I spent one of my many sick hours in bed this morning watching Hard Knocks. The Giants are up, and the show is glamorizing Schoen and his approach to developing a team. I was at once sad and understanding of the process that led to them failing to retain Barkley. They are not a running team. They spent a ton of money on a QB and, to paraphrase the GM, they didn’t do it so he could hand the ball off. Basically this is the make or break season for Daniel Jones. They’ve gone all in on the right people around the QB and now they get to see if he is the one, or he is simply the next domino to fall. Personally, I think he is gone. The injury history is a problem, but the larger issue is that he was outplayed by his backup in the same situations. He is not the guy. Maybe Sanders next year, maybe someone else. Management’s obsession with tall white guys will ultimately prove to be their downfall if they let it.
Meanwhile other sports are taking place all over the world. I am in Italy where the passion for soccer is high and though the Italians are done (terrible copa) many are still watching and cheering other teams on to see how it ends. We have a small Irish bar at the end of our alley that plays the games and you know when one is one from 200 meters and 5 stories away. It is just like that out here. Sports are a rallying cry for people. They allow us to gather and share belief in something outside of ourselves with actual stakes involved. It isn’t like religion where there is not a zero sum philosophy. In sports your team may win and they may lose. You are merely along for the ride.
In Duma Key King’s lead character jokes, “If you can’t be an athlete, be an athletic supporter.” I feel the truth of that has been written throughout human history. We rally around our athletes. We ride high on their success. We cry and spark anger at their failures. They become extensions of our joy and our pain, our success and our failures, our conceit. Not sure anyone actively chose it to be this way, but it is the way and one that I find myself entrenched in always. Perhaps it too becomes a focal aspect of the stories I tell.