Hatin’ the Player Over the Game – Repost (w/ On Ex-Gladiators)

04 Friday May 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, Pop Culture, Sports

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Ben Roethlisberger, Brain Chemistry, Brian Cushing, Crafted Image, Culture, Entitlement, Football, Gladiators, Image, Junior Seau, Lawrence Taylor, Neurology, New England Patriots, NFL, Pro Football, San Diego Chargers, Sports, Suicide, Violence

Junior Seau (New England Patriots linebacker at the time) during a game against the Oakland Raiders, December 14, 2008. (JJ Hall via Wikipedia/Flickr.com). In public domain via cc.-Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

I originally wrote the post below in May ’10, with off-the-field incidents involving Ben Roethlisberger, my man Lawrence Taylor, and Brian Cushing in mind. Not to mention our secret (or not-so-secret) lust for violence in professional football in mind. I post it again, now shocked, saddened and even mortified over Junior Seau’s suicide on Wednesday. As Paul Daugherty wrote in his SI.com column yesterday, most of us “don’t know athletes. We like to think we do,” but “we just don’t know.”

The fact is, given all we can and should know about neuroscience and brain chemistry by now, it’s clear that not only is professional football right on par with hockey as the most brutal and violent sports on the planet. It’s that the sport itself can and does alter an individual’s brain chemistry, their long-term neurology, especially if played for a serious period of time. It’s the American empire’s equivalent of a gladiatorial sport, where the stars play for keeps, live hard (albeit in the most dark and secret of ways sometimes) off the field, and obviously die even harder as well. And like the gladiators of ancient Rome, there are substantial rewards that come with the life of the NFL, including the ability to craft an image that’s larger than oneself.

The problem for NFL stars is that the career does end, begrudgingly and relentlessly so. But the violence that the mind becomes accustomed to — along with the accolades — does not and cannot, at least, not without help. For whatever reason, Junior Seau didn’t have that kind of help in his life. Seau, like so many of us, couldn’t reconcile his image with his reality, and obviously took his life in no small part because of it. As a fan, I can’t allow this to continue without saying or doing something, hence this repost.

———————-

Lawrence Taylor

Let’s see now. Big Ben Roethlisberger, the great LT and Brian Cushing have all found themselves in trouble in recent weeks. With the law, with the NFL and with fans from all over Football Land. The Fourth Estate and the 4.5 Estate (bloggers) have gone on, and on, and on about how these guys lack discipline, are entitled whiners and complainers, and believe that they can get away with anything. These pop-psychology ruminations are much more pop than social psychology, with some being down-right idiotic. The bottom line is, at the bottom of their tax returns, where the IRS asks for your profession, these players (or their tax preparers) write or type “Football Player” in that spot. And that’s all the explanation you need when it comes to criminal behavior, criminal-esque behavior, and just plain bad behavior.

To be sure, many of these players — and not just in the NFL — are spoiled, entitled, whiny, and do think that they can get away with more than an ordinary American. Sure, some of our reaction to think is colored by race, as the majority of players of two of the three major team sports in this country are Black. But while race is a factor in perception and entitlement a factor in general, the real problem with professional football players is the nature of the game itself, especially in terms of violent crimes.

We somehow expect people who’ve spent a significant amount of their time playing a sport like football to somehow turn off all of the intensity, adrenaline and violence that comes with playing the game and then act like normal everyday people. Most players in the NFL have been playing the sport at least since the age of thirteen or fourteen, with many starting as early as six or eight. Then, with college and the pros, tack on at least eight years of play with hits that would put the average person in the ICU. Yet, once their career is over, or at least, during the off-season, these same players must then become model citizens. Are you kidding me?

For most Americans, few things in our lives are more violent than watching a football game. Police officers, soldiers in combat, and boxers are the only ones who may well experience more violence. And all available research shows how difficult it is for a human being to constantly engage in violent acts and then adjust to a normal life setting (whatever that means). So it should be obvious that a professional football player would have the same kind of troubles, as say, a retired boxer or an undercover detective in

Donte’ Stallworth Hit

transitioning between his world and ours.

