Gridiron and The High Seas
For a marketing project at my daughter’s business school, students were given the opportunity to be spin-doctors for real-life company mishaps that turned into media nightmares. They had a few options to choose from: the death of beloved beluga whales at a popular aquatic tourist attraction, a listeriosis outbreak at a meat processing plant or the New England Patriots’ scandalous deflategate. My daughter, who has impressive leadership skills, told her group consisting of two other young men, “We’re taking deflategate.”
For those of you who do not know, deflategate happened in 2014 when NFL’s golden boy, Tom Brady was accused of ordering deflated balls for the AFC Championship game against the Indianapolis Colts. Obviously, it’s easier to grip, throw and catch a softer ball. New England ended up decimating the Colts 45 to 7. Given the Patriots ironclad gridiron plays, would the final score be any different if the balls were at regulation psi? Maybe, but only by a smidge. Brady and the New England Patriots were invincible consecutive years running. Even if you hated the team, and despised Brady, you had to admit that they were making football history.
My daughter explained that in their assessment of the scandal, the team did not experience any significant financial loss. Unlike the aquatic centre and the meat company, who took big hits because people lost faith in their brands, Patriot fans still bought tickets to their games and continued to buy lots of jerseys, hats, and other merchandise to prove their allegiance while at said games. My daughter and her group thought of creating a media campaign that would ignore deflategate altogether. They imagined a narrative in the form of a behind-the-scenes documentary something akin to a Greek Legend. Tragedy makes gods immortal. Brady might have been caught cheating but it’s part of his path to true greatness. Brady, the unlikely hero, having had to sit through six rounds before being picked at the cotillion-like draft extravaganza, is Prometheus unBound. Why not douse the Patriots in a glaring golden light that exclusively appeals to their pre-existing, fat-pursed, fan base and simultaneously flip the bird at their detractors? No apology maintains innocence.
There was another strategy that my daughter’s group considered. Since their popularity made the Patriots lucrative in various ways, financially and most importantly to note, culturally, a campaign was hardly needed to rehabilitate the image of what was already iconic of an all-American brand. The aquatic centre had belugas floating belly up. The meat company’s health and safety failure resulted in more than twenty people dead. Theirs was Corporate Catastrophe.
Executives must be coached to publicly demonstrate remorse, albeit motivated by capital loss, as grief. Deflategate was altogether a less complicated affair. No one got sick or died from the Colts devastating loss—at least none that we know of. But my daughter’s group thought that perhaps it was necessary to temper the growing polarization between the have and have nots, those being Patriot fans and everyone else.
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It does not come by chance that my daughter insisted on choosing a football story for her assignment. We’ve been watching football every Sunday since both my daughters were very young. It is my sincere hope that they will instill a love for the game when they have children of their own. Years to come, after witnessing a particularly graceful display of acrobatics defying both gravity and probability, they may exclaim as I do, “I have seen the face of God!”
Someone told me that in order to be a baseball fan, one has to grow up with it; the love of the sport is a kind of familial inheritance. I don’t know if this is fact, but the premise is true in my case. I don’t like baseball and I did not grow up in a household that was remotely interested in sports or athletics. To this day, I am terrified of catching a ball or anything that is casually tossed in my direction, be it an apple, an erasure, a sock. Upon hearing the easy-breezy words, “Hey, Joylyn! Catch!” I shrink back as if an angry hand is being raised to me.
Friends and colleagues have encouraged me to transfer my skills as a passionate spectator. They’d like me to relish in the high-scoring antics of basketball or the fast-paced violence of ice hockey. In their appeals, they insist that sports is sports and whatever I see in the glory of a running back, I can easily see elsewhere. I wait until their dissertations come to an end, and they, mostly men, have a self-assured smugness that is only forgiven because they have taken such an unusual interest in what interests me. I will pause for a beat before retorting, “After these basketball or hockey players score, do they perform choreographed dances?”
The men have failed to overlook one key component that would relieve them of their insistence to convert me. The mechanics of the game of football is as fascinating as the systems and culture that stoke the fires of national indulgence and glorification that verges on sin. I rarely disclose to them how I discovered football because it is by way of a very different path. I came to it by sea.
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When I gave birth to my second daughter, I decided to quit my full-time job. My husband and I weighed the pros and cons of me becoming a stay-at-home mother. We calculated the staggering cost of daycare and concluded that the financial loss to our income would be on par if I were to continue working. Also, I didn’t know anyone else other than myself more worthy or fit to raise our children. To this day, I have no regrets and have never thought of my hiatus as a homemaker as a sacrifice. Though the occupation can be blindingly boring and comes with little praise, I feel I did a good job. My daughters assure me that their childhood, filled with play, song, and laughter, was indeed magical.
