A Washed-Up Football Player Meets an Armchair Quarterback

The arrival of September heralds the start of the college football season.  It also starts a short countdown to the annual Princeton Sprint Football alumni game, which pits the current Tigers against the Tigers of yore in a sixty-minute, full-contact, officiated contest on the field turf of Jadwin Stadium.  Each player on the student team must weigh 172 pounds or less, while the alumni are allowed to weigh however much they please (although there is a modest tax on extra poundage).  This discrepancy might strike a casual onlooker as wildly unfair, but one must consider that the average age of the alumni is on the wrong side of 35, and the average level of athletic conditioning is…well, less than average.

Although I am deeply saddened not to be able to travel to Old Nassau and play in this year’s contest, I look forward to many games in the years ahead, and I look back on the two in which I have played as ranking among the very fondest memories in my athletic career.  I am 26 and still able to maintain an active lifestyle, so it has been quite an experience to play football against people who are all lighter, younger, and less experienced than I.  My favorite alumni team tee-shirt slogan states proudly, “The older I get, the better I was.”  At my age, it seems plausible to change the tense of the second verb to the present.

In any case, the last game in which I played took place on September 12, 2009.  My best friend from college and I, both Sprint Football alumni, traveled together by car from North Carolina all the way to New Jersey for both the game and all the extracurricular shenanigans which young alumni are wont to undertake.  After an action-packed long weekend on campus, my friend and I hit the road heading south.  About forty-five minutes into the trip, we exited I-295 to make one last Wa run—a visit to a Wawa convenience store, for those who are not familiar with this little slice of culinary heaven.  On the way into the store, I overheard a gas attendant musing about football coaching strategy.  What follows is my best recollection of his verbatim monologue:

It’s a lot easier to win in football than people think.  You’d think, as much money and hype as people put into it, that more coaches would have figured it out by now.  All you gotta do is score a touchdown every time you get the ball.  Then, you just have to stop the other team once; force just one punt the whole game, and you’ll win every time.  So simple, even an idiot could understand it.

Needless to say, my buddy and I had a lot to think about for the remaining nine hours of our trip.  Had our coaches only employed this breathtakingly simple strategy 24 hours earlier, victory for the alumni would have been assured.  Moreover, since we always want the current team to start the season on the high note of victory, we could have shared this strategy with the young Tigers in order that both teams might have won by scoring a touchdown every time and stopping the other team at least once…

…Wait…that’s exactly what both teams tried to do.  In fact, every football team in history has tried to score a touchdown on every possession and stop the other team on as many possessions as possible. 

Why so seldom do both teams win the game?

Several months ago, I shared an early dinner with two of my friends at one of our favorite old haunts.  In the course of ever-polite dinner conversation, one of my friends wondered out loud how long it would take to contract a sexually transmitted disease (hereafter STD) if one were to practice unsafe sex with strangers on a regular basis.  Feeling in the mood — so to speak — to teach a little math, I explained abstractly the concept in statistics known as expected value.  Without a calculator or any reliable statistical information on the incidence of STDs in the general population, I was unable to approach a numerical answer.  A few days after the dinner, however, I sent the following email to my friends in order to follow through on the subject:

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Hi Zoe,

I apologize for the delay—your message serves as a timely reminder that I need to finish a few posts from which I got sidetracked recently.

In response to your question, I’m afraid I don’t have any earth-shatteringly original suggestions.  If you have a Twitter account (particularly one with more followers than my paltry few!), I recommend using it shamelessly to promote the film.  If you have any student or alumni connections at your alma mater, I recommend reaching out to the college community.  I’m sure you have already realized that the local print media is unlikely to touch anything Randian, except with scorn and mockery (the only retweets I get from the NC papers that I follow pertain to sports).

Finally, as you may be aware, there is a good number of local chapters and organizations devoted to Ayn Rand, Objectivism, Conservatism, Capitalism, and the like.  A little googling should help you find ways to reach out to these outlets.

