ON: Michael Irvin

Many NFL fans have disliked Michael Irvin for twenty years.  As a Dallas Cowboys fan I rooted for him for the reasons sports fans root for players of questionable morality: he won games for the laundry I pledged allegiance to, (that being the white shirt, the silver pants, the blue star).  That's basic sports fan math: your bad guys aren't as bad as the bad guys on the other team -- rooting interest.  But I love Michael Irvin; I love the idea of Michael Irvin.  I love him for the reasons fans who romanticize code words for white players like "grit" "toughness" and "smarts", hate him: he's the ghettoest motherfucker that ever played.  A man who had the "grit" "toughness" and "smarts" to go from the Lauderdale black ghetto to Miami to Dallas to Canton.

I love Mike Irvin because his nickname is Playmaker.  And he was.  

I love Michael Irvin because he was the 15th of 17 kids.  

If you ever ate cheerios in water it's an easy kinship when you hear how poor someone was before they got rich; Michael Irvin was Elvis -- Ft. Lauderdale = Tupelo.

I love Irvin because when he was drafted by the Dallas Cowboys he grabbed a cardboard cutout of legendary coach Tom Landry, (that was only slightly less stoic then the real Tom Landry), hugged it, and with the rarest sublimity shouted, "This is my new daddy!"  Greater even than it seems because a 20 year old Irvin knew exactly what kind of master/slave shit he was toying with; he meant it reverently and sarcastically at the same time.  This duality is what great men are made from.  It's the kind of charged wordplay one imagines Julius Caesar winning over pleb, equites, and senatores alike.  

And speaking of Gaius Jujube Kaiser, one can imagine him answering his enemies on his alleged part in the Cataline Conspiracy wearing this:

Playmaker's day in court

I love Michael Irvin not because he was the ringleader of the infamous "White House", a residence just a few blocks from Valley Ranch, (the Cowboys practice facility), where the "criminal element" on the roster, (read: black and from Florida), enjoyed days and nights of the Nino Brown lifestyle: cocaine, strippers, 90's RnB, and Scarface viewings, but because he's the archetypal "first player at practice, and last to leave" despite this lifestyle; as many teammates have confirmed over the years, "Mike hadn't yet been to sleep when he was first at practice."  Still fucked up Mike would go out, and work the other guys, (other guys = elite athletes), until the other guys quit.  I love Playmaker because he partied like he was punishing himself; he partied like a Norman Mailer character: the poisonous tincture of the partying and the hard work, that double dose, the light and the dark, make Playmaker Playmaker.

I love Michael Irvin because "Prime" couldn't cover him.  1994 NFC Title Game.  The greatest loss in Cow history not named the Ice Bowl.  Where the Boys go down three scores, and Playmaker almost brings them back by making Deion Sanders, (in his Mercenary Defensive POY campaign for the Niners), look like a grasping little turd.  

12 balls. 192 yards. 2 TDs.  A game away from what would have been four straight Super Bowls.
"almost brings" is awkwardly written, I know.  But not for nothing, heartbreaking losses are like something out of an episode of Lost, the memory is a moment hanging seductively in time, in the ever-present tense; at the point of return, from what happened, to what so easily could have.  So Irvin forever brings them back, that's where he is in time for me even as I see him on television eighteen years later as a football commentator.    

I love Michael Irvin because he comprehends his demons and his shit behavior.  This is in no way an excuse anymore than a tough upbringing is, but there are many bad actors in pro sports with legal history like Irvin's, (linked here), who can't speak at the NFL Rookie Symposium, in front of 253 young men just drafted into the league, about it like this:

Though to be fair these other legally challenged ballers never stabbed a teammate over a bad haircut like Irvin did.  Wait for it.  With the scissors.

I love Michael Irvin because he got in trouble with ESPN, (his employer at the time), for saying current Cowboys QB Tony Romo's athletic ability might have come from slaves in his family tree.  holy shit.  Words, words, words, as Hamlet said.

This same Michael Irvin also got in trouble for agreeing with Rush Limbaugh in the latter's short-lived ESPN hosting gig, that Donovan McNabb was an overhyped suckpill the NFL was pumping up because he was a black quarterback.

I love Michael Irvin because as a kid my team/his team were three-time champs, and that team will always be The Team to me.  A team with my favorite player/greatest runner of all-time/Dancing With The Stars Champ/Beard Dye Pitchman Emmitt Smith, and Troy Aikman, and the aforementioned Prime Sanders, and Charles "I Masturbate In the Locker Room, Was Cut By SF For Threatening To Murder Steve Young" Haley,  and Nate "80 lbs of Weed" Newton, and Jay Novacek, Moose Johnston, Larry Allen, Darren Woodson.  A team that played football, not this bitchy West Coast dink it, dunk it, not allowed to cover, not allowed to hit, Arena League bullshit the NFL is now.  

I love Michael Irvin because his career ended with a busted spine, carted off the field at the Vet in Philly while 50,000 Eagles fans cheered his fall.  Not to get too high-falutin, but it brings to mind Caesar again,

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world

Like a Colossus; and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs, and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves. 

Irvin put it differently when on the Jim Rome Show, he said he took it as a compliment.  "I'd been killing them for ten years, and they finally got me." -- This a man speaking on the last time he played the game he loved, to practice the craft that supported his family.

I love Mike Irvin because he's a second ballot Hall of Famer.  This is akin to Taxi Driver not winning Best Picture -- it's better this way.   Particularly because he gave this speech: 

Straight Fucking Playmaker

Michael Irvin was the last player drafted by Tom Landry to retire from the NFL, he is the axis point; the storied past, struggling present, and inevitable front page future of the most grandiose professional sports franchise in American history.  His braggadocio, his encompassing presence;  a sweet demon shredding out from under how foolish IT all is: I'll work my ass off for the team's objective, but I'm not gonna sleep the night before the big game; his understanding what he IS even as he's is'ing it, makes Playmaker an existential touchstone.  Irvin is a great American novel.  Someday.