In many ways, the most popular sport in our country gives us as much of a fix as it does for the players engaged in the sport. In this sense, there isn’t much of a difference between being an NFL player or being a gladiator during the times of the Roman Empire. Both celebrated, both reviled, both part of our societal hypocrisy over their criminal acts (alleged and actual). Ben will be forgiven once the Steelers start living again, while Cushing’s use of HCG will be forgotten by training camp. LT will at least be defended by many until actual proof is provided of guilt or innocent.

Brian Cushing (Houston Texans)

I’m hardly condoning anyone’s actions, on or off the field of play. But, as long as we keep buying the tickets, jerseys, cable packages, and the beer, all we’ll be doing is supporting the violent and sometimes bloody business of professional football. We can’t have our cake and then eat it too, especially in these cases, even though we’re trying to.

Deep Race 9

30 Tuesday Nov 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Politics, Pop Culture, race

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1990s, Acting, Alexander Siddig, Avery Brooks, Culture, Nana Visitor, Pop Culture, Race, Screenwriting, Star Trek, Star Trek: Deep Space 9, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: DS9, Terry Farrell

Star Trek: DS9, "What You Leave Behind" Screen Shot, November 30, 2010. Donald Earl Collins. Qualifies as fair use under US copyright law because this screen shot is used for limited illustrative purposes in identifying the theme of this article.

I just finished re-watching the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine series via Netflix, probably one of the more underappreciated Star Trek franchise shows, not to mention underappreciated during the good-old ’90s. Since the middle of June, through the death of my sister, teaching, writing and revising different pieces and Boy @ The Window, I re-watched all 176 episodes (although, admittedly, I’d missed most of the seventh and final season in ’98-’99, between travel and a long job search).

This was easily the Star Trek series with the best acting, the most interesting story lines, and the most complicated in terms of moral choices and the complexity of humanity (and the universe more broadly). I gained an even greater appreciation for Avery Brooks — who’d previously been known as Spenser: For Hire’s Hawk character — Terry Farrell, Alexander Siddig and the rest of the cast as they grew the show over the course of seven years.

But you can’t find the series anywhere in the cable TV universe. It’s as if it disappeared in a singularity — a black hole for the layman. Even Star Trek: Enterprise, a terribly written series with mediocre acting on its best days, can be found in rerun syndication. I can’t help but think that Avery Brooks’ position as the lead actor in the series has a little something to do with my inability to find DS9 on TV.

The lead cast, dealing with complicated issues in ways that some have written would’ve made Gene Roddenberry spin like a top in his grave, may have made many uncomfortable in our intolerant of anything serious times. Race, genocide, oppression, the darker side of human — maybe even alien — nature, the idea that not everything in the distant future will be paradise. All too much for those who prefer their liberalism brewed in a ’60s era coffee machine.

The last five months of using Netflix to relive a piece of ’90s culture was wonderful. Watching classically trained theater actors on the small screen, watching religion, science, race and conflict brought to together so nicely. It made me want to give James Lipton a call to get him to interview Avery Brooks, if he hasn’t done so already. After watching the series finale last week, I felt like I lost a dear old friend again.

The Silent Treatment

21 Monday Jun 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Mount Vernon High School, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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616, Class of 1987, Coolness, Culture, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Pop Culture, Race, Silent Treatment, The Roots, Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health

Source: Screen Shot from The Roots, “Silent Treatment” Music Video, Geffen, 1995

Right after the MVHS graduation ceremony at Memorial Field in June ’87, it started. I’d walk down the street to the store, and bump into one of my suddenly former classmates, say “Hi,” and get no response at all. The few times I bumped into a certain Ms. Red Bone, she’d stare straight at me, then straight through me, all as I said “Hi.” She just kept on walking, as if I had phased out of our space-time continuum into a parallel universe. By the beginning of August, I honestly thought that these people, my classmates for so long, were showing their true colors. They just didn’t like me, not me because I’d been a Hebrew-Israelite or me because I was poor or me because I listened to Mr. Mister. It was all about me, something within me that they detested.

