In the hereafter and embellishment

by: J. E. Cammon

On Tuesday, ESPN is debuting another of its documentaries in its 30 for 30 series, this time featuring Tim Richmond, who is remembered as living the way he drove. And he was a professional race car driver, which  probably means that he lived his life pretty fast. I would expect things to be 51/49, that is to say at least 51% of people on record remembering the man fondly for all his foibles, and no more than 49% having more bitter memories than sweet ones. Of course, all of this is after those memories were made.

Take the Brett Favre situation(s). Things are murky week in and week out, from off season to pre-season (at least for the past few years) but years from now, when they make the movie about him and his legend, a lot of the negativity is going to be left out, or rather forgotten. Conveniently. No one is going to say, "Hey you remember when Favre cheated on his wife even after she threatened to leave him? Fun times." No, it'll be five million yards this and thirteen hundred touchdowns that. We say that we'd like things to be more sophisticated, but it's only hot air, really. In the end, we won't take the necessary steps.

Take the collision situation. If you didn't see the hit on DeSean Jackson in the Falcons-Eagles game, I am 152% certain that you can find it on youtube. That wasn't the only incident Sunday either in a football weekend that was a bit more concussion-prone than most. No one talks about it until a few seconds after it happens. And I say that because no one cares until someone gets hurt, and even then that doesn't really sink in until the bodies are prone on the field, the players' still forms twisted unnaturally and the air goes out of the entire stadium around them.

But what fills that space is not horror; it isn't even shock. It's awe. Because the coliseum, for all its new innovations, its libation dispensers and televisions in the lavatories, is a very old construct in human society. Violence is one of those things that is awful in the present and romanticized as it gets folded into the past. Removed from the situation, we get to make the victors into heroes and the losers into villains, or the unworthy, or the tragic. And for long times, we've taken every opportunity to control it, to bottle it, sell it, and where necessary punish it. And likewise, Donta Robinson will likely be fined for a mistake, for something he wouldn't have been able to correct and still done his job (he didn't know Jackson wouldn't catch the ball, which is the only grounds for a receiver being defenseless). But this week in practice on every level of the game, coaches will tell their players that except for the possibility of helmet-to-helmet contact (it actually looked like his helmet struck Jackson's shoulder), that 'the awful collision' was a textbook hit.

Simply put, everyone knows the sand in the coliseum is red. They even know why. But changing that, actually changing that, would require too much change. After all, it is all fun and games until someone gets hurt. It's harmless flirting until the story breaks. And it's just a touchdown celebration until someone gets flagged.