FanPost

NFL: Thumbs Up, New Orleans

A man planted his foot where he should not have. How do we know? Because we saw what came next, split second by split second, before the unexpected commercial break began. By the time the cameras returned, he was loaded up on a stretcher. They drove him off the field, atop a gardener’s cart.

The man had spent his whole life preparing for sport; he was the polished tip of the spear. We’d seen him run like hell, balance on razor-thin edges. We hadn’t seen the discipline, and the work--they don’t photograph. But we knew them to be there.

His leg was disfigured beyond recognition. The surgeons said that it was as though he had been carried in from a battlefield: when they opened him up, nothing was at all where it was supposed to be. We knew it already, of course--we had seen the replay again and again, how the bone bowed before it snapped, how its jagged end gasped from his colored sock. We’d seen the tendons and ligaments reeling up into his body like curtains drawing.

As he neared the edge of the field, we saw tears rolling down his face, and the glossed and drying lines left while he still lay in the grass. Not from pain, alone: more, it was the recognition that he--the polished tip of the spear--was not simply tarnished, but broken. He would never set foot on another field, not in uniform, not in glory.

And then, with the cart finally rolling into the exit tunnel, the lights of the ambulance flashing across the tunnel’s walls, he did it: he turned his gloved hand, brought it flush with his body. Curled up a fist. Extended a thumb.

Thumbs up, America. Everything is fine. Get another beer if you want one--this Sunday belongs to you. The game isn’t finished; this is only a momentum shift.

The thumbs-up: among the oddest rituals in all of sport. We’ve seen it so many times that we forget how odd a thing it is to see it at all. This year alone it has followed ACLs, MCLs, tibias and fibulas, ankles and Achilles. But on Sunday, we were treated to a thumbs-up so cheerfully indifferent to the annihilated body to which it was attached, that the ritual felt foreign anew. That thumbs up came from none other than the NFL itself.

Perhaps we should have known: the NFL had planted its foot where it should not have. It had already sustained a series of major injuries, and by last Sunday was practically left to ride a stretcher into the dome. There were the scandals over domestic violence. There were the reports of chronic neurological deficits. Suicides, murders. Double murders and rapes, and children beaten with tree limbs. Crimes hidden or revealed for nakedly pecuniary purposes. There was Colin Kaepernick, jobless: his pink slip a clear ultimatum for other voices.

But we watched on, even as the NFL grew ragged with age, and winced at the bone spurs of controversy. After all, it still professed to reward us, with a field on which athletic achievement and collapse gained the import of miracles and curses. We looked up to it as we would to the stars.

By last Sunday, when the NFL stumbled into the 2019 NFC Championship Game between the Rams and the Saints, it was weary, concussed. But it fought on. In so doing, it asked something of us, too. The request, one that pitted our own decency and humanity against everything else, was for complicity. And we said yes.

And then.

There were under two minutes remaining. Drew Brees dropped back, passed. Running the sideline was Tommy Lee Lewis, quick and sleight and unexpected. Charging towards Lewis, helmet-first and in stunning contravention of the rules of engagement, was Robey-Coleman. Common decency denies recounting of the next moment. Suffice it to say: while these kinds of collisions rarely end well, none has ever ended so disastrously.

The crowd’s reaction was instant, deafening. But behind those hundred decibels was an even louder silence. It was a moment of contemplation, for those of us still watching. The NFL had planted its foot where it should not have. We saw the bone breaking, the bowing heads. As the league rolled into the exit tunnel and on to Atlanta, it looked back at us, its eyes tearful. The hand turned, collected itself into a fist, and flashed the thumbs-up. But we knew that we would never see it again, not on this field, not in glory.


This FanPost was written by a reader and member of Canal Street Chronicles. It does not necessarily reflect the views of CSC and its staff or editors.