“You can’t pay any attention to that. They’re all just jealous,” my new friend E (see “The Power of E” posting from August ’08) said when I told her about the ghost treatment over lunch one day. She and I worked for General Foods in Tarrytown that summer.

“Of what? Of me?,” I asked in disbelief.

“It’s because you’re not trying to be anybody except yourself,” she said.

“That’s a good theory,” I thought, but I didn’t really believe it. E was fully in my corner, and much more obvious about it than anyone else.

This pattern of treatment had only occurred two other times. Once was in sixth grade, after I came to Holmes with my kufi for the first time. My best friend Starling stopped talking to me, and refused to even acknowledge my presence for nearly two weeks before our second and last fight. The other was earlier in my senior year, in the weeks after the final class rankings were posted. Some in the Class of ’87 were upset with me because I was ranked fourteenth in our class. Three of them responded by not talking to me at all. They’d walk by me in the hallways, looked at and through me, and kept going without so much as a nod. That went on from mid-December through the beginning of March.

The Black “Party All The Time” folks in my class, the popular and dapper folks, snickered whenever they saw me. So I guess that they decided that to acknowledge me after graduation would me contaminating themselves with the knowledge that I was still alive, still figuring things out, still not cool enough to be bothered with.

Three years later, I bumped into one of these folks on my way home from my summer job with Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health in White Plains. I was walking home to 616 on East Lincoln, having just gotten off the 41 Beeline Express. It was after 6:30, and I was beat from another day of database work and my research preparations for my senior year at Pitt. Coming in the opposite direction toward North Columbus was a party-all-the-timer, a popular, slightly light-skinned dude named J. Since I assumed that he would walk by me as if I were thin air, I started to walk by him as if he weren’t there.

Surprisingly, J stopped me and said, “Hi, Donald.” He said that he needed to talk to me, to tell me that the path that I walked in high school, while weird, was a better path than the one that he was on. He told me about his mind-bending experiences at Howard, about his dropping out and need to take care of some serious emotional and mental health issues. After a year of work at Pitt and in Westchester County, I could tell, too.

At first, I was taken aback. I mean, this was a guy who laughed at me for nearly six years, who’d never lowered himself to so much as to give me a thumbs-up while in school. Now J was sharing the most intimate of details about his life with me? I asked him, “Why are you telling me this?” Among the other things he said, the thing that stuck with me was, “Because you’re true to yourself.” I gave him a handshake, and wished him well.

That was nearly twenty years ago. I guess that J and others were under a lot of pressure — peer pressure, girl pressure, family pressures — to be cool, to be successful, to be something other than themselves. None of this justified how they treated me back then. Nor does it justify how any of them may see me now. I’m just glad the only silent treatment I get now is from my wife when I’ve taken a joke too far. At least I know that she’ll talk to me again, eventually.

Generation Gap

03 Thursday Jun 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture

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"Greatest Generation", Baby Boom Generation, Band of Brothers, Culture, Generation X, Generation Y, Politics, Tom Brokaw

Off and on for three years, I’ve waled on the ’60s generation and its own obsession with its achievements. Not to mention its occasional turn to Generation Xers and those younger than us, as if to say, “Well, why aren’t you more like us?” For years I thought that this was the stuff of arrogance, a sense of superiority that the Baby Boom Generation felt toward us young folk. But I’ve come to the realization that it’s just the opposite, that the folks who marched with Dr. King and shut down Berkeley and Columbia were themselves attempting to fill shoes larger than Shaquille O’Neal’s size twenty-threes. And no, this isn’t about my generation.

