Friday, October 18, 2002
Return to Glory
I had a forty-yardline seat at the recent gridiron battle between the University of Notre Dame Fighting Irish and the Michigan Wolverines, the shocking game in which the Irish proved that championship-caliber college football has returned to South Bend. If you’ve never been to a game, I’d urge you to go—even if you don’t love football. You don’t have to be a football fan to appreciate the sensation caused by 80,000 wishful fanatics when the ball is on the one yardline with the clock ticking down toward that apocalyptic moment when the display is all zeroes. In football, time is always running out; the world has a certain end; but within that 60-minute span, almost anything can happen. The weak can conquer the mighty, prayers can be answered almost instantly and miraculously. The fans are bursting with wishfulness, and that comes out during the game in their cheering and in other, more subtle ways that can only be appreciated at the stadium.
Now is the best time to go there. When I first arrived in South Bend in the fall of 1993, Lou Holtz was coach, and one could imagine the program soaring ever upward in perpetual victory. I had no sympathy for the team then and felt no connection to its fans. Like New York Yankees fans, they all seemed to be spoiled winners who took victory for granted. Judging only by the behavior in my little section of the stadium, I’d have to say that it really did take several years of mediocre football to make winning seem miraculous again. And isn’t winning always miraculous? Do any of us really deserve to win? Losing was rough on these fans, but I think it has transformed them. During the Davie years, anger was at first the common reaction to losing. Fans took each loss as a personal offense, as though Coach Davie had purposely set out to ruin their lives. But perhaps it was only afterwards, after the national embarrassment of having hired the ideal head coach, George O’Leary, an Irish Irish coach, who turned out to be a forger of false resumes—perhaps it was only after that hiring debacle that Irish fans could return to the starting point and begin again without impossibly high expectations—or, more precisely, with humility. Since that nadir, the blessings have fallen upon us like autumn leaves and I think perhaps we have learned to receive football victories for what they are: gifts, pure gifts that only seem to come in response to our wishes but come from some beyond over which we fans have no power.
Not that we don’t try to influence events. At the Michigan game, I was a small part of that sometimes deafening voice we call “the twelfth man.” At this game we were once even the eleventh man. The Wolverines had the ball within the Notre Dame ten yard line, and several fans behind me noticed that the team only had ten men on the field. They began to shout. We could hear others throughout the stadium calling down to the coaches, all of us together creating an inarticulate discontented rumble translatable only as a general complaint: something is wrong. Those of you who were sitting helplessly at home, believe me, we tried. We tried in so many ways to wish the team toward victory.
Every fan is guilty of magical thinking. One particularly vocal fan seated behind me had a way of saying everything three times. He commented aloud on every play, interpreted Coach Willingham’s every move, but he also had his little mantras. For instance, not long after an Irish fumble, this fan started the mantra, “Don’t fumble it, don’t fumble it, don’t fumble it,” before each probable running play. In this scientific, skeptical post-modern age, sports fans are responsible for keeping the flame of magical thinking burning. But that primitive way of thinking, as silly as it might seem on the surface, acknowledges a truth about life in general. We understand our lives as stories, and we give to our happiest stories the structure of wishes come true. We do this even against hope, because in the face of suffering and death we are all underdogs. We don’t deserve to win, but being human is about praying nevertheless for victories small and large. Gifts from the gods.
A random selection from more than 300 Michiana Chronicles -- refresh the browser to see another set:
Joe Chaney -- Return to Glory / More essays by Joe
Louise Collins -- More essays by Louise
April Lidinsky -- More essays by April
Jonathan Nashel -- More essays by Jonathan
Jeff Nixa -- More essays by Jeff
Ken Smith -- More essays by Ken
Jeanette Saddler Taylor -- More essays by Jeanette
Chronicles Home | Email:
Leave a note for any of the authors at our WebNote page, or maybe you'd like a copy of our book?
About the series
Michiana Chronicles is a series of radio essays by Jonathan Nashel, Louise Collins, Joe Chaney, Jeanette Saddler Taylor, Jeff Nixa, April Lidinsky, and Ken Smith.
Michiana is the region of north-central Indiana and southern Michigan roughly centered on South Bend, Indiana.
Michiana Chronicles airs on Fridays at 7:35 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. on WVPE (88.1 FM), the home of public radio in Elkhart / South Bend, Indiana.
| July 2008 | ||||||
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | ||
Recent pieces
Making Up on the South Shore -- As we’re approaching the Beverly Shores station I glance over and see the woman looking into a pocket mirror. Yes, you’re pretty, sister. Don’t worry about that. Then she reaches into her bag and pulls out a big pink tackle box, sets it on her lap and opens it up, revealing a whole assortment of little tubes and jars. She selects one tube, squirts some stuff onto her fingertips and starts rubbing it onto…her face. Whoa! What are you doing? By Jeff Nixa.
Time Travel in Paris -- I had studied maps of Paris and read French literature and the Parisian works of American expatriates like Stein, Hemingway, Baldwin, and Miller. I had fallen in love, of course, with my French teachers in high school and college. My prior romance with the language, art, stories, and landmarks animated the city. I remember a morning when the sun emerged and lit up the domes and towers across from where my friend and I stood on a right bank quay, and the world itself seemed like a pure gift, a fresh beginning. By Joe Chaney.
Celebrating Magna Charta Day -- Runnymede, the site of the signing of the Magna Charta, loomed right up there in my imagination with Stonehenge: a couple of historical sites that had captured my interest early on. I can still see surly, pimply-faced, bad King John in some old movie being strongly urged, that is coerced, into signing this document where he promised to behave: “The Lion in Winter,” I think. By Jeanette Saddler Taylor.
