Jon Bois: When I think of “clobbering,” the word, I receive the image of a seedy bar, the sort in which cash is necessary, and fluorescent signs advertising beers from long-shuttered breweries dimly illuminate a floor littered with peanut shells. A beast of a man, clad in a military-issue jacket with passants sitting neatly on the shoulders, spins off his stool, faces the offending party, winds up, and slams the unfortunate man’s face with his fist until it resembles peach cobbler. Perhaps this is because “clobber” and “cobbler” sound alike. In any case, we witnessed a clobbering in Washington on Monday night. For three quarters, Michael Vick and his Philadelphia Eagles roundly dispelled the myth that professional football is played in our nation’s capital; by the start of the fourth quarter, they led the Washington Redskins by a 59-21 score.
The enterprising Eagles shoved as much greatness as they possibly could into these three quarters. And then they stopped. With the all-time NFL record for most points scored within reach, they failed to score any points in the fourth quarter. Is this a testament to the Redskins’ resilience? Did they find a solution to the Eagles’ offensive assault? Did they try harder? Did they simply out-play them? None of these. Time and again, their running backs stumbled up the middle for no gain and with no purpose in mind other than to leave the field with greater haste. Vick, the show-runner, was removed from the game, leaving Kevin Kolb to issue handoff after listless handoff as though he were distributing flyers in front of a Radio Shack.
This was not what we wanted to see. This was not football. Indeed, presumably in the interests of avoiding injury and demonstrating good sportsmanship, they took it easy on the flummoxed Redskins defense. One moment, though: how was this a display of good sportsmanship? Wasn’t it dishonest? Wasn’t it insulting?
Evil Contrarian: Running Up The Score Is A Noble Act Of Sportsmanship
Spencer Hall: Patronizing would be a word, but worse yet a complaint about running up the score is chivalrous in the worst sense of the word, as in it relies on an unwritten code. Unwritten codes and customs are fine in some instances. For instance, I love that people pull over to the shoulder for fire engines. I enjoy knowing that the man next to me at a urinal will stare directly ahead at the indiscriminate spot somewhere around eye level. I like knowing that if a woman catches me looking at her boobs, it’ll all be okay as long as I immediately look away as if a wolf just started eating the tires off my car, and then resume conversation coolly and evenly. That last one may be a custom I only believe in, but it’s one I really think should gain some mass acceptance.
None of these are written, however, which is part of the problem. With a written rule, i.e., a law, there’s set penalties for violating that code. Litter and you may pay a fifty dollar fine. Steal a car, and you will go to jail. Grunt too loudly in the gym and you’re awesome cause you’re getting your swole on, brah, but you may be asked to leave the gym per established and codified rules. Because we are not all chill bros who can work things out, there are rules and according incentives and penalties associated with following or not following them.
Laws didn’t exist in a serious universal degree in 14th century England. Not coincidentally, there are a lot of “Murder’d by rake/farm implement” on the books in English records from the time, because without established penalties for minor squabbles, things have a tendency to get out of hand very quickly. On a less fatal note, the arbitrary and unwritten rule that you should not run up the score on your opponent is the kind of chivalrous rule written nowhere, and thus enforced in the same uneven fashion. There is nothing in the rulebook about the number of points scored in one game: none. Some teams actually prefer to keep the score low; some prefer to keep the score as high as possible.
This has nothing to do with “class,” a word the wattlenecked nannies of the sports world like Mike Francesa could not define if given a dictionary, a highlighter, and three days’ lead time on delivery of said definition. It has to do with playing the game you want to and negotiating your own terms on the field of play. If you want to beat a team by 30, be prepared to accept a beating in return. Time on the clock is time when football should be played, and if one team happens to be incapable of stopping the other, so be it. That’s competition, and doing anything but that is a grotesque perversion of the spirit of play. Anything else is chivalry, which only the finest minds of the 13th century seem to be able to quote.
Jon: Chivalry! Yes, that is the behavior we’re concerned with as we watch men not only grapple and throttle one another to the earth, but effort to deceive one another at every opportunity. Let’s settle on what politeness, in, say, football, is and is not. If I am losing in the fourth quarter by 24 points, and the opposing quarterback steps back to launch a deep throw, that is as polite as one can and should be in football. It is not very polite, but then, politeness does not interest me. I am trying to win. The team opposite me is trying to win. We win by scoring points, which is precisely what this quarterback hopes to accomplish when he lets loose with a 30-yard pass. Does it make sense for him to throw deep? Irrelevant. That is his decision and his right. If he chooses to run, that is also fine.
It is also the sportsmanlike thing to do. My reasoning is that the sportsmanlike thing to do is to play sports as the rules demand they be played. It does not concern hurt feelings. To let up on an opponent, to intentionally scuttle a drive, is to be as unsportsmanlike as I can imagine. If the opposing team does that to me, I am furious. I want to break their arms and stomp their heels. I feel as though I am being treated like a child, that my sensibilities are perceived as delicate, that I cannot handle the very, very mild sadness that arrives after being soundly beaten in a football game.
If a team lets up on me, I think, “what is wrong with these people? More to the point, what do they think is wrong with me?”
