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COMMENTARY BY MATT HICKMAN
HERALD/REVIEW
In late July 2001 my father and I took a road trip to deliver my parents’ dog to my uncle who lived in Spokane. The folks were leaving for Kuwait in a couple of weeks to spend two years prepping petroleum princes and princesses for the rigors of higher education in the West.
In the stinky potato fields of southern Idaho, our conversation found its way to the Clinton impeachment and I pounced, declaring the saga the smoking gun in my case against the present age — namely that we are not living at the end of history, but in the post-mortem of history.
In other words, nothing spontaneous happens anymore. We are all stars in our own boring reality TV shows, responsible for fabricating our own drama and crises. There is no visceral passion; all is scripted. There is nothing to write about, much less die for, and Monicagate was the pinnacle of this ennui.
 Matt Hickman |
It couldn’t always have been like this. Otherwise, great men could never have done great things.
Dad wasn’t getting on board with any of this. To his philosophy, there was never a Golden Age, and anyone who speaks with wistful nostalgia about such an Eden, is just one trauma away from becoming a full-blown religious wacko.
Six years after that conversation, I think Dad was probably right. But six weeks after it, my diagnosis was turned on its head at the expense of thousands of American lives.
•
Meanwhile, high schools across the country were getting ready for another football season.
The game isn’t what it used to be.
Clinton’s post-Cold War scaling down of the military might have been prudent policy, but it was killing high school football.
High school football is all about legions, battalions, platoons. Only 11 can be on the field at once, but the team that could put 70 on the sidelines sent a clear message to the other side that football was their
religion.
A generation earlier, a young man wearing his football jersey to school on game day had as much success with the ladies as a uniformed G.I. in Times Square on V-J Day.
By the mid 1990s however, uniforms of all kinds were out.
Young men came to believe that the way to impress the girls was to have a shiny car that pumped out godawful bass sounds intended to make the infrastructure crumble.
All this took money, so they had to get jobs, legal or illegal, to pay for their lifestyle.
There was no time or incentive for them to play football anymore.
Those who loved the game and had a real talent for it still played of course, so the level of play didn’t decline all that much. But the minions on the sidelines who endured the rigors of practice just for the boost to their popularity, were nowhere to be found.
In November, 1998, Sports Illustrated writer Grant Wahl sounded the alarm with his piece “Unintentional Grounding Across America.”
Wahl claimed that high school football was in serious decline and even big schools in football-rich cities like Detroit and Miami were eliminating their football programs for a lack of participation. Many would-be football players were turning to soccer and other sports, or no sports at all.
This correlated with the change in American culture at large in the 1990s.
The rise of the Internet and America’s new role as lone, benevolent Superpower made us more interested in world sports, world movies and world music.
The smashmouth ethic that only football could instill in our young men now seemed unnecessary and archaic.
We were on our way to becoming the kinder, gentler nation Bush the elder wished us to be.
But we were also becoming lazy and boring.
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I’ll never forget where I was the first Friday night after the towers fell.
I think it was Tombstone, but it could have been any place where late summer moths danced around stadium lights.
The NFL postponed its entire slate of games that weekend and many colleges did too.
The first public event many people, particularly in flyover country, participated in after the attacks was the local high school football game.
As though they had just wandered out of caves, high school football fans saw the game with new eyes.
They discovered what an essential part of community those Friday night lights were. And with impending war in the backs of everyone’s mind, the notion that young men should be instilled with a bit of a warrior spirit was revived.
The NFL is wonderful, but it does not engender community. It keeps TV viewers away from church or farmers markets or anywhere else they might go on a Sunday. Or, it lures them into dark sports bars to get them fat and drunk on beer and chicken wings. In the urban homes of the 32 teams, 70,000 people gather, but the only way you’re likely to get to know your neighbor is if you get in a fight with him.
But that first Sunday, with the NFL conspicuously absent, Americans returned to church in droves.
Many of them, surely as a product of the spoiled and flabby ‘90s, had a knee-jerk reaction to the terrorist attack. They thought God was ready to put the sickle to the harvest, so they thought they’d better get on the dull side of the blade. More than would admit thought Nostradamus predicted the whole thing 500 years earlier.
Whatever the reason, people began to congregate and a spirit of community and passion sprouted up.
It wasn’t always rational.
Remember the universal flag scarcity in the days after the attacks?
I don’t know that the Herald/Review will ever sell more papers on a single day than when we ran a 21 1/2-inch, color newspaper rendering of Old Glory, to alleviate, in our own little way, the dearth. People clamored for additional newspaper flags, even after they were all gone.
This was not rational behavior. But perhaps rationality was what we were rebelling against. Maybe it was rationality’s restraint of our passions that caused the sloppy police work at the CIA and FBI.
And maybe it was the rational notion of international unity that kept us willfully blind to the growing threat from the Muslim world.
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In 1998, there were 971,335 high school football players at more than 14,000 schools with 11-man programs. Since 2001, the number of players has increased by more than 8 percent to a total now of 1,104,548.
“It must have been something. Since that time (late ‘90s), the numbers have clearly gone up,” said John Gillis, who for 18 years has been assistant director of the National Federation of State High School Associations in Indianapolis. “Certainly as far as excitement, it seems like since ’01 there’s been an increase in football.”
Gillis agreed that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, may be a cause, or the cause for the swell.
“I remember it like it was yesterday. There probably is a correlation there,” Gillis said. “It was a great tragedy. People kind of came together. We went back to our core values, and high school sports are certainly one of those. You need that thing to hang on to.”
Since Sept. 11, 2001, we’ve seen a return of the inspirational high school football movie from “Remember the Titans” to “Friday Night Lights” and “Gridiron Gang.” MTV, a champion of the destruction of high school football in the ‘90s, is now rendering it cool again.
And the rise of soccer in America, which was threatening the existence of high school football in the ‘90s, has been beaten back by a surge of national pride in our own brand of football.
I’ve seen participation at local schools increase dramatically. This could be somewhat misleading because Bisbee, Tombstone and Buena have all been programs on the rise, to one degree or another.
But I’ve seen boys on game day wearing their jerseys to school with pride, as though their affiliation will elevate their status in the eyes of the opposite sex.
I would even go so far as to speculate that being on the football team at most schools now equals or surpasses having the hot car with the obnoxious sound system.
Chasing girls isn’t the noblest endeavor of youth, but since it’s going to happen anyway, I think it’s far better that the means to that end is something spiritual and life-affirming like football, than the shallowness and decay of abject materialism.
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As for me, I still get bored, but never as cosmically bored as in the years leading up to 9/11.
We’ve all sort of forgotten those days after the attack, but that might be a good thing.
You can’t live with that kind of adrenaline rush all the time lest your heart explode.
Some things have stuck, like the singing of God Bless America for the seventh inning stretch and the constant ticker on cable news channels.
The ticker started with round-the-clock coverage of the attacks as a way to address the other news in the world without pulling away from the biggest story in at least five decades. It told us about things like.... Another surfer attacked by shark in Bermuda... Gary Condit denies involvement in disappearance of Chanda Levy... Study shows correlation between cheesecake and weight gain...
Six years to the day later, the ticker still runs. But now, it runs something like this... Car bombing kills 30 in Ankara, Turkey .... Venezuela nationalizes all natural resources ... Putin declares Russia’s sovereignty over Santa’s Workshop ...
Because we wouldn’t want to pull away from the biggest news of the day — a live shot of the jail Paris Hilton will be emerging any minute now.
Wait for it ... wait for it ......
great american wrote on Sep 13, 2007 4:24 PM: