“You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes.”
This morning yet another day is upon us. No cataclysmic refusal of a sun to rise, no ridicule followed the performance of young men in a game to my own personal nightmares. I am reminded that we are fans. Nothing more and nothing less.
Fans are a very important piece to the puzzle that is college athletics. There is a sort of tribal or territorial pride involved. We spend our money, we cheer, we revel in victory and agonize in defeat. But too often we put ourselves ahead of the truth – that which is most important. The players and coaches care more than do the fans. When we got up this morning, our future was not dependent upon the outcome of last night’s game. Some of us will work today, most of us tomorrow.
But there are 11 full time coaches and 85 scholarship football players who are more distraught over the performance last night. They fought with their blood, sweat and tears to bring fans a moment of perceived joy, glory, happiness, which ever adjective best describes why we revel in victory. Rodney Hardrick has had eight major surgeries during his football career and faces a ninth this off-season. He is college football.
What is often lost after such a devastating defeat on the field is that wins and losses are only a small piece of the puzzle. Every year 25 or so young men arrive on a college campus having not really known what it is like to be an adult. Coaches take these young men and attempt to develop them into men who will bring positive to the world. The young men, while spending 20 hours per week in football related activities, also attend college full time attempting to not only develop into men of character, but educated men of character.
This, you see, is the primary objective of college football. Education. Character. Of course, coaches are measured by more than just graduation rates and character development. Wins matter. But as we wake up this morning, we have become Hemingway’s expatriates.
“You’re a fan. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake SEC standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with winning. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are a college football fan, see? You hang around message boards.”
These moments should be what they are for us. We are fans and we will feel upset, betrayed almost, when the team for whom we cheer somehow lets us down. But I can guarantee you that the players and coaches are considerably more ruminative about their troubles in San Antonio than any of us could hope to be.
I woke up today to snow. I hate snow. But my dog ran and played in the stuff and that brought joy to my wife and, consequently, myself. It is just a game. A game played by young men. At the end of the day, it was great joy to watch this season unfold at times, and painful at others.
My pain, though, is temporary. There is another season to come. A season which will begin with the same hope as all seasons.
Go Ducks.
Thank you for this perspective. Great! I have posted it on O Positive Ducks on Facebook.
Penny, thank you for sharing. I am so grateful that so many people have had the opportunity to read this… I always worry about sounding too 'holier than thou' when posting something like this and I felt honored that Rodney chose to share this on his FaceBook page.
Scott Reed, you must have crawled into my brain because I have been thinking of so much of what you have said, and I could never have put it so eloquently. Think I said in an earlier post that our boys can be proud of themselves NO need to hang heads or feel they have let us down. THINGS happen and this is just one of those things. There is tomorrow, next week, next month and NEXT SEASON. Go heal yourselves look back and see where things went wrong then rectify them. I am one DUCK FAN that never looses the dream that you will survive to come back and be better next year than you were in 2015. You my young men are a CLASS ACT, and you can be proud of that. Looking to see you again in 2016 to do what you do best WIN don't let one game define who and what you are. You are OREGON DUCKS and WE are your SUPPORTERS. Go forward and God Bless.
Thank you very much, especially for calling me young! That does not happen as frequently as I would prefer.