Flannery O’Connor
Sports Saturday
For American football fans, February is the cruelest month. Suddenly there are no Sundays to look forward to anymore. Suddenly there are no players or coaches or owners to excoriate. Suddenly there is, well, emptiness.
It may be pushing it, but for me, the feeling is captured by a 1960’s Flannery O’Connor story.
Pushing it, I say, because there seems little resemblance between “Everything that Rises Must Converge” and post-Super Bowl-partum depression. The story, after all, is about a son, a college graduate, who feels a perpetual sense of grievance against his mother, with whom he is still living. And certainly there are things to complain about, starting with her upper class airs (unmatched by their current lives), her never-ending stream of insipid platitudes, her maddening self complacency, and her racism. He styles himself as a liberal, but as the story progresses one gets a sense that he is one only to spite her.
His resentment comes from the fact that he is dependent upon her—a truth that becomes horribly apparent to him at the end when she suddenly dies. Here’s the final paragraph:
“Wait here, wait here!” he cried and jumped up and began to run for help toward a cluster of lights he saw in the distance ahead of him. “Help, help!” he shouted, but his voice was thin, scarcely a thread of sound. The lights drifted farther away the faster he ran and his feet moved numbly as if they carried him nowhere. The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow.
In the course of a season, football fans experience euphoric highs and crushing lows. They resent the team that has raised their hopes. If it’s a badly run team—our local team, the Washington Redskins, is a very badly run team—then it’s even worse. The fans rage and rage. But they can’t leave.
And then, when the season ends once and for all, it’s as though they are swept under by a tide of darkness. Shouldn’t they feel liberated from the end of this emotional roller coaster? But they aren’t. Because now that Mama NFL is no longer around, they have to become responsible adults. And this means facing up to a world of guilt and sorrow.
And if there is no football next year–a strong likelihood with the owners threatening to lock out the players–then there will be more facing up than normal.
