Spencer Hall tries to explicate Jadeveon Clowney’s memorable tackle/forced fumble/recovery on Michigan’s Vincent Smith in the Outback Bowl in many ways, but remains flabbergasted all the more:

The part I still can’t wrap my brain around: Clowney did that with about eight yards of running room. In the span of 24 feet, he gained enough momentum to do that to Vincent Smith. The equation is F=MA, and the numbers work out, I’m sure, but the brain can only do so much. It’s a day later and my eyes still can’t believe the spectacle and brutality of applied physics in football pads. When you have a variable like Jadeveon Clowney, though, sense is never, ever part of the equation.

Dave Kindred gives Hall’s take plenty of props, and adds this:

I have no use for football’s jack-‘em-up fetish. I loathe the mentality that cheers a blindside block on a helpless defender whose eyes are locked on a kick returner. I have seen cheap shots and I have seen Darryl Stingley in a wheelchair. But what Jadeveon Clowney did to Vincent Smith was none of that. The old Michigan State coach, Duffy Daugherty, once said, “Football’s not a contact sport, it’s a collision sport.” By that definition, Clowney’s tackle was as pure a demonstration of the game’s truest nature as we’re likely to see.

Sports attorney Jason Belzer’s dug up this gem about some long-lost bowl games that might give present-day corporate naming-rights mockers pause.

Before there was an International Bowl, and long before an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to stage a Haka Bowl in New Zealand, a very famous rum manufacturer was able to persuade American college lads to head to Cuba for a scrap against local sides.

The Bacardi Bowl, staged seven times between 1907 and 1946, was also known as the Rhumba Bowl, for fairly self-evident reasons.

It’s not as obscure a tale as it might seem, as Deadspin’s Jack Dickey blogged around this time last year, interviewing NPR’s Mike Pesca, who had done a segment.

There’s a blog lovingly dedicated to keeping the story of the Bacardi Bowl fresh and alive, along with a companion Twitter account.

But the throwback T-shirt for the 1937 Auburn-Villanova Bacardi Bowl (above), the only one of the games that was an All-American affair, no longer appears to be for sale.

Jeff MacGregor went to the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium Saturday, but there was nothing evocative about the experience:

In life and in sports, these fictions of history are a more seductive reality. This is especially so at Yankee Stadium, itself a time machine and a tomb and a shrine to better days, a replica of something impossible and mythological: the house that The House That Ruth Built built. So it is possible on a black afternoon in a 21st century December to look up into the lights and the streaming snow and to mourn things you’ve never known, like bootleg whiskey and nickel cigars, fedoras and shined shoes, hand-painted neckties and wet woolens, Schrafft’s and the automat and Luchow’s, Stillman’s Gym and the Seven Blocks of Granite, Mel Allen and Toots Shor and Jack Dempsey, the Stork and El Morocco and the Copacabana, too. You say goodbye to places you’ve never been and to people you never met. Whole nations, generations gone, dead as real burlesque.

Maybe in the age of instantaneous disposability, the distance of history gives the illusion of meaning. By comparison, the new and the modern feel inauthentic. Artificial. Trumped up. Maybe in the 22nd century, people will look back on the third annual Pinstripe Bowl and know that this was the real thing. There are 39,098 paid seekers of the authentic shivering here.

And at halftime in the rain and the snow, the score is 12 to 7.

Johnny Manziel’s heartfelt speech upon winning the Heisman Trophy Saturday undoubtedly would have made the honor’s namesake proud.

For as fearlessly — and occasionally brashly — as the Texas A & M quarterback plays the game, earning him the nickname “Johnny Football,” his humility in the wake of being the first freshman to win the award was refreshing.

But the story of the man bearing the name is a rather interesting one too, going beyond his status as a coaching legend and including his role in the growth of the game off the field.

“Heisman: The Man Behind the Trophy,” written by John M. Heisman, the coach’s great-nephew, with Mark Schlabach, a former colleague of mine at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, was published in October in anticipation of the award.

Heisman moved to New York in 1930 as the first director of the Downtown Athletic Club, but he was bearish on the idea of awarding a trophy to the top player in college football when the idea was pushed within his own organization.

In an excerpt published Friday on The Quad, the college football blog of The New York Times, the co-authors reveal the artistic roots of the actual object that’s been handed out every year since 1935:

“In searching for a unique design, the Downtown Athletic Club commissioned Frank Eliscu, a 23-year-old recent graduate of the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, to design the trophy. Eliscu had won a National Academy prize for his sculptures, and was looking for a job that paid.

