, back this season from reconstructive shoulder surgery, was going to do it—he was going to go nine complete innings without allowing the Cardinals a single hit. He was going to break the Mets’ embarrassing streak of mound-bound fecklessness.

I was supposed to be reading. I was supposed to be writing. Instead, I was staring at a little corner of the ESPN website as a real-time scoreboard kept track of Santana’s pitch count. At 9:49 p.m., I texted my brother, also a Mets fan, with amazing news: “He fucking did it.” After firing 134 pitches, Johan Santana had become the first Mets pitcher in the history of the universe to successfully throw a no-hitter.

Eventually, before the night was over, I got back to my reading. But I decided to revisit Arendt’s “What Is Freedom?” by writing a poem about what had happened in Queens that night. I would try out Arendt’s concepts and assertions in the context of Santana’s newly minted no-hitter. How hard can it be, I wondered, to write a decent baseball poem? That night I discovered that, for me at least, and especially at 10 p.m. on a Friday, it is almost impossible to write a poem of any kind. (In other words, when I finished writing my poem that night, I did not text my brother to say, “I fucking did it!”) But writing the poem brought me back to Arendt, at least, and I tried to throw some strikes. The result appears below.

***

The Miracle

If I could diagram a man’s shoulder

(the inside, where the ball of bone

fits into the smooth socket padded

with cartilage and snugly wrapped in muscle)

I would place that diagram here, first.

Every single pitch is a beginning.

Imagine Hannah Arendt at a baseball game.

“This is strange,” she says. “The players are repeating

the same actions over and over again inside the white

lines on a field.”

“And yet–?” you ask her.

She smiles and sips her $9 beer.

Every single pitch is a beginning. Good pitchers know this

in their eyes, muscles, shoulders and hands.

The finest southpaws and knuckleballers insist

on the action of effortful wind-up and release

because they’re schooled in automatism and routine, but

schooled too in the way a 95 mile-per-hour fastball breaks into the world

and delineates the texture of what’s real.

When Johan Santana, pitching a no-hitter on a cool June night in Queens,

asked his surgically reconstructed shoulder to begin 134 times

we were reminded that a miracle has pieces.

A FAN’S NOTES, The Rumpus Sports Column #36: Manny Ramirez’s Final Performance

Brian Schwartz — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 07:01:39 +0000

The biggest news of this young baseball season is that Manny Ramirez is hanging up his batting gloves and saying goodbye to the Major Leagues. This is sad because Ramirez was one of the game’s great natural hitters and because he was (probably without meaning to be, but occasionally I wasn’t really sure) one of the most compelling performance artists in pro sports. He was a kind of Beckett of baseball, forever finding ways to question the meaning of the game, the absurdity of its rules and traditions, even while he was out on the field wearing a uniform. Over and over again, he reminded us that the ballpark is always a theater, that the dramas played out on the diamond are full of artifice as well as passion. The man—Manny—was an unwitting (again, I’m pretty sure) meta-critic of the sport—of all sports, maybe. During his mercurial years as a ball player, I often suspected that Manny was more genius than jackass. And of course it really didn’t matter which was true, because he had the divinely constructed circuit between hand and eye that allowed him to prey on pitches like a falcon on field mice.

During Ramirez’s career, cataloguing and critiquing “Manny Being Manny” moments became a pastime within America’s Pastime. In Cleveland, when he was playing for the Indians, Manny once left his paycheck (which was worth a lot—a lot—of money) in an empty boot in the visitors’ locker room. As a member of the Red Sox team that won two World Series championships in 2004 and 2007, Manny began to re-conceptualize the Green Monster at Fenway as his personal man-cave, retreating to the backstage area of left field to sip a sports drink or talk on his cell phone or, most memorable of all, so he could pee (in the middle of an inning) behind the ballpark’s hallowed scoreboard. As a Los Angeles Dodger, Manny argued with manager Joe Torre about whether the slugger’s famous dreadlocked tresses would or would not be trimmed back. And it’s all led to this: faced with a 100-day suspension for using a performance-enhancing drug, Manny Ramirez has decided to quit the game for good.