Inasmuch as I want this film to succeed (so they’ll make the next two), I’ll keep thinking about your question and get back to you if I come up with anything worth mentioning.

Best,

Elias

Regarding Maine’s new exemption to the State’s ban on switchblade knives, I can’t decide whether the greater blunder is legislative or judicial — to ban switchblades in the first place or to deny the two-armed population equal protection of the law. Would it not be simpler and more fair to repeal the ban altogether? Did the United States Supreme Court not just overturn Chicago’s handgun ban? I fail to see how the Second Amendment guarantees the right to possess a pistol, as interpreted by the Roberts Court last year, but allows for the states to proscribe spring-loaded knives. Finally, am I the only person who owns a knife with a thumb stud for easy, one-handed opening?

[As I was finalizing this post, a friend of mine sent me a link to a summary of the history of the prohibition of switchblade knives by the United States Federal Government: http://reviews.ebay.com/The-History-of-the-Federal-Switchblade-Act-of-the-USA_W0QQugidZ10000000007130733 ]

Super Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts is a fantastic game, replete with memorable music and entertaining gameplay.  It is also maddeningly difficult, though maybe not Nintendo-hard.  The fact that my favorite tracks correspond to the first two stages is no coincidence, inasmuch as (i) I was usually too frustrated to appreciate the music in the third stage by the time I got there, and (ii) I never got past that part of the game.

dailydoseofgamingtunes:

Haunted Graveyard - Mari Yamaguchi
Super Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts (SNES)

- On the Art of Suffering Well -

Although not beautiful, this photograph captures perfectly a moment of sudden emotional reversal.  Taken in July of 2006, it portrays me (on the left) eating a combination of granola, raisins, and powdered milk mixed with water.  This repast, taken with a plastic spoon, stands among my top five dining experiences.

Four days prior, my crew of seven divided into two rope-teams and encamped at the foot of the west fork of the crevasse-laden Nelchina Glacier (in Alaska’s Chugach Range). For the sake of weight, we had brought only enough food for three days and left the remainder cached several feet deep in the snow about two miles from camp.  I would soon perceive these two miles as a boundless and hopeless distance.

Rising at 2:00 a.m. to embark on an attempt to summit Mount Valhalla (11,752 ft.), I had to brace my body and my morale against a strong down-glacier wind that blew colder than daggers of ice.  Hours and mere hundreds of vertical feet later, the weather had deteriorated into a violent snowstorm with white-out effect (a white-out occurs when cloud vapor hangs in the air immediately over snowy ground, such that it becomes impossible to distinguish the sky from the ground, whether on the horizon or just a short distance ahead).  After halting and resting on our packs for about an hour, this increasingly dangerous storm forced me and my crew to retreat.

We spent three days and nights shivering, building wind walls, tightening guy lines, repairing tent flies torn by tent poles which the wind had caused to buckle, and running out of food.  By the time the storm had relented and the air had cleared enough for us to safely navigate the deadly crevasses which separated us from our food, none among us had eaten within the last thirty-six hours. The combination of brutal cold, empty pain in my stomach, and the cruel uncertainty of the situation had all but depleted my morale, but my heart sang like a choir angel when at last someone on the other rope-team managed to locate the first of our now very deeply buried food sacks.  The change in my disposition was as sudden as an interception in football, caught in full stride by a defender heading up field.  

This moment, forever memorialized on film, occurred after I had spent about three weeks living and traveling on the Nelchina, Columbia, and Science glaciers as part of a mountaineering course offered by the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS).  One of the instructors had prefaced our departure from base camp by describing the practice of mountaineering as “the art of suffering well”.  Eating that combination of raisins, granola, and powdered milk mixed with water on a cold day with a slight smile on my face, I was unconsciously learning this lesson.

“Lost Painting”

Composed by Michiru Yamane, this tune is featured in the classic Playstation game, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997).  It plays in the Royal Chapel of the Inverse Castle.  While the entire soundtrack to this installment in the Castlevania series is first-rate, “Lost Painting” remains the most enchanting piece from any game that I have played.