“Eliscu decided to make the trophy by using a metal-casting method known as the lost-wax process. He asked his friend, Ed Smith, a running back at New York University, to pose for the design of the sculpture. Eliscu decided to go with a football player sidestepping and straight-arming a would-be tackler. The Downtown Athletic Club officers approved Eliscu’s initial design and he molded a clay sculpture. Eliscu took the model to Fordham University and Rams Coach Jim Crowley, one of Notre Dame’s famed Four Horsemen, had his players take various positions to illustrate the football sidestep.

“Over the next 76 years, it would become one of the most recognized trophies in American sports.”

The book is billed as the first “authorized and definitive biography” of Heisman, who died in 1936, and includes a forward from former Heisman winner Steve Spurrier, a noted coach in his own right.

While Manziel made a notable piece of Heisman history, the history of the man for whom that trophy is named has been been filled in admirably in this new account.

Here’s more on Heisman by Mike Jensen of The Philadelphia Inquirer from a couple of years ago.

“Those who think that sports are merely entertainment have been bemused by an entertainment culture.”

– Michael Novak, “The Joy of Sports”

For those who insist that the commercial colossus of major college football has no soul, that it is played out primarily for television audiences in the pursuit of maximum ratings by teams that use unscrupulous methods to procure unpaid teenage talent, I give you Saturday night’s Alabama-Georgia SEC Championship game.

Granted, I had emotional interests in this, so I was going to be hooked from the start. But as Georgia ran out of time on Alabama’s 4-yard-line, and as tens of thousands in the Georgia Dome and elsewhere were screaming about why Bulldogs quarterback Aaron Murray didn’t spike the ball to stop the clock, I had just one thought that I have kept to myself, until now:

This wasn’t just entertainment. This wasn’t just a good way for sports fans to kill a few hours on a Saturday afternoon, and into a Saturday evening. Calling it “A Game for the Ages” just doesn’t cut it, even if that description is completely accurate.

It is, like most of what has been written and said about this game, inadequate.

While there was plenty to play for — a trip to the national championship game for the winner — what the Bulldogs and Crimson Tide gave us has been absolutely missed by the sports media, churning away as it constantly does, tossing out conventional platitudes and throwaway references. There are deadlines to be met, more than ever.

This wasn’t spectacle. This wasn’t entertainment. This couldn’t, shouldn’t have been reduced to simplistic “instant analysis” that is rarely expanded upon, unless it’s to dub it an “Instant Classic.”

Why do we of the sports realm limit ourselves to what games like this truly represent? Why must the confines of the sport represent all that this game embodied?

This epic contest transcended football, and sports, although I doubt that many who don’t follow or care much for college football ever knew what had happened.

That’s fine. But even if you wanted Alabama to win, the gut-wrenching agony in the faces of Georgia players and coaches was hard to ignore. The hurt and the pain reflected a game that didn’t turn out in their favor, but it symbolizes so much more than who won and who lost.

I’ve spent most of this college football season fretting about conference realignment, NCAA “investigations” of minor misdeeds and the inherent violence of the game. But what’s been bothering me more than anything in our flood-the-zone, on-demand sports media world is how worthless so many games have been rendered.

The sheer volume of every game not only being televised, but overanalyzed to death, has been absolutely dispiriting. Instead of yapping on talk radio or a podcast or Tweeting or blogging on something to an incessant degree, to boost traffic and ratings and a “personal brand,” sports journalists should be helping us make sense of what’s important in all of this. Not just the game they covered, or the team or conference they’re assigned to.

Not this interminable “What We Learned” tripe (see “instant analysis,” above). Help me understand why I should care, beyond the fact that it’s just another game and in college football every game counts, yedy yedy. What’s the significance beyond the immediate moment?

Three days after Georgia-Alabama, I still feel short of breath when I think of the dramatic twists and the big plays. Alec Ogletree’s recovery of a blocked field goal for a touchdown. A.J. McCarron’s magnificent head-on-a-platter touchdown pass to Amari Cooper.

And Georgia’s ill-fated final pass play.

These will remain timeless, as does Novak’s assessment so many years ago of a new breed of sports journalist wizened to the world, but, as it turns out, tone deaf to the true meaning about which he writes:

“The motive for regarding sports as entertainment is to take the magic, mystification and falsehood out of sports. . .

“I don’t watch football to pass the time. The outcome of the game affects me. I care. Afterward, the emotion I have lived through continues to affect me. Football is not entertainment. It is far more important than that.”

