BY STEVE JANOSKI
As a vicious hater of the winter season, I can't pretend that I'm happy the temperatures are cooling off. Fishing season's over, working out outdoors is more brutal, and baseball season winds down (although being a Red Sox fan, one might call that a blessing this year.)
One of the only good things about the death of summer is that it means that football season begins. It's been my favorite sport since I was a kid, and though its recently been usurped by boxing, it still has a strong place in my heart.
A lifelong Giants fan, I'd wake up early and watch all of the NFL shows on the sports networks when I was young, and curse them all when they picked the Giants to lose during the dark days of the early 90s (as they invariably did).
I read all of the magazines and every article in the papers that even mentioned the team, and knew their roster inside and out along with the strengths and weaknesses of each player.
I put a lot on that team back then, but that changed.
I'm not sure what happened. Maybe I learned the lesson early that you never put too much on something you can't control, like a sports team, and once I began working on Sundays, I rarely got to watch the team with any regularity.
It's also been disheartening in the past two decades to watch the impact that things like free agency have had on football- in an era when players sometimes play for a team for only a year or two before departing, you find yourself rooting more for a uniform color than for a team.
But New York Jets Coach Rex Ryan said something during the last episode of HBO's "Hard Knocks" series that struck me.
The show, which follows the Jets through their preseason training camp, gives an inside look at all of the trials and tribulations of the prima donnas that are so often found littered on the football fields these days, and while it is intensely interesting, it's often disappointing to see some of the attitudes of professional players.
When you've got enough money to fill a swimming pool and an entourage of nobodies telling you how spectacular you are, I guess it's easy to get a little… "self-important."
But when Ryan's son's high school team came to the Jets camp, he began to talk to one of the other coaches about how seeing high school players always "brings him back," and that no matter how far up he goes, he always looks at the young kids and thinks that once, "that was us."
"Look how far we've come…" he said.
As a former high school football player and as a reporter who spends many cool autumn nights on the sidelines of various teams from our local area, I can tell you that Ryan really gets it.
I never went anywhere playing football, but being on those sidelines brings back a slew of memories myself. The bright lights, the electricity in the air before a big game, the coaches walking through the lines as their players stretch, shaking hands and talking to the key guys.
Because the sport is taken very seriously by those that play, it's sometimes easy to forget that for many of them, this will be the last time that they're playing football…just because.
Most will never play again. They're not good enough, or they'll get hurt, or they'll have other responsibilities that will take over their lives.
The ones that do go on to play in college, or to the pros, might accomplish the world…but the world is watching. It's not just "for fun" anymore. It's for contracts, for money, for status, for fame; all of those things that lead men to their downfall.
But for a few years, when they're very young, it's not a whole lot different than playing out in the fields around their elementary schools.
And those years, that's when the football is worth watching- when they've got their hearts and souls in it with nothing to gain except victory, and it's still some time before they'll be ruined by the flashing lights of this greedy world.
So do yourself a favor this weekend, football fans. Turn off the TV, and don't worry about how the pros are doing. Go down to your local high school, and watch those kids beat the hell out of each other on the gridiron.
The pros don't care whether you go to the game or not, whether you watch or not. But the kids will notice that there's more people, and they'll play harder for it, appreciate it.
And to watch that kind of purity in a sport these days… that's something that's worth paying the price of admission for.
Showing posts with label HBO. Show all posts
Showing posts with label HBO. Show all posts
Monday, November 15, 2010
Monday, October 25, 2010
Big Easy’s pain strikes close to home
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
By Steve Janoski
When the New Orleans Saints won the Super Bowl this past February amongst a chorus of “Who dats” and pre-Mardi Gras debauchery, we all heard about was how good this would be for the people of the city after the apocalyptic destruction that Hurricane Katrina had heaped upon them.
Katrina? I thought. Wasn’t that like five years ago?
Saying that the Saints winning the Super Bowl made people forget about Katrina seemed like saying the Bears want to win this year so Chicagoans can get over the great fire of 1871.
After five years, I thought, the city was probably back to where it was before with high-rises a Superdome and Cajun food, because this is America, and we rebuild speedily and without mercy — and I rooted against the Saints because of this.
How wrong I was.
I didn’t understand this until I stood in Pequannock’s lower end last month, and saw for myself what a flood does. It not only destroys houses, but after throwing up all of the trash and sewage we dump in it, sucks the people’s spirits with it on its return to its banks.
It was in the despondent eyes peaking out from under slouched hats as the men gazed towards their swamped homes, or the aimless wandering that people do when they have nowhere to go, nothing to do except stand in the rain.
The only chorus in Pequannock that day was the rattling machine-gun song fashioned from the generator engines that showed that some folks just wouldn’t leave, come hell or higher water.
The cleanup has been massive, and the reconstruction will be that much harder.
Many people have had enough, and are looking to be bought out so they never have to deal with a watery plague ever again; ugly catchwords and phrases like “FEMA,” “catastrophe,” and “Army Corps of Engineers” are uttered in our own streets.
