Post by Jet on Sept 2, 2013 20:00:42 GMT -6
Is it all worth it?
By Al Blanton
On January 1, 1954 in the Cotton Bowl Classic, Alabama football player Tommy Lewis tackled Rice’s Dicky Moegle in one of the most infamous plays in college football history. On its face, this might seem to some as quite an innocuous act, that is until you add the part about Lewis coming off the Alabama sideline to make the tackle as Moegle was chugging toward the end zone. Afterward, Lewis quipped, “I guess I’ve got too much ‘Bama in me.” Alabama lost, 28-6.
In sports and in life, emotions sometimes get the best of you. Your life can be defined by one incident. Just ask Bobby Knight, or Woody Hayes. (Your mind is perhaps conjuring a chair skimming across the floor at Assembly Hall or a Clemson player getting a chokehold applied to his throat by an old angry codger).
Here in America, we are crazy about sports. Looney-bin kind of crazy, not good crazy. It’s why people poison trees, ingest a litany of meds that end in the suffix “ol” to enhance their performance, bet on baseball, and spend northwards of $10,000 on one ticket for a ballgame that will come and go in a period of three hours. It’s why we name our kids Saban and continue to believe in a team that hasn’t won the World Series since Teddy Roosevelt was president.
This past Friday night in a little Alabama town known for coal and car lots, emotions got the best of a pair of coaching staffs, ending in an all-out brouhaha. The fight was a culmination of a bitter rivalry between Walker High School and Cullman High School that should have been settled on the scoreboard. After Cullman scored in the final minute to forge ahead and win the game, 13-10, the real histrionics ensued. As the two teams were leaving the field, pleasantries (not really) were exchanged, followed by approximately a minute of a human circus that would make P.T. Barnum envious.
I did not go to the game, so the first image I saw of the festivities was a photograph of the losing party (the fight, not the game) with a shiner under his eye as big as a can of snuff, and enough blood on his face to pass for war paint. My first emotion was embarrassment for the two schools and the two towns. But then, being a former coach myself, I began to feel a sense of empathy for Walker Head Coach John Holladay, the apparent possessor of one hell of a haymaker.
By Saturday afternoon, rumors began to swirl about Holladay’s future. Whisperings such as, “Holladay on administrative leave. Holladay fired. Holladay suspended indefinitely.” Whatever the case, John Holladay will carry this one errant act in his back pocket for the rest of his life.
People have been quick to come to Holladay’s defense (“he’s a good person”, “his players have great respect for him”, and the like), while others have been quick to arrive with slingshots (“terrible example for the kids”, yada yada). I don’t know what happened on that field to provoke John Holladay to anger, and I might never know. But I do know that no one has been wishing he could rewind life and do things all over again more than John Holladay. I feel truly bad for him and his family, the ones that will have to carry this burden the longest. And I bet if you asked him today whether or not the punch-heard-round-north-central- Alabama was worth it, he’d unequivocally say “no.”
The man who got punched, his wounds will heal. But if Holladay is fired and has to withdraw from the game he loves, his may never heal.
Sports is a tough, tough thing. Games can become life or death situations (or at least, feel like it). No one feels the agony of defeat as much as a coach, and I can’t imagine the status of John Holladay’s heart after Cullman just plucked it out a la Mola Ram on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. One will never know how that feels until he steps into the arena of coaching.
To maintain sanity, we have to separate sports from life when the two become too interwoven. Sometimes, sports can mean too much to us. We need balance. We have to step back, exhale, and say out loud, “This is just a game.”
I think about all of the games I coached, and how it seemed as though my well-being hinged on whether we won or lost. Oddly enough, I can hardly remember the scores of those games now.
Winning and losing should not define us, but unfortunately to outsiders it does. Whether or not we punched somebody on August 30, 2013 should not define us, either, and hopefully in Coach Holladay’s case, it won’t be his Scarlet Letter. This is not to say that what John Holladay did was right; it’s just the nature of competitors that get revved up on emotion.