For the umpteenth time, I watched most of the Band of Brothers series on Memorial Day (it was on Spike TV, of all places). If it’s possible for me to have a man-crush on anyone, it’s with Damien Lewis playing Col. Richard Winters, as well as the man himself. So moving, so inspirational, and so hard to live up to. Especially since another 16 million men and women served in the armed forces during the Second World War. Millions more worked hard in factories and on farms, in shipyards and railroad yards to supply these folks with food, equipment and ammunition to fight.

The generation of folks born between 1910 and 1930 are part of what Tom Brokaw and others have called the “Greatest Generation.” That’s going a bit too far, given that the generation born in the 1880s and 1890s helped make them this way. But given the times they grew up in — the Roaring ’20s, the Great Depression, and the Second World War — it’s hardly a stretch to say that as a generation, they rose far above their circumstances to achieve great things, to build and rebuild our country, to make the US as great as it would become after the war.

Sure, there are a variety of tensions in this assessment, racial segregation and discrimination not being the least of these tensions. In this case, then, you could argue that the generation of Blacks born between 1915 and 1930 were the “Greatest Generation.” They’re the ones who marched on Washington in ’63, who helped do the leg work for Brown v. Board of Education, who fought segregation and discrimination to fight valiantly in World War II, where leaders like Dr. King, Malcolm X, and so many others emerged. To act as though Whites from this generation weren’t themselves fighting against racial segregation, economic inequality, and gender discrimination is to deny the tensions that existed in the world in which Baby Boomers grew up in, the mythically placid ’50s and early ’60s.

So yes, the ’60s generation was one that was radicalized by civil rights, Vietnam, social unrest, politics (and eventually, a distrust for government), it was also one that, for all its denial, was following in the footsteps of the generation before. It would be nice if folks from this generation would put their narcissistic biases aside and give a fair and complete assessment of their own achievements and their own role in creating the narcissistic generations that have followed in their footsteps. But they’re probably not going to do that. Oh well.

Teacher Ignorance

25 Tuesday May 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Eclectic

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Culture, Discipline, K-12 Education, Mount Vernon New York, Nathan Hale Elementary, Teachers

I’m confronted with the fact that not all teachers are competent or considerate when dealing with their students. In the past week, my son Noah has had two incidents with his first-grade teacher that have involved a complete lack of communication skills. On one, I ended up sitting with Noah in detention for something Noah shouldn’t have been in detention for in the first place. On the other, Noah was accused of cheating — yes, a six-year-old was accused of cheating — on a math quiz because he didn’t put his pencil down immediately after time was up.

We contacted Noah teacher and one of his principals, because the teacher overreacted on both occasions. But now, I feel as if Noah is dealing with a problem that I had the pleasure of dealing with in second grade, ignorant teachers. By ignorant, I don’t mean stupid or dumb. I mean teachers who are ignorant of context, whose level of world knowledge is limited, who understand the letter of the law only slightly, and the spirit of it even less.

The first teacher I had who was like this was my second-grade teacher at Nathan Hale Elementary (now Cecil Parker) in Mount Vernon, Mrs. Hirsch. One of only two White teachers I had in all of elementary school, Mrs. Hirsch was extremely impatient with all of us. She snapped at us for violating any rules at all. “No talking,” she’d yell, and very loudly at that, for any whispering whatsoever. Our single-file lines in the hallway were the straightest in the school in all likelihood. I thought that Mrs. Hirsch was mean.

And she proved it one day during a spelling test. I was already upset that day, as my mother and father were divorcing, and the stress of it had landed my mother in the hospital. I wasn’t feeling well, and was a bit stressed myself. We started the test, and I, with my usually disgusting self, dug a booger out of my left nostril, which landed right on my paper. I wiped the rest on there as well. Another student said, “Ill, Donald!,” and I said something back, something like, “I couldn’t help it.” Mrs. Hirsch came over, looked at my paper, and gave me a zero on the spot. “Shame on you, young man,” she said.