]]> http://www.wendyparker.org/2012/12/much-more-than-sports-as-mere-entertainment/feed/ 0 http://www.wendyparker.org/2012/11/a-few-riffs-on-the-culture-of-southern-football/ http://www.wendyparker.org/2012/11/a-few-riffs-on-the-culture-of-southern-football/#comments Thu, 01 Nov 2012 16:57:01 +0000 Wendy Parker http://www.wendyparker.org/?p=5387 Tweet

My favorite explanation of the appeal of college football in the South came from Clinton campaign guru James Carville several years ago, when he was asked by The Wall Street Journal to explain the legions of fans who never took a step inside a classroom at the schools they follow treat yet their teams with such religious devotion. He referenced his own alma mater:

“Half the people in that stadium can’t spell LSU. It doesn’t matter. They identify with it. It’s culturally such a big deal.”

On Saturday night in Baton Rouge, Tiger Stadium, aka Death Valley, will be swarming with nearly 100,000 souls, quite a few of them inebriated, when top-ranked Alabama plays No. 5 LSU. Last year’s 9-6 slugfest was a snoozer, but with the SEC flying as high as it ever has (seven teams in the national rankings), the rematch is one of the biggest games on the national calendar.

These Southern cultural obsessions have prompted what LSU coach Les Miles, a former Michigan man, likes to refer to as “big boy football,” and that’s not just about the size of the players. It reflects the big-money, high-profile, winning-at-all-costs environment that exists in the South like nowhere else, and the SEC in particular.

Unless Alabama trips up along the way — and it could happen on Saturday — it looks like the SEC will be represented in the BCS national championship game for the seventh consecutive season. No other conference has won in the last six years, and it’s not just because of the closed system of the BCS.

My sportswriting friend Ray Glier has just published a book about all this, “How the SEC Became Goliath,” that details the recent developments in the sport (review here from Paste Magazine), including increasingly lucrative television contests and even more cutthroat recruiting battles.

While those beasts grow ever larger, and must constantly be fed to a possibly unsustainable degree, this is about more than commercialism and the desire to win. The Southern complex of wanting to be better than those damn Yankees at something doesn’t fully explain it, either, although it does contain the seeds of this cultural fervor.

The rest of the above-linked WSJ story from 2008 doesn’t stick with Carville’s point, delving into business and political angles instead. But in a season preview published in August in ESPN The Magazine, Southern journalist and author Rick Bragg boils down this phenomenon not only to the Southern identity that Carville mentioned, but also the notion of Southern memory:

“Wayne Flynt, professor emeritus of history at Auburn, says the South’s devotion to college football probably reaches that far, to a time before there even was any football, to defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, to a whole lot of times when we just got the hell beat out of us, as a culture.’

“Reconstruction starved us. Then, the Ku Klux Klan swept candidates into pretty much every elected office in the state of Alabama and burned crosses on the skyline across the South. The rest of the nation, not that it was without sin, looked down in disdain. Then, just after Christmas 1925, the Alabama football team boarded a train for California, for the 1926 Rose Bowl, and fought back against that derision, even if the players did not know they were doing so at the time. Those young men drew, Flynt explains, ‘on a long history of not being afraid,’ of the hottest days or endless rows of cotton or a million bales of hay. ‘It’s not like you’re unprepared for a little physical suffering,’ he says, and next to the pain of just living down here, football was, well, like playing games.

“Not knowing any of this, the rest of the nation gave Alabama no chance against its Rose Bowl opponent, the vaunted University of Washington, but Southerners knew there was too much at stake to lose. ‘Even the president of Auburn sent a telegram,’ says Flynt, ‘telling them, You are defending the honor of the South, and God’s not gonna let you lose this game.’ Halfback Johnny Mack Brown ran, as one writer described, like a ’slippery eel,’ and the South won something of great value, at last.”

The dark years of Jim Crow laws and stubbornly segregated teams in the years to come, Bragg continues, proved that “college football was not a cure, not a tonic for what was wrong in the South, merely a balm.” As ESPN’s Wright Thompson showed in this week’s “30 for 30″ documentary about the “Ghosts of Ole Miss,” an improbable, undefeated college team in Oxford 50 years was overshadowed by segregationists furious with James Meredith. (Review here from PopMatters)

Nor is the game now any more of a salve, in spite of the prominence of the black players who have helped Southern teams to dominate today. It’s a bit facile to declare college football in the South to be “just as entrenched in our culture as Jesus, sweet tea and BBQ,” especially without a reference to the South’s lore with military culture that also stemmed from the Civil War.

The deepest, truest cultural roots, as Bragg notes, predate the sport, and will always be bound up with a constantly developing Southern identity that University of Georgia history professor James Cobb expertly examines in “Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity.”