Spencer: It’s even less common at the pro level than it is at the college level because of the talent parity and general conformity of the NFL’s braintrust, and that is the most baffling part. In no other field of American competition does someone start to really gut an opponent, to begin putting serious mileage between themselves and their rival, and then suddenly say “Well, we’re all professionals here, so I’ll ease up and only half-destroy you.” If this were true we’d still be driving Oldsmobiles and Packards and eating at Shoney’s. (To those of you who are still doing this: stay golden, real-bros and bro-settes, and hit the twinkie boats on the buffet for me.)
It’s precisely the kind of cynical game management that football fans hate in soccer, and no less aggravating or despicable. Actually, in football it’s worse than in soccer since you will see EPL teams pour six or seven goals on a team if they have the chance because why should they care: it’s not my fault you’re not prepared to able to engage in this game with pre-established written rules.
In short, I just accused football of being more intellectually and ethically pure than soccer, and I’m not backing off that.*
*Don’t mention diving. It’s devastating to this argument.
Jon: Nearly everyone involved directly or otherwise in the world of sports -- athletes, management, referees, sportswriters, fans, you and I -- often suffers from a profound inability to appropriately assign credit and blame. If something happens, then someone or something is responsible, yes, but goodness.
One reason sports are valuable is that, for the most part, they exist in a vacuum, isolated from real-world consequence, ripe for vicarious indulgence. We cannot pummel our Draconian shift manager at the Shoney’s (sportswriting needs to talk about Shoney’s more), but we can live through Ndamukong Suh as he levels Matt Schaub. We will not tell our parents-in-law what we really think, but we can watch a point guard give the business to an opposing center. It is a sandbox through which we vicariously try things we would not try in everyday life, just to see the consequences. And if our wielding of the concepts of credit and blame in sports is reflective of how we do so in our own lives, then we are a sorry people.
Perhaps our most radical and egregious act of misunderstanding is our notion that if Team A routs Team B in embarrassing fashion, nobody deserves credit, Team A deserves blame, and Team B deserves sympathy. Team B, were you powerless? Did the rules -- as in, the written rules, the rules that follow bullet points and alphanumerical designations, not the invisible rules ground out by your sausage-maker of a heart -- change, leaving you with an unfair advantage? Team B, we agree that you could not score, you and your fans appear to believe that if you can’t play with the Teddy Ruxpin, nobody can play with the Teddy Ruxpin. Quite the opposite! You are in time out, and your little sister is in the living room, pulling the poor teddy bear’s cassette tape into string.
“Butt-hurt” is a wonderful expression. I do not know who first coined it, Team B, but I imagine it was you -- you! -- who served as inspiration. I will thank you for that much.
Spencer: I think we’re in complete agreement that the ultimate form of sportsmanship to accept personal responsibility, admit the facts in front of you, and honestly appraise things as they are without flipping out. Do you notice that coaches’ rants are usually completely honest beneath the white flecks of foam at the corners of the mouth and the thumping of background scenery? (Yo and respek, Jim Mora.) Notice the only time most athletes or coaches finally tell the truth is when they’re seconds from getting canned, or perhaps when they’re going through period of being Ron Artest?
This isn’t always the case. If you watched “The Best That Never Was,” the 30 for 30 documentary about Marcus Dupree, you saw Barry Switzer circa 1982-83 being scarily candid about his team and his players, openly admitting his team “wasn’t as good as last year on offense” with a genuinely disturbed look on his face. Switzer may have been devious on the recruiting trail, but the one thing he didn’t lie about was football and what was happening on the field. Switzer was also fond of putting fifty on an opponent; so is Steve Spurrier, another coach whose lacerating wit swings in all directions, including inward when necessary. Chip Kelly, another coach who will not hesitate to set a team on fire and then set the ashes on fire again while throwing the whole thing into another, larger fire, is bracingly straightforward about his team’s performances, and once wrote a check to a fan who demanded a refund after Oregon’s 2009 loss to Boise State.
There’s an honesty at work here, a kind of purity that I don’t think many can tolerate. But make no mistake: it is the most honest and straightforward way to play the game. Everything else is just working in shades of dishonesty clad in--what was the word?--ah, yes. Butt-hurt.
Jon: Men like Chip Kelly are the men we build statues for. They are tall and terrible, they are ruthless, they offer no quarter. Before the contest, you had words for your team and about your team, you shouted praises, you talked on and on and on about how this was your day, that you believed in your team, that you knew you were going to win. And then Chip Kelly arrived, and when he was done with you, all your pithy sayings were neatly reduced to soundless shrieks in Hell.
Perhaps the greatest thing about an un-compromised clobbering is that it is purely honest. It is what it says on the scoreboard, those bright, wonderful numbers delivering a message as simple as their un-rounded fonts. Then again, though, perhaps they are great because routs themselves are beautiful. When Wisconsin bested Indiana by an 83-to-20 score, those who truly appreciate what sports can be reclined in our seats and said, simply, “wow.”
The Badgers could have set a thoughtful gift basket at the feet of the God of Hand-Wringing. Instead, they set an elk on fire and dragged it as tribute before the Blood God. It was as beautiful and brilliant as sports are capable of being, and to say the least, it is a pity that we are left with so many half-empty canvases, abandoned for the benefit of teams stubbornly unwilling to accept what they are: a fattened calf, a bottle of champagne smashing against the hull of a newly-commissioned battleship, a doormat, a prop, a static, faceless entity.
I’m sure they would have liked to be heroes. And I’m sure our shadows wish they wouldn’t die as the sun falls under the trees.