Without Manny, we now have to rely on a handful of ball-playing crazies who seem to me mere shadows of Ramirez. Who are the clowns now? The San Francisco Giants’ closer Brian Wilson is at least interesting and genuinely eccentric. Like Manny, Wilson has crafted some sublime moments of theater during his career, including the time when he arranged for a mostly nude dude to walk across the room during an at-home interview. But the best bits of Wilson’s fooling take place off the field—the insane antics he performs during games are mostly predictable, game-related, the products of emotion and fierce competitiveness. You couldn’t really say the same about Manny Ramirez’s game-time behavior—odd, yes, but predictable, no. And Manny’s off-season weirdness was sublime in its own way as well. The best example of that, I think, was his attempt to sell (or help his neighbor sell) a grill on eBay in 2007. The listing included pictures of Manny standing next to the grill, along with a message that began, “Hi, I’m Manny Ramirez. I bought this AMAZING grill for about $4,000 and used it once…”

It’s funny to think of “performance-enhancing drugs” in the context of performance art. Did Marina Abramovic, performance artist extraordinaire, need banned substances to make it through her grueling performances at New York’s Museum of Modern Art last year? Abramovic sat for hours on end in the museum’s atrium, day after day, inviting visitors to sit across from her and look into her face. No one was supposed to say anything. Some visitors sat with Abramovic for a couple minutes, some for much longer. For Abramovic, who according to the MoMA website “began using her own body as the subject, object and medium of her work in the early 1970s,” it was just Marina being Marina. And I believe that if Manny had made it to MoMA for that particular exhibition, if he’d sat across from the lauded artist and looked into her eyes, he might have recognized himself.

A FAN’S NOTES, The Rumpus Sports Column #34: From Dallas to Eternity

Brian Schwartz — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 20:00:19 +0000

The Pittsburgh Steelers are headed to the Super Bowl yet again. It’s their third trip to the championship game in six years, despite a season shadowed by controversy. During the regular season—before the season started, even—the Steelers seemed to be in the news every week. By now we all know about QB Ben Roethlisberger’s disturbing activities in Georgia last spring (which I covered here) and we’ve heard plenty about his teammate James Harrison’s season-long struggle to avoid penalties for illegally dismembering opponents, or whatever you call it.

So enough about Pittsburgh. Let’s turn our attention to the other team playing in the big game on Feb. 6 in Dallas.

Who are the Green Bay Packers?

First of all, the Packers are the only team in the NFL owned by a hundred thousand fans instead of a single fat cat billionaire or a small corps of fat cat multimillionaires.

The team’s quarterback, Aaron Rodgers, reportedly likes turkey and avocado sandwiches, according to a woman who works at the deli favored by Packers players and their wives.

The team’s name comes from the Indian Packing Company, a business that briefly financed the nascent Packers in 1919.

Green Bay’s current coach, Mike McCarthy, grew up in Pittsburgh and loved the Steelers as a boy.

One of Green Bay’s wide receivers has the same name as the guy who wrote From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line.

Speaking of From Here to Eternity, did you happen to notice the revelations in 2009 about James Jones (the novelist, not the Super Bowl-bound wide receiver) being forced to expunge references to gay sex from his most famous book? This article explains it all. The brief passage quoted from the book is terrific, partly because it practically forces the reader to imagine Frank Sinatra participating in a dialogue about blowjobs (Sinatra played the character Private Angelo Maggio in the movie adaptation). James Jones’s daughter Kaylie, also a writer, recently composed her own take on the editorial exchanges her father had about the “salacious” (imagine Frank Sinatra saying that word) content in From Here to Eternity. All in all, this makes me want to actually read a James Jones book for once instead of just watching the film adaptations (Terence Malick’s The Thin Red Line is especially good), and it makes me want James Jones the wide receiver to have a huge game on Feb. 6 for Green Bay… 150 yards, say, and two TDs, including a balletic toe-dance in the corner of the end zone for the winning score.

Apparently, in the early 1950s, James Jones the novelist fought for the gay references in his ideal version of From Here to Eternity. But eventually, after being told that the Postal Service might not deliver his books to stores, the writer agreed to extensive cuts. Anxieties about fictional depictions of gay sex aside, this is funny today because relying on the Postal Service to deliver texts of any kind is an increasingly quaint notion. In 2011, at long last, readers can get their hands on salacious stories instantly, via electronic devices that save them the potential embarrassment of walking trashy titles up to the register. (Apparently this newfound book-buying anonymity has meant big bucks for the romance genre.) Plus, when you’re reading a digital romance novel, no one else has to see the cover. In this way, at least, e-books may be enhancing our freedom.