Though I worked in the evenings and over the summer, I didn’t return to work full-time during the day for almost five years. According to experts, the most crucial stage in a child’s life is from birth to five years old. During this time children’s brains develop connections that lay the foundation for their emotional disposition and social behaviors. Knowing that I was the primary role model for my young girls, I was determined to maintain as much stability as I humanly could for the sake of their physical and psychological well-being. My husband will always remark, “We’ve done our best to damage them the least.” Parents are giants in their children’s lives and wield power that can crush the petals of a dancing spirit in an instant. Most of us don’t even know the many moments when we have dashed the flame of hope or joy in our little child’s life. Once a flower is knocked off its stem, even if by accident, it's impossible to put back.
The tedium of motherhood can transform days and nights into a long traverse across a never-ending, seemingly unchanging, expanse of sand. Chloe Cooper Jones, the Pulitzer Prize winner writer, knows this all too well when she reflects on her son’s laughter bringing her a sense of glee and happiness, “I was acutely aware of how quickly the experience of beauty dissipates and is replaced by boredom and the dullness of obligation.” Mothers find ways to retreat from childcare malaise, but with an infant and toddler tethered to my skirt’s hem, how was I to protect myself against the arid bubble of monotony growing inside my maternal chest? Where was I to go? What else was I to think?
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Miguel de Cervantes, the Spanish author of Don Quixote that was first published in 1605, led an extraordinary yet impoverished life. After enlisting with the Spanish Naval infantry, one of his responsibilities was to travel throughout the country and confiscate wheat from different towns and villages, often leaving its population hungry and starved. This was amongst other outrageously inane preparations made in order to assemble one of the most impressive armadas in history.
Philip II of Spain, defender of the Catholic Empire, was as incensed as the Vatican at England's Reformation and planned an invasion. The wheat that Cervantes seized was used to make thousands and thousands of tons of biscuits that were to be stocked on ships serving the Armada. It turns out the Spanish failed to oversee effective quality control measures. As a harbinger to Spain’s military campaign and true to Cervantes’ penchant for absurdity, the barrels in which the biscuits were stored were poorly constructed and not airtight. Most of the biscuits became moldy and were inedible. Both citizens and soldiers of Spain were left with empty stomachs and a defeated empire.
Waging war is not unlike the game of football. There are two teams that study the probabilities of a possible outcome. And there are only two outcomes: winning or losing. They take stock of their adequate or inadequate manpower and equipment, sometimes making decisions out of an unshakable hope or irrational belief rather than practical considerations of readiness, let alone livelihoods. Thus, they engage under the terms and conditions of combat. Sometimes an ill-equipped country or team would certainly prefer to stop the gunfire or game prior to the last battle or fourth quarter. Wouldn’t Indianapolis have been better off if the referee blew the whistle to end the game at halftime? Wouldn’t it be better to walk away licking their wounds with a bad score rather than carry on to get slaughtered and humiliated?
In the case of the Spanish Armada, we all know the outcome. It’s a David and Goliath story. The Spanish navy should have overwhelmed the English, their fleet bloating with more cannonballs and gunpowder than England’s little galleons. The irony plays out centuries later with esteemed British actor, Peter O’Toole, starring in Don Quixote’s musical adaptation, Man of La Mancha. O’Toole leaps about with strange gusto creating quite a paradox to the small gathering of dirty, dreary peasants who watch him sing, “I am I, Don Quixote, the Man of La Mancha! My destiny calls and I go! And the wild winds of fortune will carry me onward whithersoever they blow!” In the end, the wind was in the English fleet’s favour, sending most of the Armada up the English Channel and missing their chance at glory. When the underdog wins, it’s hard to stave off the rush of adrenaline-infused celebration that sits right at the moment between disbelief and belief, the moment when the impossible is achieved.
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My youngest daughter would have been only a few weeks old when I began to take my children on weekly trips to the public library. There are one hundred libraries in Toronto, and the few I regularly visit are magical places. I am indebted to the wonderful librarians who curate and decorate the children's sections with colorful posters, comfortable places to sit and plenty of good books. I usually walked to our local branch, pushing a limousine-sized double stroller loaded down with diapers, blankets, and baby bottles. Once inside, my first stop would be the magazine rack. I’d pull off as many magazines as I could and drop them into the mesh storage basket under the stroller. Then I’d whisk over to the novels hoping to find something pulpy and trashy, a mindless page-turner I could sink my teeth into after the kids went to bed. Mommy brain is a real thing and my dampened capacity to process information made most highbrow literature unappealing.
