Sports are fun. Sometimes they even fill up neat narratives as smoothly as if they were booked by wrestling promoters. But often times not. In these times, when say, your team is rostered with dirt bags, or (worse), chokers, one needs find a way to explain away the trolls. It's all a fascinating bit of cognitive dissonance. The question is: why do people need an excuse for supporting dirt bags. Throwing a football is beauty, just as Van Gogh's sunflowers and stars are; that one is art doesn't disqualify the shallower beauty as transcendent. Beauty is a universal country, all of us blind patriots.
When I was a boy my football heroes were just that, heroes. It was biblical, and Emmitt Smith was Jesus -- I can tell you I had the whole gimmick worked out as to why Emmitt Smith was better than Barry Sanders at running the football. I was no football atheist. I was a kid true believer. I admired this athlete. I attributed to this athlete qualities such as work ethic, perseverance, and heart; these attributes became far more important than the attributes that may have been lacking in him, and greater in others, in this case: elite athleticism. Cognitive dissonance, like me working the blue collar angle with Emmitt, is easy and uncomplicated, so long as the object of your affection does not fail the narrative you construct; in the case of Emmitt Smith, he never failed me other than to get old; the worst personality defect ever attributed to Emmitt Smith was that he had the mind of a businessman -- hardly transcendent, but not exactly Michael Jackson in a house full of kids. When fandom gets icky as in the Michael Jackson case, or when Jim Brown throws a woman out a window, or Lance Armstrong dopes, or the New England Patriots get into Spygate -- here is where the conspiracy theories come out, the "everyone was doing it", or "people were out to get them", stories -- (perhaps you have a few friends who run this gimmick in defending their favored politician?) -- it is icky here because the person is now desperately defending indefensible behavior, or failure, and for what? It isn't necessary to defend joy you have already felt, so what is it you are defending? The answer is injured tribalism. Had Emmitt Smith pissed positive for steroids, it would have done a number to my blue collar romanticism over his work ethic, and my identification as a fan of everything Dallas Cowboys. If you made Barack Obama your savior, and it turns out he is merely mortal, you might have a time reconciling it, or you could just say: "Election night in that field was a great night.".
Tom Brady is clutch, except he is and he isn't, which is to say, he is a an elite quarterback at not making mistakes, just not as magical as he seemed ten years ago, when he won three super bowls, and his first eleven playoff games -- Brady is like a poker player that went on a ridiculous run of cards, and given how hot the cards were running, he did everything right; and since then, however those cards are running, he manages those cards beautifully, just not magically. But grown men will argue with me that he is magical, a gridiron Gandalf, full of wonders. Because the cognitive dissonance of fandom tells these fans that the three championships Tom Brady won by three points were won via "the Patriot Way", whereas when the super bowl he lost by four points comes up, they remember every single call that didn't go their way. Eli Manning's transcendance was fluky and against the rules.
I won't disagree with Pats fans about the helmet catch, just that it is no more unfair or fluky than the tuck rule. The truth of Tom Brady is that he is great, and also his career, in regards to the magic of how it started, regressed to the median -- it was a market correction, even as the player himself became better than the player he was when he won his titles.
Ahh the wonders of sabermetrics. Sabermetrics are the new stats. Stats devised by MIT eggheads and the like to more accurately, more scientifically, assess, and predict excellence in sports. Nouveau stat lines for the degenerate gambler and sports atheist, wherein the athletic achievement is no longer sappy narrative, but some kind of obsessive modern autistic math game. Simplest explanation: better stats for calculating individual greatness inside a team sport; take all the grit, and clutch, and heart away; who performs the best in the theoretical vacuum introduced by these shiny better stats? This is the world all the Madden kids, (like me), have grown up into with our childish sports fantasies.
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