The story of James Jones’s battle for the integrity of From Here to Eternity is newly relevant in the months following the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Some of his remarks to his editor more than half a century ago anticipate one side of the DADT debate: “[T]he things we change in this book for propriety’s sake will in five years, or 10 years, come in someone else’s book anyway … and we will wonder why we thought we couldn’t do it. Writing has to keep evolving into deeper honesty, like everything else, and you cannot stand on past precedent or theory, and still evolve … ” In the end, Jones insisted on keeping some of the so-called “homosexual scenes” because they reflected the reality he’d witnessed as a member of the Armed Services during World War Two.

Times change. But there’s one ad I doubt we’ll see during this year’s blockbuster Super Bowl broadcast: an Army recruitment spot encouraging gay Americans to serve in the military.

A FAN’S NOTES, The Rumpus Sports Column #30: The Football Hold

Brian Schwartz — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 19:00:49 +0000

Hey Football Fans,

Have you been watching a lot of NFL preseason games lately? Or have you, like me, mostly been watching breastfeeding?

The two spectacles aren’t entirely dissimilar. In the past several weeks I’ve learned that breastfeeding resembles professional football in certain particulars. For instance, one of the terms often associated with tough, physical NFL teams is “smashmouth,” as in, “This offensive line knows how to play old-fashioned smashmouth football.” This is a term with a certain evocative appeal. But lately, when I think of “smashmouth,” I think not of hard, angled facemasks crashing together but of the bouncy, gentle collision that begins every breastfeeding session—the moment of contact between my infant daughter’s lips and the moony shape of my wife’s breast. Before the baby latches, her nose digs into her mother’s skin. It’s a kind of non-violent smashing, a vital urgent inward dig. The child will assuage her hunger. She knows now how to get what she needs.

At times during the first two weeks of our newborn’s life, the struggle for that sweet smashmouth seal between breast and tongue led to extended fits of pique that were harrowing (because, as the baby howled, we knew—my wife and I both knew—she was hungry, she needed a thing so basic we’d never thought to question our ability to provide it in a time of need).

My wife began to use the “football hold” while breastfeeding. Essentially, this means holding the baby in a one-armed clutch, the way a running back holds the pigskin when he breaks into the open field and begins to pick up speed, protecting the ball by tucking it up close to his rib cage with one hand, leaving his other hand free to ward off oncoming tacklers; imagine now, if you will, a seated woman, still as she can be, bare-chested, holding a baby essentially the same way a running back holds a football (although hopefully the woman doesn’t need to stiff-arm anyone with her free hand). The football hold can be a good position for a nursing baby, it turns out. It all depends on the angle. And the child’s mood, the time of day, the level of hunger, a hundred other things we, the new parents, can’t name and don’t know about. What works one day won’t necessarily work the next. Breastfeeding can be grueling, emotionally draining, a pitched battle at the line of scrimmage.

Football? NFL preseason? I don’t know. There’s been a lot of talk about Brett Favre’s ankle. Is that decrepit adrenaline junkie honestly trying to make it through one more season of the violent game that made him famous? “My mind’s telling me one thing, but my body’s telling me something else,” Favre said recently. Once, long ago, the grizzled veteran was a smooth infant drinking at his mother’s breast. Now he receives ankle lubricant from a sports surgeon, hoping to make it through 16 more games, maybe the playoffs too. And we actually cheer him on for his insane quest. We like watching men get beat up on a football field because we like it when they pick themselves up off the turf. It’s a neat story of resilience. It distracts us from how vulnerable our children are. It’s a big loud colorful multi-camera-angle distraction from our own mortality.

There’s buzz about the Falcons this season. The Jets are ascendant, it seems, though I hate to say it. We all love the Saints, but most likely that storybook has ended. It’s funny to think of the players on these football teams as babies. Before they ever saw a football spinning through the air, they saw a bottle or a breast. The breast was the shape they clutched at, many of them. In Cosmicomics, Italo Calvino writes, “We had her on top of us all the time, that enormous Moon.” Why is the image so comforting? We can’t remember, exactly, but we like to think of a time before we held up our hands as shields.