Fans are guilty, too. I have been blessed to be an Alabama football fan for my entire life, and I’ve had my fair share of ups and downs. I remember walking out of Bryant-Denny stadium in 2010 after Auburn sliced our jugular and I tasted the rancidness of a Cam [Newton] sandwich for the first and only time. I looked over at my date as we charged down Bryant Drive after the 28-27 loss and said, “I’ll never get over this.”
Two national championships later, I still haven’t.
I remember how crestfallen I felt in 2011 when I walked out of the stadium after satan’s pawn, the LSU kicker, lofted an end-over-end field goal to beat the Tide on their home turf 9-6. And last year, how that same feeling crept back in when the Johnny Manziel wagon rode herd over our vaunted defense in a 29-25 Aggie victory.
It is in these moments that I wonder if being a fan is worth it. But each and every year, I seem to find myself glued to the television once again, and in the stadium again with a kraut dog and a $6 Coke. I am no less enthralled than I was twenty years ago. Sports, dadgumit, just means too much to me.
The other day, I was thinking, “What did people have to cheer for before there were modern-day sports?” Like in 1840, I mean.
“Bessie the Mule fell in the mud today and Butch rescued her. Hooray!”
I feel like God gave us sports in the 20th Century to assuage us when life’s loads of crap were thrown our way (war, civil unrest, Depression, Hitler, genocide, Communist Russia). Thus, sports have garnered a particularly fond place in our lives. It’s part of who we are, part of being an American, part of our fabric.
Sports give us a reason to cheer for something. To raise our arms in the air in a V, fists-clenched, head back. To celebrate when life otherwise sucks. To yell at the top of our lungs. To paint our chest and stand out in thirty-degree weather, or to load up on the OFF! and bake in ninety-nine-degree heat. To train for months and months for ten seconds of finish-line glory. To act like banshees when our little ones hit a ball off of a tee and scurry around the base paths.
What else causes us to act this way? What else in the world gets us so jacked up?
Nothing. Nothing but sports.
Is it all worth it? The answer is “Yes! Yes!” A thousand times, yes.
But only if it does not become the biggest thing in our lives. Only if we do not make it an idol.
Only if we realize that there are greater things worth fighting for, and sports are not one of them.
By Al Blanton
On January 1, 1954 in the Cotton Bowl Classic, Alabama football player Tommy Lewis tackled Rice’s Dicky Moegle in one of the most infamous plays in college football history. On its face, this might seem to some as quite an innocuous act, that is until you add the part about Lewis coming off the Alabama sideline to make the tackle as Moegle was chugging toward the end zone. Afterward, Lewis quipped, “I guess I’ve got too much ‘Bama in me.” Alabama lost, 28-6.
In sports and in life, emotions sometimes get the best of you. Your life can be defined by one incident. Just ask Bobby Knight, or Woody Hayes. (Your mind is perhaps conjuring a chair skimming across the floor at Assembly Hall or a Clemson player getting a chokehold applied to his throat by an old angry codger).
Here in America, we are crazy about sports. Looney-bin kind of crazy, not good crazy. It’s why people poison trees, ingest a litany of meds that end in the suffix “ol” to enhance their performance, bet on baseball, and spend northwards of $10,000 on one ticket for a ballgame that will come and go in a period of three hours. It’s why we name our kids Saban and continue to believe in a team that hasn’t won the World Series since Teddy Roosevelt was president.
This past Friday night in a little Alabama town known for coal and car lots, emotions got the best of a pair of coaching staffs, ending in an all-out brouhaha. The fight was a culmination of a bitter rivalry between Walker High School and Cullman High School that should have been settled on the scoreboard. After Cullman scored in the final minute to forge ahead and win the game, 13-10, the real histrionics ensued. As the two teams were leaving the field, pleasantries (not really) were exchanged, followed by approximately a minute of a human circus that would make P.T. Barnum envious.
I did not go to the game, so the first image I saw of the festivities was a photograph of the losing party (the fight, not the game) with a shiner under his eye as big as a can of snuff, and enough blood on his face to pass for war paint. My first emotion was embarrassment for the two schools and the two towns. But then, being a former coach myself, I began to feel a sense of empathy for Walker Head Coach John Holladay, the apparent possessor of one hell of a haymaker.
