Football, Literature, And Murder

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ceme online terbaikFriends and acquaintances are often surprised to learn that I played football in high school. I guess I just don’t seem the type, somehow, but I did. I was a very mediocre linebacker on a very good football team that won three conference championships and lost two state championships in my four years there. My senior year, our team was ranked fifteenth in New England.

These days, I still subscribe to Sports Illustrated as well as to the English Journal and Poets and Writers. I watch Sports Center at the gym on the elliptical trainer and watch games late at night after I make myself stop working.

During the playoff games this past weekend, I noticed that my friends on Facebook seemed pretty evenly divided between being engaged in the playoffs or offended by the undue attention a couple of sporting events were getting in the media and on Facebook. A lot of my more artsy friends, for lack of a better descriptor, found the football frenzy annoying.

I suppose football just doesn’t have the literary credibility or literary tradition that, say, baseball does. Not that baseball players are all that literary themselves, but baseball certainly has a rich literary tradition. Think of The Natural by Bernard Malamud, Shoeless Joe by F. P. Kinsella, Eight Men Out by Eliot Asinof, The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn, or Summer of ’49 by David Halberstam, just to name a few. These are not just good reads. Some are borderline classics. The Natural was on the sophomore curriculum at the school where I used to teach.

Football has George Plimpton’s Paper Lion, published in 1963, and the lesser known follow up, Mad Ducks and Bears, published in 1971. If you can name another good work of literature about football, please let me know. The only other strong connection I can think of between literature and football is Jack Kerouac, who spurned a scholarship to play football at Boston College to argue with the football coach at Columbia, spend most of his time riding the bench, and then break a leg. (I read an interesting article once about how Kerouac and Ken Kesey, who wrestled, were crucial figures in the cultural transition from the hyper-masculine literary culture of Ernest Hemingway to the more feminized literary culture of the 1960’s. But that’s for another blog post).

Anyway, I couldn’t help but think about the irony of the fact that football is so un-literary, and yet one of the four teams in the conference playoffs, the Baltimore Ravens, was named for a work of literature, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” This happened in 1996 when Art Modell proposed moving the Cleveland Browns from Cleveland to Baltimore. The Browns were charter members of the AAFL in 1946, which became part of the American Football Conference in 1960. The outcry of the fan base when Modell proposed a move, on the team’s fiftieth anniversary no less, was so great that a very unusual deal was struck that allowed Modell to relocate the team providing the NFL committed itself to replacing the team with a new team, and Modell vacated the team name, its history, and its records. Modell agreed to this unusual arrangement, and found himself with a nameless team. A fan contest was put in place to name the new team in Baltimore, and the three finalist names were Marauders, Americans, and Ravens. In a selesai go-round, Ravens won with more than 33,000 votes.

Most of you reading this probably know that Poe spent much of his life in Baltimore, died under odd circumstances in Baltimore, and is buried in Baltimore, where since as early as the 1930s, two or more generations of a family have maintained a mysterious yearly vigil of bringing three roses and a half-filled bottle of cognac to his grave on the anniversary of his birth. (The first written account of this visit is in a 1950 newspaper article, but apocryphal stories say visits may have begun as much as two decades earlier). This year was the third year in a row that no visitor attended, bring a mysterious end to a mysterious tradition.

What struck me as odd and interesting watching the AFC playoff game this past Sunday was that the Ravens were playing the New England Patriots, who were charter members of the AFL, but from 1960 till 1970 were known as the Boston Patriots. This was interesting to me because Poe, despite his association with Baltimore, was actually born in Boston in 1809, and even published his first book of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems, in Boston in 1827. And rather than use his name, Poe published the work as merely, “A Bostonian.”

So the Patriots’ victory over the Ravens, their sixth in seven meetings over the years, struck me as a blow for the more literary town of Boston against a team whose name is likely lost upon a collection of players best known for linebacker and alleged murderer Ray Lewis. Lewis was originally charged with murder following a party at a nightclub after the Ravens won Super Bowl XXXIV in 2000. Ultimately, Lewis was convicted merely of obstruction of justice, even though the allegedly blood-splattered suit he wore on the night of the murders has never been found and no other suspects have ever been identified. Now that is a mystery worthy of the eminent Bostonian author.