Matisse, “Icarus”
Sports Saturday
What a football game we witnessed last Sunday between Denver and Dallas! As an ardent Peyton Manning fan, I was of course delighted by both his performance and the fact that Denver won. At the same time, my heart went out to Tony Romo, who played the game of his life and yet still lost. I therefore appreciated a poem that Sports Illustrated ran in honor of the Dallas quarterback.
Sports writer Doug Farrar sees Romo as an Icarus figure and explores his style of play with the aid of a 1950 Edward Field lyric. Icarus, of course, is the Greek youth who escapes from his Crete prison with wings that his inventor father Daedalus has fashioned. In the exuberance of flight, however, he ignores his father’s warnings about flying too close to the sun. He plunges to his death after the sun melts the wax holding the wings together. Here’s the poem:
Icarus
By Edward Field
Only the feathers floating around the hat
Showed that anything more spectacular had occurred
Than the usual drowning. The police preferred to ignore
The confusing aspects of the case,
And the witnesses ran off to a gang war.
So the report filed and forgotten in the archives read simply
“Drowned,” but it was wrong: Icarus
Had swum away, coming at last to the city
Where he rented a house and tended the garden.
“That nice Mr. Hicks” the neighbors called,
Never dreaming that the gray, respectable suit
Concealed arms that had controlled huge wings
Nor that those sad, defeated eyes had once
Compelled the sun. And had he told them
They would have answered with a shocked, uncomprehending stare.
No, he could not disturb their neat front yards;
Yet all his books insisted that this was a horrible mistake:
What was he doing aging in a suburb?
Can the genius of the hero fall
To the middling stature of the merely talented?
And nightly Icarus probes his wound
And daily in his workshop, curtains carefully drawn,
Constructs small wings and tries to fly
To the lighting fixture on the ceiling:
Fails every time and hates himself for trying.
He had thought himself a hero, had acted heroically,
And dreamt of his fall, the tragic fall of the hero;
But now rides commuter trains,
Serves on various committees,
And wishes he had drowned.
Farrar notes that Romo is an extremely talented quarterback who, despite his reputation for “melting down” in nationally televised games, has actually done very well in the spotlight. Where the reputation is merited, however, is in “win-or-go-home” games. Time and again he has thrown fourth quarter interceptions. As Farrar notes, “Romo doesn’t understand the importance of keeping things together in crunch time — it’s just that he unravels when he really needs to do anything but.”
Farrar notes that Romo often tries to do too much at those times, and this was certainly the case in Sunday’s game. The interception that gave the game to Denver came on a 2nd-and-16 play following a Shaun Phillips sack. Romo had a receiver who was wide open five yards down the field but chose to throw it to the receiver who was fifteen yards away. In his defense, he might have completed even that pass had he not had been crowded slightly by an offensive linemen who was pushed back into him, thereby robbing his throw of some of its velocity. This meant that defensive back Danny Trevathan, who was anticipating the throw, had time to launch himself through the air and make a magnificent grab..
Peyton Manning, in a similar position, would have been more like Daedalus, completing the safe underneath option and worrying about picking up the first down on the subsequent play. Part of Manning’s brilliance is knowing how to play within himself. He exploits the holes that the defense leaves him. Romo, by contrast, takes chances—he had to on Sunday to keep up with Manning—and on Sunday he took one too many.
Farrar notes that some of the great quarterbacks have had this tendency to “play the hero at the worst possible time”:
It’s a mutated tendency that some great quarterbacks have — from Bobby Layne to Johnny Unitas to Fran Tarkenton to Warren Moon to that Brett Favre guy. Some signal-callers can’t — or won’t — listen when that little voice tells them to pull it down and live for the next play.
It’s pretty simple — sometimes, thinking you can be the hero makes you the goat. The same thing that makes Romo great at times also proves to be his undoing. Icarus would be proud — and many other great quarterbacks would understand.
Maybe more cautious quarterbacks, such as Manning and Tom Brady and Drew Brees, will ultimately be more successful than Romo. But as any number of commentators pointed out after the game, a more cautious Romo would not thrown for over 500 yards and five touchdowns against one of the greatest quarterbacks in football history who is in the midst of one of his greatest seasons.
In that way, Farrar misapplies Field’s poem to Romo. The Dallas quarterback need not go into old age wishing he had drowned. There was nothing “middling” or “merely talented” about his performance Sunday. In a football sense, he did drown out on that field.
Have no regrets, Tony. Last Sunday, you compelled the sun.
