Flag Football
I like a good videogame, but I really only play them once or twice a year when I am on vacation. So I am not really up on gamer culture. Nevertheless, I occasionally enjoy reading Penny Arcade, even though I don’t really get the jokes. I suppose this it has the same appeal that Austin Powers movies have for a 16-year-old who has never seen a Bond movie without Pierce Brosnan: you can laugh at the existence of parody without a relationship to its source. So I was surprised last week when I saw a Penny Arcade that descibed my life. I realize that there were only seven years in which Saint Louis didn’t have a pro football team, and I wasn’t even living there for all of them. But somehow I never developed the passion for watching football games. In theory they are packed with both action and strategy and should be interesting. But I unmoved. Plus, most football is watched on television, and I don’t even enjoy watching sports I like that way (except for eight-ball).
So Seattle was in this big game, which was a great accomplishment. And we lost, which was too bad. People were broken up about it. There was front page news in the local papers. And I thought that would be the end of it. So I was surprised when I was walking by the stadium at lunch last Monday, and scores of fans in Seahawks jerseys were streaming in to welcome the team back with a big rally (kind of the opposite of a victory rally). And that was touching, I just didn’t know people did that kind of thing.
The next day I was waiting for someone to show up at a meeting, so I was looking out a window at the Seattle skyline. After staring at the buildings for several minutes, I noticed that none of the flags I saw were flying at the tops of the flagpoles. And I began to wonder if our city commemorated losing a sporting event by flying the nation’s flag at half-mast. That seemed unfathomable to me, but I couldn’t think of anything else we were publicly mourning. Maybe cities do this, like the defeat rallies I didn’t know about. But it still seemed like conflating the loss of a game with real loss of human life was pretty extreme, even if it was a big game. So I lost some faith in the city of Seattle.
I was pleased to quickly discover that Seattle is fine, and I should have been doubting my memory.
February 13th, 2006 at 10:57 pm
I’m not a football fan either, but I wasn’t really surprised when the Seahawks lost. Not because the Steelers were a better team or because the refs were biased or whatever (I actually watched the Super Bowl, but had no real understanding of what was happening on the field), but because sports teams from the Northwest have an irritating habit of being very good until it actually matters (cf. the early-90s Blazers, the mid-90s Sonics, and the early-00s Mariners).
I am surprised to hear how hard folks up there are taking it, though. I thought people would have learned not to get their hopes up by now.
February 13th, 2006 at 11:56 pm
Interesting. I had not realized that we were so cursed. I guess people have to put that out of their defeatism behind them to get invested in the game. Anyway, didn’t we win the WNBA right after I got here (which I am sure inspires less fanfare than losing the Superbowl)?
That reminds me of the part in Moneyball where Michael Lewis writes about how the A’s have an extremely scientific approach to a baseball season, where they know what kind of a game they need to play to statistically win enough games to get into the playoffs. However, this approach doesn’t extend into the post-season well, because there you do not want a team that can win a high proportion of a large number of games, but rather you want to be able to pull out talent to win specific games.
November 12th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
cj221z3406o24bvl