The Folderol of Flawlessness
I'm starting to get really tired of sports. And that's not only because I generally despise this time of year, which is, in my opinion, a wasteland: football is gone, baseball hasn't started up yet, hockey is grinding along but is not quite center stage, and the focus is on the NBA and college basketball (neither of which can save basketball from the sad truth that it's a dull, boring sport).
It's bad enough that golf highlights are the pinnacle of my SportsCenter experience on February mornings -- the bastards and their warm weather... -- but for two consecutive seasons, we have been immersed in two radically diametric threads of discussion, and it's possible that I may be the first one to put the two together and draw them out to their logical conclusion.
Unless you've lived under a rock for the past six months or detest the NFL so much that you can ignore it through its omnipresent season, you may have remembered a little team called the New England Patriots, and how from very early in the season (I want to say it started around Week 5), talk amongst sports aficionados -- or at least those they'll allow on television -- was that this could be the first perfect season since the 1972 Miami Dolphins went 17-0 and won Super Bowl VII.
Notwithstanding the fact that, at that point, it was Week 5. Or that there were still two other teams with 5-0 records. The Patriots were adorned with the title of potential perfection -- aww hell, fuck "potential." As the season wore on, there was the occasional grumbling about when they'd trip up, but few if any genuinely believed they would. (As a point of reference, look up how many articles declared the Patriots Super Bowl Champions after the end of the AFC Championship game; there are more than you think there are.) Even when the two remaining undefeateds met, New England at Indianapolis in Week 9, the fact that it was the Colts whose bid at perfection was ended did not surprise too many people. (And who actually gave a crap that the Cowboys too suffered their first loss that day?)
The truth that New England was showing great weakness and beatability around the halfway point of the regular season? Brushed under the table. The magnitude of "Spygate" and its related allegations? Water under the bridge. It wasn't even about football anymore, it was about destiny, as if somehow, the anointed Patriots deserved, from Week 5, to win it all more than anyone else because they had the potential to be flawless.
But as we know, in the end, they were not perfect. They only lost one game. The one game that mattered. The Super Bowl. And as much as I may despise the New England Patriots, and as much as I may love that my Giants are Super Bowl Champions, you have to give them just a little bit of credit, because 18-1 is a pretty damn impressive mark to reach.
It's that 1 that's ruined everyone. The 1 that got away. The 1 that, according to many, would have justified it all. And this is where I begin to take issue. Sure, anyone in professional sports who tells you that winning isn't everything is feeding you a years-old pile of horseshit, and most of us know that. But think of how the expectations for the Patriots have changed: a Super Bowl will no longer be enough. It will have to be perfect.
We as a culture obsess so much about perfection, and the sports writers across this fine land fed into that obsession in the worst way over the NFL season. It was all about being perfect and winning and nothing else. Consider what happened during the college football season, a season in which near-perfection is the only way to reach the National Championship -- a truth that should, on its own, show the inadequacy of the BCS system as a college football playoff. The only team that went to its bowl game undefeated was Hawaii -- #10 Hawaii. Ranked at #10 because a computer didn't think their perfection was impressive enough, that they didn't play hard enough teams, that they didn't really earn it.
And now we are just hours away from college basketball's game of the year, #1 Memphis vs. #2 Tennessee, with Memphis sitting at 25-0, looking to defend perfection while all around them the media dares to believe and expect that they will see it happen. The players even filmed a montage before a feature on SportsCenter this morning in which they must have said "perfect" at least ten times. Do you honestly mean to tell me that if they don't win, if perfection becomes tainted, these kids will feel nearly as tall as they do now, unscatched, unblemished, untainted? (If you need a hint, start searching for articles on the Patriots written after February 4, 2008. The answer will become quickly obvious.)
The obsession over perfection on its own wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that the other top sports story is the Senate hearings on baseball's steroids scandal. A bunch of highly-paid men, earning their paychecks by playing a game, forced to either own up to having cheated or perjure themselves in front of Congress in defense of their good names. It's an absolute travesty, for sure, but is anybody seeing the connection that I'm seeing here?
On one hand, players are doping themselves stupid to give themselves the utmost competitive edge. On the other hand, the possibility of perfection in sports is cause for compulsive celebration in the hands of the media.
Umm...duh?
Does anybody not see that perhaps athletes dope because we expect perfection from them? That cheating, whether through performance enhancers or illegal videotaping, is done so that some one or some team may be able to reach the pinnacle of perfection and receive the endless accolades of an adoring legion of fans back home? And if this is all so obvious, why isn't it equally obvious that kids in college and even in high school do the same kinds of things, adopt the same dubious standards of good sportsmanship, because the expectation isn't just to win, it's to win all the time, every time?
We're blind to that kind of impact, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. There's painfully little differentiation between the crazed Little League parent's rant that my-little-Johnny-is-the-best-and-should-play-all-six innings-of-every-game-and-what-do-you-know-you-stupid-ignorant-coach and the staggering expectations of New England's pursuit of perfection.
We all agree that steroids and cheating aren't right, but perpetuate their presence because we believe it's the sport or the rules that need to change, and not our perceptions.
And in that regard, our perceptions couldn't be any farther from perfect.
