OK, to be honest, I am a movie/TV nerd, and everything I know about football comes from watching Friday Night Lights. If you actually threw a football at me I’d be more likely to duck than catch it.
But I ran into this story over the weekend and would really love to hear what you folks at MB think about it. I walked away feeling so much for this guy, who is quarterback Derek Anderson for the Arizona Cardinals.
This is what happened, as far as I can tell. The Cardinals were getting hammered, it was the fourth quarter, they were down by 18 points — and their quarterback did a Terrible Thing. The camera zoomed in on him, he was talking with one of the guys on the team, his buddy said something — and Anderson laughed. He LAUGHED.
The reaction of fans, sportscasters, and the rest of the world was to form a lynch mob. You were losing, man — how dare you laugh? Like a mantra, over and over it was repeated: “There is nothing funny about getting your butt kicked.”
Later he was grilled about it on TV and he had a meltdown, which apparently has become one of the big viral videos of 2010, “forever chronicled on YouTube with the rest of the memorable post-game meltdowns in NFL history.”
It’s one of the most touching things I’ve seen, how this man employs in 60 seconds every strategy ever invented for escaping from this searing demand of Judgment and Criticism.
And it just made me wonder what it must be like, to have every second of your professional life on closeup, every moment of your life being offered for commentary and scrutiny, up for approval or condemnation. “Who can stand?”
And about the nature of humor and of Loss (which apparently is never NEVER funny).
Love to hear what you all think. (Read this for more on the story.)
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5 responses to “No Laughing Allowed”
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No crying in Baseball.
No laughing in Football.
No sinning in Evangelicalism.
Rules to live by.
🙂
Perfect Mich…well…I did grow up playing sports, except while I would have tried to catch a football thrown at me and not duck, I also would have dropped it.
It made me think of this story of Joe Montana who is being lauded for his ability to be so completely unperturbed that he seemed to be only marginally aware of the seriousness of the game circumstances….the difference is that Montana WON.
http://espn.go.com/sportscentury/features/00016306.html
SD – I LOVE your lack of sympathy for the absurdly serious mentality of sports. It's only a game right?
Well, yeah, Todd. 🙂
But let me give you an analogy from my own life, just so you don't mistakenly think I am a totally uncompetitive wuss.
The game I play competively is bridge. (This is because, as anyone can see by one look at me, I really am a guy who could be successfully beaten up by a boy with polio — I am a colossal failure at any real sport: baseball, football, basketball, hockey, whatever.)
Now when I play bridge, with a partner or on a team of 4, we are not trying to have some vague mushy all accepting experience where nobody cares about winning. In every hand, we are focused on killing our opponents. We really are.
But at the same time, there's a real sense where it IS just a game, and bridge players themselves talk about the hugely important need to be able to deal with loss and crushing defeat. It's widely written about in bridge magazines. It's essential for a team or a partnership to be able to say, Well That Was A Disaster! And laugh it off. If you can't you spend all your time in the land of self-recrimination or anger what is way bad for your game!
So I have seen times where partner's hand comes down, and the other guy realizes there's been a bidding disaster, and he basically just laughs. Apparently this is allowed in bridge. 🙂
Great post, StampDawg. What a glaring image of our response to judgment. Hard to watch it's so…me.