By Saturday afternoon, rumors began to swirl about Holladay’s future. Whisperings such as, “Holladay on administrative leave. Holladay fired. Holladay suspended indefinitely.” Whatever the case, John Holladay will carry this one errant act in his back pocket for the rest of his life.
People have been quick to come to Holladay’s defense (“he’s a good person”, “his players have great respect for him”, and the like), while others have been quick to arrive with slingshots (“terrible example for the kids”, yada yada). I don’t know what happened on that field to provoke John Holladay to anger, and I might never know. But I do know that no one has been wishing he could rewind life and do things all over again more than John Holladay. I feel truly bad for him and his family, the ones that will have to carry this burden the longest. And I bet if you asked him today whether or not the punch-heard-round-north-central- Alabama was worth it, he’d unequivocally say “no.”
The man who got punched, his wounds will heal. But if Holladay is fired and has to withdraw from the game he loves, his may never heal.
Sports is a tough, tough thing. Games can become life or death situations (or at least, feel like it). No one feels the agony of defeat as much as a coach, and I can’t imagine the status of John Holladay’s heart after Cullman just plucked it out a la Mola Ram on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. One will never know how that feels until he steps into the arena of coaching.
To maintain sanity, we have to separate sports from life when the two become too interwoven. Sometimes, sports can mean too much to us. We need balance. We have to step back, exhale, and say out loud, “This is just a game.”
I think about all of the games I coached, and how it seemed as though my well-being hinged on whether we won or lost. Oddly enough, I can hardly remember the scores of those games now.
Winning and losing should not define us, but unfortunately to outsiders it does. Whether or not we punched somebody on August 30, 2013 should not define us, either, and hopefully in Coach Holladay’s case, it won’t be his Scarlet Letter. This is not to say that what John Holladay did was right; it’s just the nature of competitors that get revved up on emotion.
Fans are guilty, too. I have been blessed to be an Alabama football fan for my entire life, and I’ve had my fair share of ups and downs. I remember walking out of Bryant-Denny stadium in 2010 after Auburn sliced our jugular and I tasted the rancidness of a Cam [Newton] sandwich for the first and only time. I looked over at my date as we charged down Bryant Drive after the 28-27 loss and said, “I’ll never get over this.”
Two national championships later, I still haven’t.
I remember how crestfallen I felt in 2011 when I walked out of the stadium after satan’s pawn, the LSU kicker, lofted an end-over-end field goal to beat the Tide on their home turf 9-6. And last year, how that same feeling crept back in when the Johnny Manziel wagon rode herd over our vaunted defense in a 29-25 Aggie victory.
It is in these moments that I wonder if being a fan is worth it. But each and every year, I seem to find myself glued to the television once again, and in the stadium again with a kraut dog and a $6 Coke. I am no less enthralled than I was twenty years ago. Sports, dadgumit, just means too much to me.
The other day, I was thinking, “What did people have to cheer for before there were modern-day sports?” Like in 1840, I mean.
“Bessie the Mule fell in the mud today and Butch rescued her. Hooray!”
I feel like God gave us sports in the 20th Century to assuage us when life’s loads of crap were thrown our way (war, civil unrest, Depression, Hitler, genocide, Communist Russia). Thus, sports have garnered a particularly fond place in our lives. It’s part of who we are, part of being an American, part of our fabric.
Sports give us a reason to cheer for something. To raise our arms in the air in a V, fists-clenched, head back. To celebrate when life otherwise sucks. To yell at the top of our lungs. To paint our chest and stand out in thirty-degree weather, or to load up on the OFF! and bake in ninety-nine-degree heat. To train for months and months for ten seconds of finish-line glory. To act like banshees when our little ones hit a ball off of a tee and scurry around the base paths.
What else causes us to act this way? What else in the world gets us so jacked up?
Nothing. Nothing but sports.
Is it all worth it? The answer is “Yes! Yes!” A thousand times, yes.
But only if it does not become the biggest thing in our lives. Only if we do not make it an idol.
Only if we realize that there are greater things worth fighting for, and sports are not one of them.
uhhh...too late. 
