Volume 2, Issue 87: Let’s Not Get Carried Away
"Honey, if I blow your fuse, can I please be excused?"
Our annual mailbag newsletter is coming in precisely three weeks. Send me questions! Ask me any question you want at williamfleitch@yahoo.com. The rule around this here newsletter is that I have to answer whatever you ask. So send ‘em over.
Also, thank you for everyone who wrote in concerned about my father after last week’s missive. He is up and moving around, sore and grouchy about it all but otherwise in about as good a shape as someone who fell 10-15 feet off a ladder and landed on his head onto loose rock could possibly be. (Let alone someone 70 years old who did so.) I’m touched you all reached out, and Dad would be too, if he weren’t so busy grousing at Mom, my sister and me for asking him how he’s feeling all the time. Thank you. I promise we will be a lot lighter in tone this week.
Friday afternoon, the Virginia Cavaliers defeated the Virginia Tech Hokies 39-30 to advance to their first-ever ACC Championship Game. Virginia had lost 15 consecutive games to their in-state rival, and their fans, as you might expect, lost their damned minds. As the final seconds clicked down, Virginia students streamed onto the fields in droves. There were so many happy young rich white people. It’s nice to see young rich white people finally having a moment.
Look at them, the dumb giddy schmucks. Good for them. I’ve wanted to rush the field my entire life. My God, who wouldn’t? A court/field storming is the collegiate mindset brought to life: an irresponsible, spontaneous, silly little explosion of joy, a moment where you're so happy and loony that the only way you can express it is by jumping up and down and screaming like an idiot. This to me is the pinnacle of what watching sports brings to us, this unadulterated bliss, this unfettered, harmless elation. The example I always use for this is that there is nothing on this planet, save for maybe a sudden spider, that will make me spontaneously leap into the air and scream other than sports. Sports allow us to express emotions that would otherwise be unacceptable or embarrassing in the public arena. They’re healthy. They’re good for us.
There are different kinds of court stormings and field rushings, but the best come out of nowhere, on a last-second shot, the ones when you're on the court hugging everyone in sight before you even realize where you are and what is happening. My favorite one might have been when a beautiful maniac in a wheelchair ran onto the court when North Carolina State beat Duke back in 2013 and promptly got mobbed by a thousand other lunatics.
(The kid turned out to be fine, by the way. Still probably not recommended standard operating procedure.)
But it has never happened. I’ve never had the opportunity to be such a loon. The closest I’ve ever come was November 13, 1994. My Illini football team was hosting the No. 1 and undefeated Penn State Nittany Lions, led by quarterback Kerry Collins, running back Ki-Jana Carter, wide receiver Bobby Engram and defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky. It was freezing and raining and miserable, or at least it would have been had I not been an indestructible college sophomore in the I-Block student section. Illinois jumped out to a 21-0 lead behind quarterback Johnny Johnson, and when the Illini led 31-14 in the third quarter, you started to feel the rush of people pushing toward the front of the stadium. This was the best team in the country, and it was about to lose to a bunch of dopes in Champaign. The rain began to fall as dusk turned to night, and we jumped and screamed and prepared for the greatest moment of our collegiate lives. Some thick-necked Delta Sig kid elbowed the girl next to me to try to sneak down closer to the field, and everyone in our section pounced on him and shoved him back. We then all high-fived each other. We were ready. This was it.
Then Penn State pulled off one of the greatest comebacks of its history. We all sulked home, Charlie Brown, in the rain. Illinois would go 8-26-1 the rest of my time on campus. There would be no more field stormings.
A few years ago, on an assignment for The Sporting News, I sat in the Orange Krush section for an Illini game against ranked Purdue. (By “an assignment,” I mean “I begged my editor to let me and then just went ahead and did it before he had a chance to say no.”) This was probably going to be the last opportunity I’d ever have. I was in the student section—looking like a graduate student who had stuck around for a decade too long—my face was painted, I had carte blanche to just go nuts. But alas: Illinois did end up winning, but it wasn’t a close game, and it just wasn’t a big enough win to run onto the court. Not that I didn’t do my best to make a court storming happen anyway. There might not be much more pathetic than a man in his mid-30s imploring teenagers to commit misdemeanor trespassing to celebrate a game won by unpaid college students just so that he might have one last hope of hanging onto to his long-gone youth years past its expiration date. I still apologize for nothing.