The Sunbelt South in which I was raised, and that shaped my identity (I’m the hopelessly suburban daughter of a small-town Southern father and a mother from a mid-sized Midwestern blue-collar town) isn’t what most people think about when they think about the South and college football.

Although I grew up with relatives rooting for Auburn, Georgia, Alabama and Georgia Tech, and I covered college football at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the game has lost something of its appeal to me for reasons too numerous to name here.

Perhaps I’m just a creature of a metropolis, but I’ve always felt that if the Atlanta Falcons could permanently catch on around here — and at 7-0 it’s time to finish the drill, fellas — it might help this vast, sprawling place I call home, and that has been “too busy to hate” for nearly a half-century, develop a better sporting identity.

Cobb gives this “New South” its proper place in the region’s history, including the legacy of the civil rights movement and the emergence of white-collar cities like my Atlanta, Charlotte and Dallas. The Republican dominance of politics in what Democrats once counted on as the “solid South” might be the perfect example of how ancient definitions of Southern identity have mixed with a distinctly contemporary brand of cultural conservatism that has had a re-segregating effect, at least at the polls.

None of this reflects the current excellence of Southern college football. But it does reveal another layer of identity about an increasingly complicated, fascinating part of the country.

Perhaps no more so than on Saturdays in the fall.

The young man they call the Honey Badger plays with a ferocity that I’ve found a bit unsettling even for college football, and SEC football in particular.

Thayer Evans of foxsports.com has the deep background of Tyrann Mathieu’s painful upbringing in New Orleans, and how he’s trying to overcome it. The LSU Heisman Trophy finalist’s father is serving a life prison for murder, and his mother didn’t raise him. He says he doesn’t want to know why.

But it’s the comment from an uncle of the 19-year-old Mathieu that I hope never becomes a haunting one:

“He’s such a good kid and he’s got a good heart. But at some point when things are burning inside you so bad, a fire can be a fire to light up somebody and make good, and some of it can just turn into an out-of-control inferno. That’s the part that I’m scared of happening.”

This kid’s got a lot driving him when he takes the field — a lot more than football — and I can’t imagine what that will be like when he plays in his hometown Monday for the national championship. This story helps to understand him so much better.

The Bowl Championship Series computer spit out an extremely tiny difference between second-place Alabama and third-place Oklahoma State in setting up the all-SEC rematch many are dreading. (Officially, the computer gap is .0086, but who’s counting? The math still edges out the Cowboys.)

Oklahoma State’s fatal flaw, Gregg Doyel asserts, is that it’s not in the SEC.

But even in SEC country, there is grousing about the system too. In Birmingham, Jon Solomon argues that if “every game counts” then LSU should already be a national champion.

In Atlanta, Mark Bradley is dismayed by Kirk Herbstreit’s admission that his measuring stick for picking the two BCS finalists is “the eyeball test:”

And that’s what big-time college football has become — a game of brands, not reality. Is it mere coincidence that ESPN has a 15-year contract to carry SEC games? (ESPN also has a contract with the Big 12, Oklahoma State’s diminishing league, but the bigger Big 12 package is with Fox Sports.)

Dennis Dodd said it’s not right to blame the SEC but the voters.

Ivan Maisel makes an analogy understandable to the huddled masses on the East Coast:

“Ladies and gentlemen, the modern American sports fan’s nightmare — a World Series featuring the Yankees.”

In full Death-to-the-BCS mode, Dan Wetzel points out it was SEC commissioner Mike Slive who first proposed the “plus-one” playoff that many are now clamoring for. So the predictable outrage is being predictably misplaced:

“The BCS built the SEC’s reputation. And now the SEC’s reputation has overwhelmed the BCS.

“When Slive drew up his ‘plus one’ plan, he was reacting to 2004, when a 13-0 Auburn team got snubbed from the title game. He wanted a more expansive postseason that would assure his teams a chance to settle things on the field.

“So in 2008, he unveiled his plan, which he thought would not only help the SEC but improve the sport overall. Before the BCS meeting, he said, ‘I think we will be able to discuss at a high level a tangible concept that has been [hashed] through.’

“Instead, there was no discussion. High level or low.

“The reason? That a ‘plus one’ would prove so popular and profitable that there would be pressure to expand it, something the powerful bowl lobby opposes.”

So will Mike Slive’s plus-one idea gain any traction? The Arizona Republic’s splendid seven-part BCS series from last month would indicate that action from the Solons, no matter how badly their ruse continues to be exposed, will take more than yet another unsatisfactory final poll.