Life on the Default Setting -- That foam cup will still reside in the county landfill when our great grandchildren are driving their offspring in a nuclear-powered mini-van to gymnastics classes on the moon. "Will you look at those kids jump!" By then the landfill will be the tallest manmade feature in north-central Indiana, visible from earth orbit. Astronauts will steer their sleek ships by the neon glow of all our waste. By Ken Smith.
It’s a Long, Long, Road from May to December -- Over the years Kurt Weill’s music has inspired a legion of devotees who want to be a part of his creepy luster. Some fifty years after Weill’s death Lou Reed took a stab at getting in on this kind of cool. Now, Lou is just about as cool as there is too. In the 1960s he co-founded the rock band, The Velvet Underground, and as the story goes, only a couple of thousand copies of their first album were sold, but everyone who listened to it formed their own band. The man gives new meaning to having no vocal range, and yet conveys everything that needed to be said. By Jonathan Nashel.
Pomp and Happenstance -- Truly, the moments in our lives that really deserve a brass band and velvet robes and a basso profundo voice saying “Something BIG has happened here!” are most often happenstance, unexpected. Maybe you’ve had the experience of reading a novel or seeing a film that shifts you, profoundly, to another axis – that peoples your interior with ideas or characters that become guides – or cautionary figures – for the rest of your life. Or maybe you’ve had a conversation with someone that suddenly made your world slide sideways as you questioned your faith – or gained a new sense of it. Those are moments that warrant pomp and circumstance, but they often pass quietly, despite their transformative legacy. By April Lidinsky.
A Kid and a Rock -- But every night I come home, the kid is hammering on the rock. He’s like a little John Henry. Small stones dislodged and fell to the dirt but then larger ones emerged, and eventually the worst one of all: a granite field stone the size of a pumpkin embedded in there till the end of the world. “This is hard,” he said. “Yeah, it is,” I said, watching the woman glare at me from hell. I left town for vacation. Two weeks. I was carrying an armload of sleeping bags back around the house when I stopped. The concrete monster was gone. Just a circle of rock dust in its place, littered with stones and in the center, the big granite pumpkin. I smiled. He did it. Dang. I’m going to go hug that kid. Buy them both a pizza or something. By Jeff Nixa.
True to Type -- We talk about what we are reading, what we have read, what we’ve read about reading (God bless the Sunday New York Times Book Review section!) and what we are planning to read next. Standing in front of the bookcase, my daughter-in-law, Nancy, and I were having one of those discussions. I think that she was holding Bobbie Ann Mason’s Clear Springs; she flipped to the back and saw the page that tells which font was used in printing the book and a bit of history about that font. Nancy said, “I can’t believe that they waste a page putting that in there. Nobody cares about that!” Danger! A big, evil-mother-in-law-trap just waiting to ensnare me there! Recognizing it in time, I pulled the shreds of my seldom-worn garment of tact around myself and did not blurt out, “Are you nuts! That’s a great thing! I love it when they put that in! It’s like frosting on a cookie; it makes it ever so much better!” By Jeanette Saddler Taylor.
Jump Ball at the Hoosier Primary -- I can’t believe it! At long last, Indiana matters during the national campaign season. We’re in the news every day. We Hoosiers have been crafty, too, not tipping our hand as to whom we favor. We’ve made Indiana a real battleground state, forcing the candidates to pour ad dollars into our communities in a despairing sort of Vegas binge. Here in the second congressional district, we’re a battleground within a battleground. And permit me to announce loudly that I’m an “undecided voter.” You guessed it: a battleground within a battleground within a battleground, the center of a political universe in which not knowing what you want makes you royalty. By Joe Chaney.
Doing Algebra -- I’m doing quite a bit of algebra these days, helping our young mathematician solve homework problems. I last took algebra from Mr. Webb way back in the year 19-mumble-mumble, when President Nixon was still lovingly adding names to his enemies list. My strongest memory from Mr. Webb’s class was that he never learned his students’ names. He called everyone Babe. No matter who you were, he’d say, “Babe, put the next problem on the board. Thanks, Babe.” But he must have been a pretty good teacher, because after a quick refresher I can solve a basic problem. And so for the moment I still have a role to play in our teen’s life. By Ken Smith.
Skirting the Issue -- Now, Land’s End and other sensible clothiers exploit this swimsuit anxiety brilliantly to play on both the intelligence and self-loathing of grown-up women. For one thing, you practically have to have your Ph.D. in Swimsuit-ology to wade through the thick catalogues hitting mailboxes now, with bold headlines promising “Flattering Solutions” – implying every body is a problem. In fact, you can shop by “anxiety zones,” choosing which body part you think most needs to be slimmed, supported, disguised, and, somehow, covered, all while revealing more than most of us care to face in full-length mirrors, fully clothed. By April Lidinsky.
Baby, It’s Cold Inside -- After you see these photos you will probably wonder what we can do to prevent every single last iceberg from melting away and becoming history. Here, I confess, I have no idea. I’ve heard it all before: lower carbon footprints, drive hybrids, recycle with abandon, hate the oil companies, love to read in the dark, you name it. And you know what: none of this is going to bring back these icebergs or grow new ones or do anything to stop our relentless destruction of the earth, let alone quell the naysayers on global warming. I recently heard on NPR that an iceberg the size of Connecticut just broke apart and is melting away. Now, I’ve been in Connecticut many times and I still can’t wrap my head around this little fun fact. What can possibly be the size of a state? By Jonathan Nashel.
Categories
Archives and syndication
- By author
- By category
- By date
- RSS 2.0 syndication
- Technorati Profile