My crime was cheating. At least according to Mrs. Hirsch. But what I’d really done was disgusted her with my booger, nothing more, nothing less. That was it for me as far as Mrs. Hirsch was concerned. I hoped that she would melt, like the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz.

Noah’s issues of late are even more innocent than me digging up my nose during a test. He talked too much to his friends last week, so he and I got to spend ten minutes in his teacher’s classroom during the Dine with Dads event last Friday while she’s eating lunch in the teachers lounge? Or going overtime on a math quiz constitutes cheating? That’s ignorance, plain and simple, unacceptable and unbecoming of a teacher dealing with students as young as Noah.

Hatin’ the Player Over the Game

17 Monday May 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Eclectic, Sports

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Ben Roethlisberger, Brian Cushing, Culture, Entitlement, Football, Gladiators, Lawrence Taylor, NFL, Sports, Violence

Lawrence Taylor

Donte' Stallworth Hit

transitioning between his world and ours.

Brian Cushing (Houston Texans)

On Lena Horne

12 Wednesday May 2010

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Activism, Civil Rights, Culture, Double-Consciousness, Hollywood, Jazz, Lena Horne, Race, W. E. B. Du Bois

Maybe this isn’t the right time or place to be bringing this up. I’ll probably be vilified by my slightly older-than-me readers who’ll claim that since I didn’t grow up when Ms. Horne was in her prime, that I don’t know what I’m talking about. That, of course, hasn’t stopped me before, and won’t stop me now. But two things have to be said about the late Lena Horne that most reporters and commentators on her life have either overemphasized or glossed over completely. One, that there’s a huge difference between breaking down barriers and commenting on injustice and full-fledged civil rights activism. Two, that Horne represented the issue of double-consciousness in Hollywood and entertainment in ways that few want to discuss now that she’s no longer with us.

Yes, I have seen Horne on the silver and small screen, even in my limited years on the planet. Yes, I know what she did on behalf of Black soldiers during World War II, the ground she broke in film and music, the use of her position in entertainment to speak truth about discrimination, exclusion and harassment in Hollywood. That makes her a groundbreaking icon. It makes her a bit of a civil rights activist. But it doesn’t put her in the same sentence as Dorothy Height, Paul Robeson, or Ella Baker. Maybe that’s unfair and unrealistic, but the journalists and commentators have exaggerated Horne’s impact in this area.

I’ve always found the stories of the mesmerizing Ms. Horne interesting. Not that I didn’t understand, between the beauty and all of that talent, evident as late as her appearance on, of all things, The Cosby Show in ’89 or ’90. But a radio commentator recently suggested that the late Horne could’ve passed for White, but decided to be one of the rare ones to stand up for her race instead. Really? Really? Mostly light, bright and almost-White Blacks didn’t pass for White, even when it would’ve been convenient for them to do so. Although Horne was light, I don’t think it would’ve been easy for her to pass, for a whole variety of cultural, familial, and other reasons. She deserves credit for this, I suppose, but no more credit than the likes of Walter White, Nella Larsen or Mary Church Terrell.

Which brings up the one unspoken, complicated fact that has gone unmentioned, especially among Black pundits and writers. That Horne benefited from her looks — her light, bright and almost-Whiteness — as much as she had to fight discrimination because of them. Her beauty and her skin served as the embodiment of double-consciousness, in Hollywood and in mid-twentieth century African America. She was Black and yet not Black in the eyes of MGM and its execs. Yet she was also a Black icon who represented the ideal in terms of her lightness, at least as far as the times themselves dictated in African America. I’m not suggesting that the late Ms. Horne took full advantage of this reality — far from it. But I do believe that she gained advantages that didn’t fall so easily toward others, like Hattie McDaniel and Louise Beavers.

Was Lena Horne one of the great Black female — heck, American — performers of the twentieth century? Of course! Did she entertain like few others could? Absolutely! Was her impact on race relations, African American civil rights, and our understanding of race and skin tone far more complicated that is being portrayed in commentaries and obituaries? You betcha!