With two squirming bodies ready to break free from their tightly clipped stroller straps, I never had a lot of time to make my selections. On one fateful morning, I never even made it to fiction. Detoured by my baby’s high-pitched squeals, I careened down Dewey Decimal’s 900s, the history stacks. There, I frantically grabbed books on different topics. Little did I know, one of those books would spur me on a quest for knowledge that would occupy my life for many years.
After a while, I would forego fiction altogether in favour of books on science, technology, spirituality, and of course, sports. I read about football before I even watched a game. I had just finished something about Charles Babbage’s first mechanical calculator, the poor man’s unfinished pipe dream, and was at a loss for what to read next when an arrogant title on the spine of a beautiful green book popped out at me, When Pride Still Mattered. Above the title was a little cameo of what looked like an unremarkable man in glasses and a fedora hat. The notion that pride was a thing of the past was absurd to me and such an intrusive declaration was infuriating. I simply couldn’t ignore it.
David Maraniss’ biography of Green Bay Packers’ coach, Vincent Lombardi, is a meticulously researched and beautifully written 504-page tribute to a man who transformed the game of football. The book opens with a description of Lombardi’s father, Harry. Each of Harry’s fingers bore the tattoo of a single letter, together they spelled, W-O-R-K / P-L-A-Y. If you see someone with that etched into their skin and they’re sporting Packers garb, you know the nature of such a fan: a life philosophy born out of deep loyalty.
I had never read anything like Maraniss' book before. Once when I was extolling the praises of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenin, my husband asked if I may be more enamored by the book’s translator, Rosemary Edmonds than the Russian author himself. Had fate led me to Maraniss' biography on Bill Clinton, would I have dedicated so much personal time following American politics? Hard to say. But my serendipitous coupling with football would not have lasted and endured if it weren’t its precursor, the Spanish Armada.
I own just as many books on the Spanish Armada as I do on football. They both occupy the same place in my mind and are cherished. My love for the battle on the gridiron and on the high seas blossomed at the same rate as the adoration I felt toward my children. Motherhood, especially with very young children, can be an all-consuming occupation. The greedy nature of it will demand almost all of one’s waking hours and parts of the self may feel abandoned. The Armada and the NFL invited me into a wonderland that balanced on a precarious thrill, the pursuit to win. The effort and logistics to plan and manage the pageantry of patriotism, week after week and throughout history, speaks something of our desire to dominate through extravagant and expensive myth making. The Spanish Armada and football are greedy attention seekers too and I simply couldn’t look away.
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Back at business school, my daughter and her group recommended that Tom Brady do a sit-down interview and apologize. She reviewed Brady’s initial tweet in which he denied any wrongdoing and thought the man—not the team—needed rehabilitation. Everyone needed to be appeased, including Patriots fans who might be steamed up, mostly because their golden boy cost them two future draft picks. My daughter suggested that Brady is treated as a different and separate entity than other quarterbacks. Though Patriot fans will embrace and celebrate him, we cannot assume that a Patriot fan will remain a Brady fan when he switches teams; the two are not mutually exclusive.
I asked her how she can possibly compare the gravity of deflategate to belugas or listeriosis. She said that any loss in football is a death, whether it be a losing game, an injured player, free agency or a scandal. The stakes are so high that grief cannot be avoided. She went on to explain that when things go wrong in football, it’s like a funeral. Men embrace and cry openly. They reminisce and wear special old clothes that remind them of the ones who passed. “Isn’t that we all do,” she asked, “when we grieve?” It’s possible men can do this together every week.
My daughter’s project received an A+ and Tom Brady was fined one million dollars. Brady just finished off his career without donning the tricorne but waving a pirate flag. I am sure many New England fans kept an eye on their boy Brady, but it would be unlikely they would have tuned in to watch a Buccaneers game if their team was playing at the same time.
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This coming fall my daughter will return to university. My youngest daughter will follow suit next year. When they were beautiful, chubby babies, I wasn’t able to imagine far into the future. The cycle of feeding, diaper changing and survival did not allow me to wonder what my daughters would become, what strides of independence and accomplishments they would make. I never imagined they would leave me, but now they are, and I couldn’t be more proud.
Another autumn will come and my home will soon be an empty nest. The days will get shorter, the temperature will drop, the trees will begin to shed their leaves. But there will always be buzz in the air, the anthem in my ear, and chili on the stove. Because the game’s about to begin.
JOYLYN CHAI is a Chinese-Jamaican Canadian educator, artist, and writer. Joylyn teaches English to newcomers in Toronto. She loves gardening, watching NFL football games and caring for her gnome collection. Her work has appeared in Thin Air Magazine, This Magazine, and The Fiddlehead.