Sports Saturday
We’re half way through the NFL season and, just like every year, the body count keeps rising. In “the war of attrition that is the National Football League” (as ESPN’s Mark Schlereth describes it), one needs more than highly skilled players. One also needs a fair amount of luck in the injury department.
We shouldn’t be surprised by this. The surprise is that anyone is still standing at the end of the year. After all, the game mostly involves 200+ pound players throwing their bodies against each other for play after play and making violent contact with helmets, others people’s bones, and (when the weather turns cold) frozen turf.
The concluding lines from Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” comes to mind. Applied to the NFL, the poem captures not only the violence but also perhaps why were are attracted to that violence.
Here’s how the poem ends:
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
For all the intricate plays that offensive and defensive coaches draw up, much of the game is pure mayhem. “Darkling plain” and “ignorant armies” captures it.
The poem as a whole, however, is an expression of cultural despair. The Sea of Faith has ebbed, Arnold moans, and now there is “neither joy, nor love, nor light/Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.” Our “confused alarms,” ginned up by a media that generates and then feeds off of fear, prompt us to find a distraction in this violent sport.
In other words, the darkling plain is our own minds. We are the ignorant armies.