When was the beginning of the end? And when did we say, Valete, futbol? (Because we have.)
I have sworn off football. All of it, the NFL and its minor league system; the college brand run by the buffoons at the NCAA and their vast publicly supported aliteracy varmints, the American Universities; and especially the commentators and their genius analysis of anything. I often wonder where they get these commentators. It’s like they recruit them from Congress, or the congressional equivalent–the third grade. In many cases, both are only a few steps from aliterate to illiterate.
George Allen with his team (photo, Pro Football HOF)
Once, football was a game, a sport, a pivot of the real world, away from problems and their concomitant responsibilities. It paralleled activities like hunting or fishing, which were not necessarily meant to put food on the table but were relaxing (though strenuous —ironic?). And to put no fine point on it, a manly activity. I offer, though I again put no fine point on it, that both my wife and my mother enjoyed football (viewing) but also understood and participated in firing a 12-gauge at a bird or two, a time or two.
They cared not for deer hunting at deer camps, with the men relaxing as boys, chewing and spitting and “beer-ing it up,” which, of course, increased the once-prevalent but now overflowing cursing lexicon. They were ladies, and not of the modern tattooed-nose, tongue-piercing, blue-haired bunch whose every other declaration is “f*** this or that.”
I made that last clarification so that I didn’t have to clutter the point with the modern notion that every instance of saying something is manly must be footnoted with the screaming: “AND WOMEN TOO, AND WOMEN TOO!” In my view, those who write or speak with the grammatically clumsy (albeit incorrect) “men AND women” in a generic statement are dopes (or cowards, more likely).
I am probably the last guy on the planet who wants to puke every time he hears that begging PC blather! But, now, after allowing myself to drift a bit, back to the diseased and rotted beast that was once a tradition (of men, damn you, PC-crats), football.
Football, a game once masculine, is now, without men.
Landry is carried off accompanied by Rayfield Wright (photo, NY Daily News)
Looking back, I think I really started drifting away back when Vince Lombardi died, but no later than when Tom Landry was unceremoniously dumped. But that was the NFL. Highly paid rubes of the pigskin currency had consumed the game. It wasn’t that characters like Landry were unwanted, but that men with character like Landry weren’t wanted.
But I suspected that the college brand was not far behind, with its pimp, the NFL, really salivating over its free farm system, paid by the overpaid universities and the rah-rah supporters. Once the halls of ivy, now the halls of poison ivy.
These same supporters who claim great love for their alma mater but are paying for these modern Roman universities to be overrun by the contemporary barbarians! Much, of course, supplemented by the “Roman” citizen with the university savings and LOAN system.
And we wonder why this country is $40 trillion in debt! A little high school Latin: panem et circenses. Now, peanuts and popcorn and football.
And the fans cheered, because Coach not only didn’t win every game, but he didn’t get to that new magic moment developed by the gridiron gurus: THE NATIONAL PLAYOFF.
And as several have said, “We have GOT to have a TRUE national champion!” Others (like me) ask: Why? With all that is wrong in the world, we MUST have a college football champion. A “true” one, of course! Another puke moment.
This new playoff system, of course, has brought about the latest confab of which school teams participate in screaming because it’s not fair to those teams NOT ranked as the top one or two.
College football has, of course, caved to the bread and circuses character of the NFL. Money is no object because the object is money. If a college coach is 8-4 for his first two seasons, he or she almost certainly will be fired with a modest $15-50 million severance check. Nice work if you can not only get it and fortuitously lose it.
It now must be settled like that ugly sister, the basketball bunch, where these same “LOAN companies” allow a playoff system where almost every team participates (the canard from T-ball that everyone gets a trophy). This basketball kinship has appropriately been named “March Madness.” What else?
I suggest for sister’s brother’s title: “Football Follies,” though “follies” may be redundant.
And, of course, the anchor of this prominent fat university/alumni ship of fools is the athlete himself–who gets paid. And he not only gets paid like a pro (that he has become), but he can drift between universities through some magical “portal” system (a better name would be “porta potty”).
Graphic courtesy The Medium
Graphic courtesy Reaper Patches
Fine, with the pay, I suppose. But when does this fellow find time to go to any sustained classes for any practical or academic degree between universities (besides General Studies or Happy-Go-Lucky studies or Woke Studies, or Women Studies, or whatever Studies)?
Maybe they should teach them a little Latin. That is, if they could find a professor who actually has high school skills. The players are getting much of the bread for performing in the circus. At least they should be taught (for the few that want to learn) where the phrase came from.
I’ll bet Robert Neyland knew.
Tempus fugit.
Valete futbol.
_________
Paul H. Yarbrough is originally from Jackson, Mississippi. He has lived in Houston, Texas, for the past forty years. He has published short stories, flash fiction, and essays in a variety of forums. His first novel, Mississippi Cotton, was published in 2011. His second novel, A Mississippi Whisper, was published in 2014. His third book, Brother’s Blood: A Louisiana Novel, was published in 2017. Paul’s fourth book, The Yeller Rose of Texas, was released in 2020. All books are available for purchase on Amazon.com.
