Blackouts in the parking lot, black spots on the field: Football’s symbiotic relationship between fans and players

Took the picture in the north lot.  The guy was looking for the set of Leatherheads.

Paradox: A person, situation, or action exhibiting inexplicable or contradictory aspects.

Football is a paradox.  The game bonds fans and players, but also damages them.  The fans bond by watching the violence.  The players bond by surviving the violence.  Before the game, fans fire up the Margaritaville blender and players dress themselves in metal and plastic.  Fans think they can handle the binge drinking, but many cannot.  Players think they can handle the hits, but many cannot. 

The fan is lucky if he passes out before kickoff.  Otherwise, he could find himself wasted and disoriented.

Chugging vodka with an orange juice chaser was my friend Travis’ pre-game ritual.  Once after a long night, he started early the next morning to get ready for an afternoon kickoff.  At Husky Stadium, he passed out in his seat, got up and swan dived down the stairs.  Later, the story goes, he drunkenly wandered along a highway shoulder until the state patrol picked him up.  He ended up with a gash on his face. 

The player is lucky if he rides the bench after kickoff.   Otherwise, he could find himself dazed and confused. 

This is my friend Chad's description of a stinger, “One whole side of my body went numb and they [the University of Idaho coaching staff] took me out of the game for a thirty second breather.”  A stinger is an injury to the nerves that travel from the neck and down the arm.  It happens when the head and neck are forcibly moved or hit to one side - it’s pedestrian to football. 

The up side:

In 2009, my friend Cod hugged his dad for the first time in years when Jake Locker drove the Dawgs down field to beat USC.  Locker’s actions were equivalent to the Pope giving communion.  Cod and I started calling Locker, The Pope, in 2007, after he ran over Syracuse.  Like the Pope, Locker became a symbol.  Even after UW went winless in 2008, it wasn’t his fault.  Seattle’s football czar, Hugh Millen, was critical of his alma mater, but never of Locker.  He admitted (I am paraphrasing), people in chat rooms think I would walk through hell with gasoline shorts on before I would criticize Jake Locker.  When Locker said he was staying for his senior year, Cod texted me, “The Pope is coming back.” 

The down side:

Football culture teaches players to disregard serious symptoms like vision problems, headaches and vomiting.  Malcolm Gladwell compares football to dog fighting.  His argument is convincing.  Players put on pads and dogs don’t cower, even amidst their demise.  After a concussion, a player was game sick, zooking for days, but still suited up.  He saw three opposing players when there was really one, and hit the one in the middle.  The data, Gladwell referenced, alleged that many smaller smacks to the skull caused more damage than the less frequent more violent spine snappers.  A higher percentage of brain injuries were linked to linemen, who get thunder punched almost every play. 

Here are my notes from the Apple Cup: 

In the north lot, Husky fans gather around a pig, roasting in a rusty cage.  Coug fans in cammo hunting jackets watch flat-screen TV’s mounted to a Jamboree.  There is man with a purple Mohawk shot gunning a beer.  “Jake Locker for Heisman” is written on some guy’s back.  Pickup truck beds overflow with cans of Natural Ice.  It’s like Slumdog Millionaire – not enough plastic bathrooms.  People piss everywhere, even the girls.  Old men fight, one with a scraped face sits on the curb and talks to cops.  Three kids’ wheelbarrow a keg past stadium workers and drink a couple red cups in the foyer before they’re thrown out.  No alcohol is served in Husky stadium.  What happens in the parking lot stays in the parking lot. 

The next day the tailgater has a head like a hole.  He recalls swigging off a fifth of Crown and spitting out long chunks of pig fat, but the rest is a blur.  The parking lot has become as sacred as the playing field.  Many fans come for tailgating – and if they make it to game time – it’s a bonus.

Even the Harry Potter of college football, Tim Tebow, was devalued after being knocked out cold for an entire TV timeout.  The only debate was when he could play again, not if he should play again.  Tebow had trouble reading weeks after the concussion.  Sight problems, sensitivity to light, seeing black and white spots, are a few more symptoms that plague the player.  In this game there is a desperate symbiotic relationship between fans and players.  The fan roots for his team to destroy the other.  Glory is all he wants to see.  For the player, the game is fleeting.  Players have a savage window.  The fan knows that.  He knows deep down what the players’ risk. 

