It’s still raining. But things aren’t quite changing the way I’d like them to. We likely need more rain. And more time.
I took the kid to Wisconsin for the weekend, to visit family, see some old friends, catch a football game. It was an exercise in sentimentality, I’ll admit it. My parents took me to Madison on cold weekend days. We crowded into the student section, sang songs, chanted chants, bellowed cheers, and demonstrated a loyalty to a kind of forward way of thinking of such robustness and fealty as to brand one’s soul with a truculent, intrepid internal Badger, fearless in fighting for what’s right. That’s at least the way I look at it.
Out here in New York this past quarter century, I find such loyalty more elusive, if not downright paved over— by the towering materiality of aggressive individualism, the dizzying pace of life, the ever-new. Perhaps that explains why we raised our kids to hold their devotions dear; and to find, in family and community, their manifestation. When it comes to sport, therefore, it’s as if they live in Wisconsin. This makes them divided, in a way; or, as my teacher George Mosse put it, to be “multiple outsiders.” He used to begin his lectures on Jewish history with the statement that “a Jew is an outsider with a critical mind.” And so perhaps it is—extrapolating here—that being loyal to both here and there can create just the very empathies our world needs.
After a Shabbat dinner the evening before with close friends and mentors from my own college days, an early Saturday morning run of uncommon beauty along the shore of Lake Mendota and a pre-game barbecue with old friends, we trudged into the cold and snow for the Wisconsin-Nebraska game.
It’s just stuff people do. Dress up. Yell and scream at athletes. Get lost in the impossibly epic dimensions of winning and losing when everything’s at stake but where no one’s life is actually threatened. It’s like Fake War.
Unless you’re a victim. Which changes everything. This football season I’ve watched very little football, mostly out of protest for the abysmally poor way that players, coaches, leagues and owners have dealt with the long overdue exposed scandal of violence against women that the sport seems to tolerate, excuse, and attempt to wish away. To my mind, it’s left a stain of shame on the game and colored my own relationship to it as a fan—especially as a father of three daughters.
After all, they’ve been wearing the gear of fandom since infancy; have learned to read box scores along with the rules of basic grammar; and have even created heroes of these young men, their hearts and souls rising along with them on their journeys toward achievement, success and, sometimes, even victory.
This weekend in particular, watching Wisconsin dismantle Nebraska while wooping and hollering along with 85,000 others for UW back Melvin Gordon’s crushing rushing record only to turn around and watch Aaron Rodgers lead Green Bay to a win over Philadelphia, I felt my own multiple outsiderdom kick in. As a kid, trudging to these games, I never knew such dominance. It was otherworldly, something that happened in other states. But more to the point, I felt guilty, complicit somehow, in sanctioning a perceived invincibility that is in fact endemic to the abuse.
And I longed for a moment, in the near future, when a guy like Aaron Rodgers walks up to the ball, set perfectly in the cool, wet grass of the gridiron, barks the battle cry signals to his fellow warriors and then stops cold, raises his hands in the air in surrender, and leads them off the field. In this fantasy, he heads straight for the television cameras and with his team behind him, defiantly calls out his fellow players, coaches and leagues across the country for tolerating even one case of abuse against women. “Keep your hands off our mothers, our daughters, our sisters,” he should say. “And if you can’t control yourself, get help.”
I mean, if you can’t say that into a television camera, what exactly are you captain of?
When I got engaged about 25 years ago, my future father-in-law took me for a walk on a crisp September morning. “I want to tell you a story,” he said, somewhat dramatically. “I have a shovel. And I use it in the yard and it’s very pleasant. I dig in the garden. I plant trees. You know, that kind of stuff. But if you ever lay a hand on my daughter, I’ll use it bury you.” Then we bought some bagels and walked back to the apartment to celebrate.
Saturday was a great day. Snow fell on Madison, students went nuts, and our team won. Loyalty was rewarded and I held my daughter close as we sang the songs she learned in the crib. The win felt good. And in that moment, she was protected.
Leaving the stadium with the frozen throngs, snow swirling around us, a buzzed fan passed us by, chanting to no one in particular, “Nebraska, Wisconsin, same situation.” We laughed. But I couldn’t help but think, as a father, that it is the same situation. Men having a good time, for sure. But walking right up to the edge of their own behavior; and when, God forbid, they move toward crossing that line, there will be someone there to keep them in check: if not with a shovel then with a wise word, a guiding hand, and the mandate to do what is right.