Coinciding appropriately with our own flooding, HBO has begun running a new drama called “Treme,” which focuses on the people of New Orleans immediately after Katrina — and finally the vicious picture has begun to gather in my head.
The Pequannock flooding was unruly — the New Orleans flooding was armed to the teeth while on steroids and meth.
We’ve all seen the pictures of the bodies floating in the hurricane water, heard the ugly stories about the armed mobs and the utter devastation — we’ve been under a media inundation for the past five years about Katrina that rivals the height of the waters themselves.
Under those conditions, it becomes easy to have a calloused heart about the city and to believe the positively selfish idea that, “It’s their problem. We’ve all got our own.”
But Treme is the first show that’s put a regular face on the people and doesn’t ask us to pity them, but to just acknowledge that they’re still there.
It is written with the colorful flair and fiery style that only New Orleans has, and writer-producer David Simon focuses (as he did with Baltimore in his previous series “The Wire”) on the city as a living, breathing character, not simply a place where people live.
The human characters’ eyes hold the reflections of the those shattered neighborhoods in the pictures we’ve all looked away from, while the city’s character stems from all the things that New Orleans has become famous for, from the jazz players (many of whom play themselves in the show) to the food to…yes, its football team.
So I take it back, Saints.
Your city needed that win to strengthen its spirit, to remind the people that the Superdome is more than just an evacuation site, and that if a team once nicknamed the “Aint’s” can beat Peyton Manning in the Super Bowl, anything can happen.
I hope that it steels the spines of that trickle of people who are, five years later, just returning to their homes, and makes them fiercely determined to build New Orleans into the great city it once was, a city that, in John Goodman’s character’s words from Treme, “lives in the imagination of the world.”
If it does, then that game was worth its weight in old New Orleans rum.
By Steve Janoski
When the New Orleans Saints won the Super Bowl this past February amongst a chorus of “Who dats” and pre-Mardi Gras debauchery, we all heard about was how good this would be for the people of the city after the apocalyptic destruction that Hurricane Katrina had heaped upon them.
Katrina? I thought. Wasn’t that like five years ago?
Saying that the Saints winning the Super Bowl made people forget about Katrina seemed like saying the Bears want to win this year so Chicagoans can get over the great fire of 1871.
After five years, I thought, the city was probably back to where it was before with high-rises a Superdome and Cajun food, because this is America, and we rebuild speedily and without mercy — and I rooted against the Saints because of this.
How wrong I was.
I didn’t understand this until I stood in Pequannock’s lower end last month, and saw for myself what a flood does. It not only destroys houses, but after throwing up all of the trash and sewage we dump in it, sucks the people’s spirits with it on its return to its banks.
It was in the despondent eyes peaking out from under slouched hats as the men gazed towards their swamped homes, or the aimless wandering that people do when they have nowhere to go, nothing to do except stand in the rain.
The only chorus in Pequannock that day was the rattling machine-gun song fashioned from the generator engines that showed that some folks just wouldn’t leave, come hell or higher water.
The cleanup has been massive, and the reconstruction will be that much harder.
Many people have had enough, and are looking to be bought out so they never have to deal with a watery plague ever again; ugly catchwords and phrases like “FEMA,” “catastrophe,” and “Army Corps of Engineers” are uttered in our own streets.
Coinciding appropriately with our own flooding, HBO has begun running a new drama called “Treme,” which focuses on the people of New Orleans immediately after Katrina — and finally the vicious picture has begun to gather in my head.
The Pequannock flooding was unruly — the New Orleans flooding was armed to the teeth while on steroids and meth.
We’ve all seen the pictures of the bodies floating in the hurricane water, heard the ugly stories about the armed mobs and the utter devastation — we’ve been under a media inundation for the past five years about Katrina that rivals the height of the waters themselves.
Under those conditions, it becomes easy to have a calloused heart about the city and to believe the positively selfish idea that, “It’s their problem. We’ve all got our own.”
But Treme is the first show that’s put a regular face on the people and doesn’t ask us to pity them, but to just acknowledge that they’re still there.
It is written with the colorful flair and fiery style that only New Orleans has, and writer-producer David Simon focuses (as he did with Baltimore in his previous series “The Wire”) on the city as a living, breathing character, not simply a place where people live.
The human characters’ eyes hold the reflections of the those shattered neighborhoods in the pictures we’ve all looked away from, while the city’s character stems from all the things that New Orleans has become famous for, from the jazz players (many of whom play themselves in the show) to the food to…yes, its football team.
So I take it back, Saints.
Your city needed that win to strengthen its spirit, to remind the people that the Superdome is more than just an evacuation site, and that if a team once nicknamed the “Aint’s” can beat Peyton Manning in the Super Bowl, anything can happen.
I hope that it steels the spines of that trickle of people who are, five years later, just returning to their homes, and makes them fiercely determined to build New Orleans into the great city it once was, a city that, in John Goodman’s character’s words from Treme, “lives in the imagination of the world.”
If it does, then that game was worth its weight in old New Orleans rum.
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