I guess there's just a meanness... in this world
Darryl Stingley died today at the age of 55 from the condition that kept him in a wheelchair for 29 years - quadriplegia and spinal cord injury caused by a massive hit from Jack Tatum in a pre-season football game in August of 1978.
It was the day after my eighth birthday. I vividly remember seeing the hit over and over again on the highlight reels that night. I watched them with the morbid fascination with which one watches such accidents, amazed that what I'd always thought was a harmless game of colorful uniforms and outrageous personalities could turn so deadly serious, could provoke such adult anguish. The following August, the sudden death of Thurman Munson similarly would rock my assumptions. After those two incidents, sports never again seemed to me like child's play. There was menace beneath its heroic veneer - the quotidien menace of reality and death. It wasn't fantasy, it was allegory.
On a site like this where we are preoccupied with violence, moments like the Stingley incident pose a pressing question to us as fans - why? Why do you celebrate these activities that have such innate potential to permanently cripple their practitioners, and sometimes kill them?
It's a question I've wrestled with many times, and one that I can only answer as a fan. To love the fight, the ring, the allegorical gridiron war, and yet to shrink from moments like this and seek some moral refuge, some safety net of exceptionalist accusation, seems to me the height of intellectual cowardice. Look the bull in the eye, man - we love violence, we love combat, we love the truest spirit of competition, the classical, gladiatorial spirit. It resides in our ancestral hearts right beside our capacities for love and mercy, wickedness and vainglory.
Jack Tatum has been extensively vilified for years over the Stingley hit, for various reasons I'm not going to address one by one. He certainly hasn't done all the right things and I don't want to seem like I'm defending him on that count. But the central point against him boils down to the fact that he dished out such a vicious blow in the preseason, and that he never properly expressed remorse for it. And yet as I understand it, his point always has been simply this: I played the game hard at all times, I played by the rules (in this case at least), and I refuse to be made a villain for that. Tatum never has said that he was glad that Stingley suffered such a catastrophic injury. He's only said that he didn't do anything wrong.
He didn't. Football is a vicious enterprise, and the potential for life-threatening injury exists with every snap. That's no small part of what we love about it. Let's not patronize either ourselves or our athletes - we know what we're watching, they know what they're doing. They brave such imminent danger for glory, and each play from scrimmage is a Faustian bargain with the gods of violence. We, the timid, make a metaphor of their heroism for our tiny struggles, our daily, squalid victories over threats both real and imagined. It's an age-old transaction, and I believe it is good. So today I mourn Darryl Stingley's death as I mourn the death of any athlete I have watched and wondered at over the course of my life - with great admiration for his abilities and, in Stingley's case, great sadness at the depth of his sacrifice. But I do not think there is anything more to be said about the accident that maimed him than there is about the bus that is right now bearing down on some unsuspecting soul as he crosses the street with an armload of groceries. There's a bus out there with everyone's name on it. Like football, life is a dangerous business.
It was the day after my eighth birthday. I vividly remember seeing the hit over and over again on the highlight reels that night. I watched them with the morbid fascination with which one watches such accidents, amazed that what I'd always thought was a harmless game of colorful uniforms and outrageous personalities could turn so deadly serious, could provoke such adult anguish. The following August, the sudden death of Thurman Munson similarly would rock my assumptions. After those two incidents, sports never again seemed to me like child's play. There was menace beneath its heroic veneer - the quotidien menace of reality and death. It wasn't fantasy, it was allegory.
On a site like this where we are preoccupied with violence, moments like the Stingley incident pose a pressing question to us as fans - why? Why do you celebrate these activities that have such innate potential to permanently cripple their practitioners, and sometimes kill them?
It's a question I've wrestled with many times, and one that I can only answer as a fan. To love the fight, the ring, the allegorical gridiron war, and yet to shrink from moments like this and seek some moral refuge, some safety net of exceptionalist accusation, seems to me the height of intellectual cowardice. Look the bull in the eye, man - we love violence, we love combat, we love the truest spirit of competition, the classical, gladiatorial spirit. It resides in our ancestral hearts right beside our capacities for love and mercy, wickedness and vainglory.
Jack Tatum has been extensively vilified for years over the Stingley hit, for various reasons I'm not going to address one by one. He certainly hasn't done all the right things and I don't want to seem like I'm defending him on that count. But the central point against him boils down to the fact that he dished out such a vicious blow in the preseason, and that he never properly expressed remorse for it. And yet as I understand it, his point always has been simply this: I played the game hard at all times, I played by the rules (in this case at least), and I refuse to be made a villain for that. Tatum never has said that he was glad that Stingley suffered such a catastrophic injury. He's only said that he didn't do anything wrong.He didn't. Football is a vicious enterprise, and the potential for life-threatening injury exists with every snap. That's no small part of what we love about it. Let's not patronize either ourselves or our athletes - we know what we're watching, they know what they're doing. They brave such imminent danger for glory, and each play from scrimmage is a Faustian bargain with the gods of violence. We, the timid, make a metaphor of their heroism for our tiny struggles, our daily, squalid victories over threats both real and imagined. It's an age-old transaction, and I believe it is good. So today I mourn Darryl Stingley's death as I mourn the death of any athlete I have watched and wondered at over the course of my life - with great admiration for his abilities and, in Stingley's case, great sadness at the depth of his sacrifice. But I do not think there is anything more to be said about the accident that maimed him than there is about the bus that is right now bearing down on some unsuspecting soul as he crosses the street with an armload of groceries. There's a bus out there with everyone's name on it. Like football, life is a dangerous business.
1 Comments:
Well put. I'm of the opinion that people tend to get so indignant when something like this happens, less because they care about the actual event, but more because they don't like what it implies about human nature.
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