A FAN’S NOTES, The Rumpus Sports Column #22: The Army Awakened

Brian Schwartz — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 07:01:01 +0000

On writing about war:

This year, according to my careful calculations (or at least according to the bracket I just hastily filled out), Syracuse University will win the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. And when I think of Syracuse, the local basketball powerhouse of my upstate New York childhood, I think of past college greats who played for the Orangemen: Carmelo Anthony, Earl “The Pearl” Washington, and of course nineteenth-century novelist Stephen Crane, although hoops wasn’t his game.

Crane briefly played baseball for Syracuse in the late 1800s. I learned this over the weekend, from a Times article claiming that Stephen Crane’s experiences as a young athlete were directly responsible for the uncanny, chaotic momentum of his war writing. This might be difficult to believe if the author himself hadn’t said as much when The Red Badge of Courage came out in 1895. “I have never been in battle… I believe I got my sense of the rage of conflict on the football field,” Crane admitted, which makes me wonder, Did nineteenth-century novelists feel less secretive than contemporary writers about the tricks and quirks of their approaches to writing fiction? And also, more importantly, have we lost our sense of the role imagination plays in making stories about war?

A look at the opening passage from The Red Badge of Courage gives a sense of what the author learned from competing in team sports:

The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors. It cast its eyes upon the roads, which were growing from long troughs of liquid mud to proper thoroughfares. A river, amber-tinted in the shadow of its banks, purled at the army’s feet; and at night, when the stream had become of a sorrowful blackness, one could see across it the red, eyelike gleam of hostile camp-fires set in the low brows of distant hills.

One thing that fascinates here is Crane’s deftness with group psychology—the army immediately becomes a single character with a collective point of view. There is also the echo of “eyes” and “eyelike,” which actively imagines the looking that must take place before this sort of battle, capturing how young men feel when confronted with visible evidence of their rivals. Of course the rivalry Crane describes is a deadly one. Much more is at stake here than in any football game; when the army gazes at “hostile camp-fires set in the low brows of distant hills,” the hills are monstrous, not merely threatening. But there is something in this description that also resonates with the way players on the same sports team sometimes see with collective eyes, the way teammates fight for a common goal on the field even when they may not know each other very well outside the confines of the game.

Taking Crane at his word about the influence of football on his literary imagination—and knowing that he wrote his novel decades after the Civil War ended—makes me wonder about the emphasis our culture places on writers being “embedded” with military personnel in theaters of war. I believe that the work of embedded war reporters is often very important, and I’ve read excellent fiction that’s come from the experience of writers witnessing the lives of real soldiers (Tom Bissell’s recent long story “Death Defier” comes to mind). But I find that stamp of approval—“embedded”—troubling somehow. It calcifies this sense that soldiers go and fight for us, while war reporters go and witness for us. Therefore the rest of us—well, we’re given images from the front lines, and some very memorable reporting, it’s true. In some ways this reporting helps us envision what it’s like to be involved on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan. But what about our own role in witnessing and imagining what the wars our country is fighting must be like?

I didn’t love the movie The Hurt Locker, and the fact that the screenwriter was an embedded journalist for Playboy (oh God, yes, the articles!) doesn’t exactly make me trust the movie’s point-of-view. But one thing I have to say for it: maybe because of the filmmaker’s role in transforming the material from script to screen, there are moments in the film that go way beyond reporting, that force us to participate in the weird mix of boredom, discomfort, fear and exhilaration that soldiers live through. I can understand why some veterans’ groups object to the things that the movie gets wrong. But their demands for documentary realism are in some ways a big problem. The Hurt Locker’s fictionalizing is at times contrived and shallow, but there are stretches of real poetry in the film as well, moments the filmmakers’ couldn’t have made without giving themselves permission to stray from agreed-upon facts. We need excellent journalism and documentary films to help us understand war and its human consequences. We need imaginative attempts like The Hurt Locker too.

***

Civil War photograph by Mathew Brady.

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