I know that court storming and field rushing is dangerous, and I absolutely understand why players and coaches dislike it so much. Imagine completing an exhausting task at your office successfully and, seconds after it’s over, a thousand drunk idiots sprinting directly toward you, wailing like banshees and looking to hug-punch everyone in sight. The practice probably should be banned, as it has in most professional sports and some collegiate ones. But I can’t help but love it anyway. It’s basically the college experience in miniature: Reckless, dangerous, stupid, joyous, pure sensation without considering the consequences or ramifications, just plunging forward into the abyss because what could possibly go wrong I’m immortal.
I know it’s never going to happen for me now. I’m too old, too responsible. Not only would it be a bad decision, and not only would end open me up for endless justified derision, I don’t even think I’m capable of it anymore. That sort of spontaneous euphoria doesn’t come that easily these days. We’re all too aware of all the downsides anymore. There are too many variables and consequences. Nothing can be so simple now. I ran into an old friend of mine a couple of months back with whom I used to smoke weed and talk for hours, in a different lifetime for both of us. I asked him if he still smoked. “Not really,” he says. “It used to be that I’d get high and feel like I was looking at the world in an entirely different way, and I’d want to explore it and soak it all up. Now? Now I get high and just think about all the bills I haven’t paid.” The world is a lot more purely pleasureable the less you know about it. It’s easier when the world is so small.
So good for those kids, those poor, underprivileged undergraduates at the University of Virginia, who got to go crazy and run around the field, high-fiving players who mostly just want them to go away, who got to drink themselves into oblivion and pass out in some poor townie’s backyard. You’re idiots. You’re fools. You’re beautiful. Hold onto this as long as you can. You’ll miss someday having an excuse for being that stupid. You’ll miss when you thought nothing really mattered.
Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality. You may disagree. It is your wont.
Data Decade: The Ten Best Players of the Decade, MLB.com. It was a light week, which is what is supposed to happen on a holiday week.
Stephen Strasburg Suitor Power Rankings, MLB.com. He’s not leaving Washington, though.
Debate Club: Worst MCU Movies, SYFY Wire. Every once in a while, it’s fun to write something just to get yelled at.
The Thirty: Best Free Agents From Each Team NEXT Year, MLB.com. In case you want to start speculating and guessing a year early.
PODCASTS
Grierson & Leitch, we discussed “Marriage Story,” “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” “21 Bridges” and “Frozen 2.”
Waitin' Since Last Saturday, we reviewed the Texas A&M game, and previewed the Georgia Tech game.
Seeing Red, no show this week, but we’re taping on December 9.
GET THIS LUNATIC OUT OF HERE 2020 POWER RANKINGS
It is worth noting that I did not think Michael Bloomberg was a bad mayor. He made several public health improvements, the city generally ran efficiently and effectively and he was in between perhaps the two most polarizing New York City mayors of the last 50 years, which helps. He was not perfect. He’s smug and creepy around women and has all sorts of billionaire-white-guy blind spots. But I voted for him twice. (I voted for Bill Thompson in 2009.) Because I work in media, I even spent some time working for him, with Bloomberg Politics, though I never met him and only saw him skulking around the office one time. (He’s very short.) I think he honestly believes he is helping the country by running for President. But he is wrong. And if he really wants to help, he can spend half the money he’ll be blowing by running for President working on voter registration and voting rights and make a legitimate difference. Until then, get the hell out of here with this.
1. Elizabeth Warren
2. Joe Biden
3. Amy Klobuchar
4. Kamala Harris
5. Bernie Sanders
6. Cory Booker
7. Julian Castro
8. Pete Buttigieg
9. Michael Bennet
10. Steve Bullock
11. Deval Patrick
12. Michael Bloomberg
13. Andrew Yang
14. Tom Steyer
15. William Weld
16. John Delaney
17. Marianne Williamson
18. Tulsi Gabbard
19. Joe Walsh
ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!
You can also send holiday cards here if you want. I love those!
Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603
CURRENTLY LISTENING TO
“Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle,” Nirvana. Perhaps the angriest of the many angry Nirvana songs, this might be the most underrated song in their whole canon. This song, written in 1993, obviously isn’t about Donald Trump and the world we live in now. But that’s also exactly what it’s about.
Hope your Thanksgiving was a little less wild than ours, which ended with this.
We eventually got him rehabilitated and released back into the wild.
Have a great weekend, all.
Best,
Will