How ‘bout them … Considerations
Dak Prescott, in the pocket, courtesy of NFL.com
*Update: Whilst most of the altruisms of this piece hold true, the author has since decided to restore his allegiance to the New England Patriots. We apologise sincerely for any emotional inconvenience or otherwise this piece may have caused.
I remember a time when Tottenham were entirely a joke to me, a Liverpool supporter, and my old man, a Newcastle United cult member. We’d fire up the cocoa at five on Saturdays. Grit our teeth and clench our bums through the Reds and the Mags respectively needing all three points, before uniting to laugh at whatever fate had befallen Tottenham Hotspur.
Several years after he passed on – I was a lost and dispassionate writer, scrapping around – Liverpool had turned into something I didn’t recognise anymore. Steven Gerrard could be counted on for a moment of magic or three, but the football under Rafa Benitez was hopelessly practical: the moral equivalent of freezing a pint of yoghurt, when you’d much rather eat some bloody ice cream, on a 32-degree summer’s day. Tottenham Hotspur were looking to survive relegation when they appointed Harry Redknapp as manager, and in that moment it was the most familiar struggle (to me) anywhere in Premier League football. The rest is history, this blog site, and a minty-green Dominic Solanke jersey I’m expecting in the mail sometime next week.
You know what else is kind of fun? Laughing at the Dallas Cowboys.
On Sunday morning I was meant to turn up at a futsal game, play my usual grasping game on the wings before dropping back into centre-field to play (if lucky) an economic defensive game. The night before, despite a normal heartbeat, I felt a numbness at the tips of my toes and fingers. After whizzing through a handful of medical possibilities, I presumed there was a chance I was going to die. Something I consider when I think I’m going to die is my nephew agreeing to write my eulogy, after his mom nudges him into the role. “You knew him best,” she’ll say. “He told you everything.”
My nephew, with a classic “Fuck it” demeanour applied to the whole endeavour, will get to the bit where he tells everyone how obsessed I was with sports. How, even though I ended every phone conversation with him shouting out the five boroughs of New York, I could never quite countenance the ugly theatre of New York football. The Jets and their ghastly uniforms, and their big fat mouths. The Giants and their favoured Trojan horse, years upon years of mediocrity before boom! – an unlikely playoff run forces late edits in newsrooms from coast to coast. At this juncture, my nephew makes a great and showy literary pause, Hemingway-esque, though stroking a less impressive beard. Was I Raiders? Was I Chargers? Was I a Jet, in the end, after the tingle in my hands caused me to spare a passing thought to Aaron Rodgers and his own mortality, surrounded on all sides in nearly all divisions by righteous gunslingers?
I was a Cowboy. I’d like to make it totally clear, totally seriously, that I’ll leave this world a Dallas Cowboy.
Some of it is artful propaganda. NBC’s Friday Night Lights, whose second most memorable refrain was, “Texas Forever,” underlined the emotional and spiritual importance of American football to inhabitants of the Lone Star State. When the stalwarts of the show’s high school champion Dillon Panthers dream of superstardom, they imagine commitments to TCU, Texas A&M, and of course the Texas Longhorns – a little All-American recognition here, and a Heisman-winning season there, and beckoning brightly is the blue star of Arlington’s Cowboys. We knew, watching the show, that it would take a lot for the real-life Cowboys to move on from Tony Romo: an affable quarterback who took a sack like a bear-hug, and who fed his receivers little play-action snacks whose delivery was fascinating to behold. The Cowboys probably weren’t going anywhere for a while, even if there was a way to get the (fictive) Tim Riggins on the depth chart at running back; even if Brian “Smash” Williams had Terrell Owens energy written all over his third-person soliloquies. Nonetheless, the Cowboys were beautiful: they strolled into people’s towns with the cleanest uniforms in the league, the deepest history in it too, and they acted like your franchise was simply making a cameo appearance in what was their season.
The modern-day Cowboys, another team full of perennially promising young black men, carry themselves against the tide of a crushing media narrative – like they have some shit to get took care of. Several almost’s and maybe’s have resulted in several lost seasons, at the hands of both superior rivals like the 49ers and inferior ones like last year’s Packers. The Cowboys are running out of time. The franchise has to decide what to do with the expiring contracts of two more elite players, particularly their quarterback Dak Prescott, given the quandary of elite play that never leads to even Conference Finals billing. Their fairly problematic, very Republican owner is 81. They face the prospect of a rebuild, 2/3 years of passive participation, if they decide to shake up their key offensive personnel. But … certain things will remain consistent about the Cowboys.
In my quest for a new football team, whose individual and collective political values align even somewhat with my own, I’ve divorced the Patriots for cozying up to Donald Trump; wondered if the dumb things I’ve heard Jets QB Aaron Rodgers say are that dissimilar from the dumb things I’ve heard men say when there aren’t any women around. I think some of the reality I’m facing up to now is one must reckon with all the stuff that could come out, will come out, about the businesses we choose to transact with emotionally. Sometimes you will wait anxiously for the draft day press release of an owner who has said many unsavoury things about athletes your skin colour. Sometimes your favourite player will project quite clearly as the sort of person you would never get tacos with. Sometimes a sports organisation will simply let go of nice folks who don’t win. Even if you know how to romanticise the place a team comes from – even if you copped the jersey for a hundred bucks plus – you’re going to have to negotiate internally at some point with the terrible things men do with money, power, and fame.
When Bill Simmons and Cousin Sal fire up the postgame machine for their Sunday podcast, I want to have a horse in that conversation right there. If Dak Prescott somehow achieves the unthinkable, hopefully in Dallas, I want to see the smirk wiped clean off Stephen A. Smith’s face. When ESPN slow-mos the 30-yard throw that does it, to Cee-Dee Lamb, I want to clip the sequence, sauce it up in trap music, and tell my nephew that was the greatest thing I’d ever seen a wide receiver do. If I ever get to visit an NFL city, I want it to be someplace the football itself is everything – even if, especially if, there are real-life conversations to be had about every day besides Sunday.
Go Cowboys, gawddamnit.
