The Super Bowl has come and gone and, although my team lost, I appreciate the fact that the American city most in need of a boost received one. Before the football season entirely fades from memory, I want to share the story of my incursion into the sports blogosphere and how I carried the torch of Beowulf to Indianapolis Colts fan websites.
Prior to the conference championship game, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek post comparing Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning to Beowulf and New York Jets coach Rex Ryan to Grendel. I then did something I had never done before: I summarized the article and posted it as a message on StampedeBlue, one of these websites.
Some of the responses I received back were great. “So Peyton is gong to tear Rex Ryan’s arm off and beat him with it?” one wrote. “I’d pay to see that,” wrote a second. “Aha!” wrote a third, “so that is how Ryan got so big. He was eating humans!” And that led into a discussion of the movie Soylent Green.
This was just the beginning. I compared Viking quarterback Brett Favre, following his battering at the hands of the Saints, to the bull in the Ralph Hodgson poem by that name. Age, I imagined, was hovering over Favre like vultures: “Flocking round him from the skies,/Waiting for the flesh that dies.”
Then I wrote a piece of doggerel that got picked up by a second Colts website. (There are at least three out there.) Then I wrote an article on how Indianapolis Colts coach Jim Caldwell, a former English major, employs language poetically to inspire his team.
This piece used up a few of my 15 minutes of fame. Paul Kuharsky, a columnist for ESPN’s on-line sports magazine, wrote about it after being alerted by my son Darien and provided a link. Suddenly my website, which averages 50-70 hits a day, had 746 visits one day and 286 the following.
After the Colts lost, I saw one last bit of good that Beowulf could do. Fans, who live and die with their teams, were suffering and Beowulf specializes in suffering. Some Colts diehards, I thought, might appreciate seeing their pain poetically expressed.
I therefore posted the passage of Grendel screaming after he loses his arm, along with some follow-up advice:
Then an extraordinary
wail arose . . . ,
a God-cursed scream and strain of catastrophe,
the howl of the loser, the lament of the hell-serf
keening his wound.
Here’s the advice that Beowulf gives us for when, like Grendel, we feel torn apart: Don’t pretend that it doesn’t hurt or try to cope by telling yourself it was just a game. After all, our hearts have just been broken. Let the loss drag you into a dark mire, let it pound at your chest armor with its knife. This is a time for grieving. We can worry about swimming to the surface later.
The passage gave people a chance to grieve. “Oh lord, does it hurt!” wrote one. Wrote another,
Thanks, I really needed to hear that. For the past 12 hours I’ve been trying to be strong, but now I realize that it’s okay to be sad, to be heartbroken, to be disappointed. I guess it’s hard because there’s no one person that I can blame. It was the team’s failure last night, and I have to accept that. The next 6-7 months will be hard without any Colts football. I doubt that I’ll mourn that long. Maybe today, but I have to get over it. But I do need to cry it out.
I wrote a reply to this latter comment:
If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that to push one’s hurt under without acknowledging it just means that it sits like an icy lump inside. There is a lake (or mere) in Beowulf, where Grendel and his mother live, which is frozen on the surface but which burns at night. We may think we’re being strong in the face of heartbreak when we are just being icy numb. The real story is not the outward midwestern reserve but the angry monsters that writhe in our depths. Better to acknowledge them and the hurt—it’s a kind of respect to the depth of your attachment.
Not everyone was impressed with our attempts to pick each other up. “Please spare us the melodrama,” wrote one reader.
That last comment got me thinking. It’s true that we were being melodramatic. But then again, what are sports but melodrama? In fact, venturing into sports websites has convinced me that their defining characteristic is melodrama. Fans write in to grieve and vent, to complain about certain decisions or people and celebrate others, to fixate on the past and dream about the future. It’s a community support group.
To speak in gender stereotypes for a moment, sports are to men what soap operas are to women, on-going narratives that symbolically articulate many of their deepest anxieties and desires. A sport like football is filled with stories of men who succeed and men who fail, young men who have to prove themselves and aging men who wonder if they still have it, men striving for individual glory and men trying to work as a team.
Talking about sports that way makes them sound a lot like Beowulf, a male melodrama from the 8th century. I have just been bringing the two worlds together.