The fan needs to peer over the edge in the parking lot.  The player does so on the field.    

What the future of free will be

I just read Malcolm Gladwell’s review of Free by Chris Anderson, “Priced to sell: Is free the future?” for The New Yorker. Gladwell is best known for his books, The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker. In the 80’s he was a reporter for the Washington Post, his website Gladwell.com says he “covered business and science.” According to Wikipedia his articles, “often deal with the unexpected implications of research in the social sciences.” Anderson is editor-in-chief of Wired. He has two books about the future of free online content, The Long Tail and Free. His Wikipedia page ironically notes that he “generated controversy for plagiarizing content from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, among other sources, in Free.”

I have not read Free, but the premise is digital content will continue to be free. Recently Steve Ballmer said something similar. Gladwell starts his critique with an example of the state of old content providers. In this case, the negotiations between the Dallas Morning News and Amazon to license the newspaper’s content to Kindle, Amazon’s electronic reader. Amazon wanted seventy percent of the subscription revenue and the right to republish the newspaper’s content on any other portable reader. Old content creators are barely hanging on, going online only, or just simply going away. Newspapers are dying. Anyone invested in holding onto hardcopy newspapers, are trying to figure out a way to save the institutions.

Recently Rupert Murdoch said every Newscorp website will start charging within the year. Gladwell uses Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal as an example. He writes, “a million WSJ subscribers are quite happy to pay for the privilege of reading online.” Gladwell goes on to argue that free network television is struggling while a pay for content cable television is doing well. Gladwell does not like Anderson’s argument. Probably because it hits close to home for a famous writer like himself. Gladwell does not like that Anderson overlooks the cost of “plants and powerlines.” Of course Gladwell is right about that. The delivery system for our electronic world is the expensive component. But I think neither Gladwell, nor Anderson, nor Ballmer know what the future of free will be.

Tech Dirt writer, Mike Masnick, on the Gladwell/Anderson controversy.

The answer to Gladwell’s question is simply one of economic efficiency. You can pay people to write -- just as Encyclopedia Britannica does. Or you can get other people to write for non-monetary rewards -- as Wikipedia does. The latter is a lot more efficient a solution, and the difference in productivity and output is quite evident.” Masnick goes on, “. . . competition happens, and when it does, price gets driven to marginal cost. You might not like it. You might wish it didn’t happen, but arguing against the fact thats how markets work is like arguing that the sun won’t rise tomorrow.

Gladwell ends with a great insight.

The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold there are no iron laws.

I think the latest example of that, is Rupert Murdoch’s forecast of charging for online content across the board. Murdoch would not be the first. There are a few examples. Harper’s is not free, you must have a subscription to the hardcopy magazine to gain a username and password to their web presence, same for Cook’s magazine and Consumer Reports.

So, what is the argument between Gladwell and Anderson? Co-founder of Type Pad and Moveable Type blogging tools, Anil Dash, hits on what this is really about.

I am sure that both of these authors’ books absolutely do lean more towards anecdotal evidence than statistical proof. And honestly, it’s okay that these books don’t necessarily follow the tenets of hard science. In many cases, they’re arguing that a cultural trend is becoming true, or is about to become true, and the reality is that asserting these trends actually helps them come true. In short, these are books designed to create culture, presented in the the guise of reporting on culture.

I think Dash is right.

We should keep in mind that the best of this new world order is that many people are contributing to the dialogue of ideas because they have a passion for it and are not driven by financial gain. Which is probably one of the reasons for the quality of so much free content to be quite high. It is going against the culture to start worrying about not only compensation for your content or copyright infringement at this point. Most blogs go to great lengths to give credit. Not only by naming the source, but also by posting a link to the original document that was quoted. That is about as transparent at it gets.

One thing I am certain about, is that I disagree with trying to predict where all this will go.