But Mike Tirico, one of the most affluent, smooth sports casters around, said, "Oh no! Alge Crumpler lost the football.... there's a scrum. Recovered by Indianapolis!" First off... sorry for using two exclamation points so close together, you're only supposed to use eight in your hole life. That aside, I love how the situation wasn't drowned in football lingo. Anyone who might flip through the channels and watch a pile of guys fight for a brown leather bean rolling on artificial grass could understand what's going on outside of a fumble.
Alge Crumpler momentarily lost his livelihood. It's like a part of his soul was ripped from his body, and 21 other men had the chance to touch it. They had a chance to pull it towards their heart. Bodies turn into weapons. Into cruise missiles burning smoke onto a blue canvas, then crashing into banks of earth with their fragments displaced.
I made a post a few days ago where I stated that I hate when academics downplay the artistic integrity of sports. A night like tonight is exactly why. Two extremely important games are going on. Poets, authors, academics, theorists, etc., need to remember that you win and lose in writing. In theory, in rhetoric. Sometimes, you write a poem, and the journal or magazine you send it to is the Patriots, or the 1985 Bears or the 1975 Cincinnati Reds. You're choked into submission. But there are other times where you throw a bomb from the warning track, you complete a screen pass with twenty seconds left and run as fast as your body lets you. Your limbs start feeling like immovable mass, lungs burning through from invisible jabs to the gut. Somebody likes your poem. You have a fantastic conversation about a story you read, or you go to somebody's reading and it's fantastic. You might win. I hope you win.
Also, poet James Wright wrote a fantastic poem about football. It's linked on a blog here. The first time I read it, it felt like I forgot that what I was doing was reading. Everything just felt like emotions and nausea. It was one of those things that all humans could understand, even if we lacked the ability to convey the situation through language.
I want you to start looking at sports differently. Go onto YouTube or something, and check out classic games. It'll take you five seconds to find them, and your entire body will feel weightless.
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I wrote the phrase "brain in a window," and I took the statement literally. Seeing a brain in a window would scare me, but not as much as seeing a heart. My mom told me a story once hen I was younger about a night in a hospital she worked in where there was a bucket of brains sitting in a room by itself all night. It's probably not true.
Could you imagine seeing that, though? Imagining a brain working gives me anxiety. It seems impossible. Like when you have somebody explain how a car runs or how my laptop lets me type this sentence.
I keep thinking about things that I'll never be able to understand. Always meeting them with great anxiety. Yikes.
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The game was suspended tonight due to rain. 2-2 in the sixth inning. I'm terribly excited. It was the kind of game that I want to watch with my friends that don't enjoy sports because the game had so many wild things happen that weren't normal.
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