As I watched Rob Gronkowski get carted off the field yesterday with a season-ending knee injury my diseased mind engaged itself with dark feelings of the future of football.
Strange premonitions entered my brain and I felt uneasy.
Has a major sport ever disappeared from the landscape before? I don't know and I am too lazy to do the research.
More importantly, has a major sport that I absolutely love ever disappeared from the landscape before?
Not in my lifetime, and that is all that matters.
Live pigeon shooting was featured in the 1900 Olympic games. 300 birds were killed. That was the last we saw of that.
Solo synchronized swimming was featured in the 1984 and 1992 Olympics. I'm not kidding. Solo synchronized swimming. What the hell is that?
One swimmer who apparently was considered to be in sync with the music.
How bizarre, how bizarre.
That's gone too. But those are hardly marquee sports.
The knee thing has become the latest trend. There has been a major focus on violence in the game, especially head trauma, so the league creates rules to define legal hits, penalizing those that go for the head and upper body. As a result, defensive players are forced to go low and the knee often ends up being the target.
Target is not the right word. There are only a few scumbags in the NFL like Ndamukong Suh. Players who intentionally hurt other players.
In most cases the knee gets exploded because the defensive player has to go low and that is the end result. It just happens.
But it has happened a lot this year and has ended a lot of seasons.
The game is too fast to legislate specific hits, specific areas of the body that are OK to hit and others that are not. The defensive dude flys in and sees an opening, the offensive player makes a move and suddenly you got helmet to knee. Or helmet to chin.
The game has to be dealt with in an all encompassing way, and that is the thing that could kill it.
A decision is going to have to be made about what level of violence is OK. Since violence is inherent in the game and is part of what fans like me love, that decision carries a lot of weight.
I will not love THE PATS if they play flag football.
The NFL exacerbates the problem with its cold, corporate image. It is a billion dollar business and big business is always callously disconnected from its employees.
But to try to hide the connection between playing the game and early onset Alzheimers and dementia is amoral. It reveals a league to whom its players are nothing but product, easily interchangeable with all the young product lining up to fill the void.
Morality has entered the picture as something to be considered. Morality is not something big business gives a damn about.
It was weird. When I saw Gronk get hit and reach for his knee, a weird foreboding crept into my thoughts. It was not a comforting feeling.
On the light side, I read a Boston Glove article on Gronk's injury this morning written by Christopher L. Gasper.
He called Gronk a sui generis tight end. Isn't that spectacular? What an amazing phrase to connect to football.
I have heard the phrase before but had no idea what it meant. Until now.
Sui generis means "of its own kind; unique in its characteristics."
Perfect. That is exactly what Rob Gronkowski is. I have no idea what Gasper's motivation was for using the phrase. Impress his boss? Maybe he gets a bonus paid for using Latin phrases in a sports column.
I'm glad he used it. Maybe he got other sports fans to look it up, thereby raising the intellectual level of the country just a tad. We could certainly use it.
Next time I walk up to the counter in Wal-mart with a package of Charles Manson underwear I'm going to say to the clerk "This underwear is certainly sui generis."
My expanded intellect will create a ripple effect that will run through the store like lightening, incidentally improving the shopping experience at the behemoth.
Or maybe not.
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