Friday Night Slights
By TIMOTHY EGAN, NYT
You didn’t have to be Michelin-man big to play football on my team in high school, though it helped in moving slabs of engorged sophomore on third down. You didn’t have to be gazelle-quick, though speed was how you dodged the less fleet-footed going for a cheap shot. What you needed, most, was an ability to absorb pain.
They didn’t put it that way, the coaches with their clipboards and barking bromides. “Suck it up” is what they said. As when you took a hit that sent you to a black-and-white world, enveloped in the wraparound sound of a television test pattern, the sky blurred. As when you saw a compound fracture on the field, a leg bone exposed and white and bloodless.
And when a handful of the biggest boys with the smallest minds picked on a vulnerable member of the team. The victim, the kid who faced the serrated teases, was supposed to suck it up, to man up, and — above all — to keep it in the locker room.
These memories came to mind after reading about the brutal dysfunction inside the Miami Dolphins football team, where the question is not so much did one player bully another with racial insults, pranks and demands for large sums of money, but whether all of this is just part of making a big man less soft. You know, football players doing football things. Some people are astonished that Jonathan Martin, a 6-foot-5 tackle, could actually be emotionally damaged by taunts from a teammate. Can you possibly hurt a hulk with words?
(More here.)
You didn’t have to be Michelin-man big to play football on my team in high school, though it helped in moving slabs of engorged sophomore on third down. You didn’t have to be gazelle-quick, though speed was how you dodged the less fleet-footed going for a cheap shot. What you needed, most, was an ability to absorb pain.
They didn’t put it that way, the coaches with their clipboards and barking bromides. “Suck it up” is what they said. As when you took a hit that sent you to a black-and-white world, enveloped in the wraparound sound of a television test pattern, the sky blurred. As when you saw a compound fracture on the field, a leg bone exposed and white and bloodless.
And when a handful of the biggest boys with the smallest minds picked on a vulnerable member of the team. The victim, the kid who faced the serrated teases, was supposed to suck it up, to man up, and — above all — to keep it in the locker room.
These memories came to mind after reading about the brutal dysfunction inside the Miami Dolphins football team, where the question is not so much did one player bully another with racial insults, pranks and demands for large sums of money, but whether all of this is just part of making a big man less soft. You know, football players doing football things. Some people are astonished that Jonathan Martin, a 6-foot-5 tackle, could actually be emotionally damaged by taunts from a teammate. Can you possibly hurt a hulk with words?
(More here.)
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