It's bad enough that golf highlights are the pinnacle of my SportsCenter experience on February mornings -- the bastards and their warm weather... -- but for two consecutive seasons, we have been immersed in two radically diametric threads of discussion, and it's possible that I may be the first one to put the two together and draw them out to their logical conclusion.
Unless you've lived under a rock for the past six months or detest the NFL so much that you can ignore it through its omnipresent season, you may have remembered a little team called the New England Patriots, and how from very early in the season (I want to say it started around Week 5), talk amongst sports aficionados -- or at least those they'll allow on television -- was that this could be the first perfect season since the 1972 Miami Dolphins went 17-0 and won Super Bowl VII.
Notwithstanding the fact that, at that point, it was Week 5. Or that there were still two other teams with 5-0 records. The Patriots were adorned with the title of potential perfection -- aww hell, fuck "potential." As the season wore on, there was the occasional grumbling about when they'd trip up, but few if any genuinely believed they would. (As a point of reference, look up how many articles declared the Patriots Super Bowl Champions after the end of the AFC Championship game; there are more than you think there are.) Even when the two remaining undefeateds met, New England at Indianapolis in Week 9, the fact that it was the Colts whose bid at perfection was ended did not surprise too many people. (And who actually gave a crap that the Cowboys too suffered their first loss that day?)
The truth that New England was showing great weakness and beatability around the halfway point of the regular season? Brushed under the table. The magnitude of "Spygate" and its related allegations? Water under the bridge. It wasn't even about football anymore, it was about destiny, as if somehow, the anointed Patriots deserved, from Week 5, to win it all more than anyone else because they had the potential to be flawless.
But as we know, in the end, they were not perfect. They only lost one game. The one game that mattered. The Super Bowl. And as much as I may despise the New England Patriots, and as much as I may love that my Giants are Super Bowl Champions, you have to give them just a little bit of credit, because 18-1 is a pretty damn impressive mark to reach.
It's that 1 that's ruined everyone. The 1 that got away. The 1 that, according to many, would have justified it all. And this is where I begin to take issue. Sure, anyone in professional sports who tells you that winning isn't everything is feeding you a years-old pile of horseshit, and most of us know that. But think of how the expectations for the Patriots have changed: a Super Bowl will no longer be enough. It will have to be perfect.
We as a culture obsess so much about perfection, and the sports writers across this fine land fed into that obsession in the worst way over the NFL season. It was all about being perfect and winning and nothing else. Consider what happened during the college football season, a season in which near-perfection is the only way to reach the National Championship -- a truth that should, on its own, show the inadequacy of the BCS system as a college football playoff. The only team that went to its bowl game undefeated was Hawaii -- #10 Hawaii. Ranked at #10 because a computer didn't think their perfection was impressive enough, that they didn't play hard enough teams, that they didn't really earn it.
And now we are just hours away from college basketball's game of the year, #1 Memphis vs. #2 Tennessee, with Memphis sitting at 25-0, looking to defend perfection while all around them the media dares to believe and expect that they will see it happen. The players even filmed a montage before a feature on SportsCenter this morning in which they must have said "perfect" at least ten times. Do you honestly mean to tell me that if they don't win, if perfection becomes tainted, these kids will feel nearly as tall as they do now, unscatched, unblemished, untainted? (If you need a hint, start searching for articles on the Patriots written after February 4, 2008. The answer will become quickly obvious.)
The obsession over perfection on its own wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that the other top sports story is the Senate hearings on baseball's steroids scandal. A bunch of highly-paid men, earning their paychecks by playing a game, forced to either own up to having cheated or perjure themselves in front of Congress in defense of their good names. It's an absolute travesty, for sure, but is anybody seeing the connection that I'm seeing here?
On one hand, players are doping themselves stupid to give themselves the utmost competitive edge. On the other hand, the possibility of perfection in sports is cause for compulsive celebration in the hands of the media.
Umm...duh?
Does anybody not see that perhaps athletes dope because we expect perfection from them? That cheating, whether through performance enhancers or illegal videotaping, is done so that some one or some team may be able to reach the pinnacle of perfection and receive the endless accolades of an adoring legion of fans back home? And if this is all so obvious, why isn't it equally obvious that kids in college and even in high school do the same kinds of things, adopt the same dubious standards of good sportsmanship, because the expectation isn't just to win, it's to win all the time, every time?
We're blind to that kind of impact, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. There's painfully little differentiation between the crazed Little League parent's rant that my-little-Johnny-is-the-best-and-should-play-all-six innings-of-every-game-and-what-do-you-know-you-stupid-ignorant-coach and the staggering expectations of New England's pursuit of perfection.
We all agree that steroids and cheating aren't right, but perpetuate their presence because we believe it's the sport or the rules that need to change, and not our perceptions.
And in that regard, our perceptions couldn't be any farther from perfect.
posted by Dave at 2/23/2008 11:03:00 AM
2 Comments:
But thats America for you... we do it with almost everything. Its not the American dream to want a home and a family anymore, you have to have a McMansion and the perfect family. You dont have to be pretty to be considered attractive, you have to be rail thin and the peak of perfection. Americans cant do something in moderation ::cough cough international politics cough cough::cause its considered going half-hog.
"But as we know, in the end, they were not perfect. They only lost one game. The one game that mattered. The Super Bowl."
...and now there are millions of people running around in Guatemala wearing "19-0 perfect season" shirts...
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