The Last Football Post

… at least until the preseason begins.

Actually, this might be my first post on the 2008 season. No matter. Your response, I imagine, ranges from “Huh?” to “Good.” My friends and fans, I’m well aware, predominantly lack any interest in sports, especially the organized variety, if they don’t feel active antipathy toward them. Whether they follow this blog or not.

It’s certainly furthest from my intent to antagonize my friends or fans. At the same time: occasionally I agonize over, What’s this blog about? Bloggers are always being urged, if we want to attract and keep readers, to specialize. To narrow the subject to something we can write authoritatively about.

In my more lucid moments I realize the blog’s about me. Victor’s World. As of course is my fiction. And indeed, that’s something I can write authoritatively about – a claim you might note I seldom make about anything.

Egotism? Hell, yes! Anybody who presumes to produce anything in the belief that others will wish to consume it is an egotist. Especially if the producer intends consumers to pay.

Anyway: as with me in general, if you sign on, you sign on for the whole package. And as with me in general, if any aspect here doesn’t interest you feel free to direct your attention elsewhere. That’s freedom, isn’t it?

So, given the lengthy apologia … it occurs to me that even if you hate sports you might want to read on. Because maybe it’s not all about that after all.

While I wasn’t deeply vested in the game’s outcome I kinda sorta wanted the Cardinals to win. Like Meowlin in the Comments, I like Kurt Warner.

And like many Americans I’m a sucker for underdogs. And if anybody was ever a sports underdog, it was the Arizona football team. If anybody – I mean anybody, even a member of the team – had at the beginning of the season uttered a phrase remotely construable as, “The Cardinals will play in the Super Bowl,” they’d have been laughed out of existence. If not taken under close psychiatric evaluation.

I must admit that when my boy Kurt hit Larry Fitzgerald for that beautiful 64-yard touchdown I admit I threw my arms in the air and shouted, “Ladies and gentleman, that’s your Super Bowl!” Which unseemly display seriously miffed poor Squeak, lounging beside me in her current fave hang-out-with-Daddy spot.

It also turned out to be, um, wrong. Sometimes even truisms are significant; there’s no more key truism in sports than it ain’t over ’til it’s over. It’s actually a favorite insight of mine, and I forgot it to my shame: with over two and a half minutes remaining on the clock and the game a field-goal away from being tied, and it’s the Super Bowl, buddy, the game is never over.

Which brings me to what most impressed my about the game – and which should’ve keyed me in right away that my celebration was, as history records, a trifle premature.

Because of the way Steelers quarterback Big Ben Roethlisberger, not the player I’ve had the most respect for, responded to the play that capped what’s still the greatest turnaround in Super Bowl history – putting the Cardinals ahead after being down by 13 points. He didn’t react with anger, or despair, nor yet brainless jock bravado.

He simply picked up his helmet from the bench beside him and stood up, in the businesslike manner of a professional craftsman going back to work. He had the demeanor of a man with a job to do, and who was simply going to do it.

It probably will never show up on any of the replays. Yet at that moment I should have known it was game over – Steelers win.

I have come to suspect that simple, yet complete, determination may be the most powerful force in the human universe. Not passion. Just unshakeable intent.

As I’ve gotten older, and I hope wiser, I’ve come to honor craftsmen and women pretty much above all others. That’s what I aspire to: not to be an artist or a literateur. Those things belong to the judgement of history; and anyway if you study the matter you’ll note such assessments are usually as much fad as anything else. Take a look at the way Edgar Alan Poe‘s been regarded over the years. Or even Shakespeare.

What I want is to master the craft of entertaining. Primarily through my writing.

I admire craft when I see it. So I salute Roethlisberger, not just as winner of the national football championship, but as a true craftsman.

There. That wasn’t so painful. Was it?

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