American football is Greek to me, but even I know the Panthers did Charlotte proud. It was good to see our city get some respect, and the players conducted themselves with spirit and skill, a welcome change from recent history both on and off the field.
I can’t admit to being a fan; my cultural conditioning to British sports renders me impervious to the brutal charms of the gridiron. It’s not the violence that disturbs me — I played rugby for many years, dishing out and taking physical punishment in pursuit of fleeting victory. I still have malfunctioning body parts as mementoes. But from my perspective there’s something about rugby that American football lacks — the constant motion of the action, the cut and thrust of sweeping attack and swift counter, without stylized breaks and formulaic set pieces. Toughness without padding.
Watching last year’s rugby World Cup on television, when dozens of countries, large and small, battled it out for glory over several weeks, and where England stunned Australia by winning the championship trophy with a drop-kicked goal in almost the last minute of the game, transported me back to my modest, youthful efforts. It was a sort of visual madeleine. Once more I was on the pitch, locked in the scrimmage, battling with the other heavyweight forwards to win the ball and feed our fast-flowing line of threequarters — roughly the equivalent of American running backs.
No amount of Panther power play can overcome that hard wiring in my sporting brain, however much they try and however deserving they are of my applause. By contrast, my son, now an architect in Boston, rarely played rugby in school in England, and so is not conditioned by that experience. He learned to appreciate American football as a means of bonding with professional colleagues in the construction industry, and has become a regular fan, and a Patriots’ supporter to boot.
Watching England win by a kicked goal and the Panthers lose by a similar play made me think that in some perverse manner, connections exist between England and Charlotte in ways beyond our efforts on the pitch. English sports teams are renowned worldwide for losing pluckily at the last gasp rather than winning. It’s true across the spectrum of sports, be it soccer, rugby or cricket. It’s almost a fixture of the national character. Generations of English boys and girls have been taught that playing the game is what counts; it matters less who wins or loses. It’s a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.
England’s last great sporting victory was back in 1966, when the nation won the football (aka “soccer”) World Cup. England’s cricket teams continue to lose regularly to the countries we taught to play the game, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Australia, South Africa and the West Indies. Only in rugby have we distinguished ourselves in recent years, first in Europe and then in world competition. Hence the scenes of national jubilation after the recent triumph in Australia. It was almost unbelievable: England had actually won something!
So, being conditioned to coming in second, or third or “also ran” in sporting contests, I didn’t feel too aggrieved by the Panthers’ loss to the Patriots. Charlotte’s team played well and displayed their skill on the national stage. That was enough. Winning really isn’t everything.
For me, the most memorable image of the whole “Panther fever” episode had nothing to do with the players on the pitch, or any facet of the game itself. It was the aerial view of the crowds of tens of thousands of Charlotteans crammed into the intersection of Trade and Tryon Streets at an uptown pep rally the week before the game. Here were citizens of suburban Charlotte reveling in public space in ways almost unheard of. Charlotteans taking over the streets and shutting down the center city!
I gazed at the image for many minutes, letting my mind slip out of focus. What if all those people were coming together around issues that were really substantial! Like protesting the incompetent handling of the Iraq conflict. Or demanding free health care. Or clean air and water, demonstrating for a living, breathing planet to bequeath our children. Or seeking an end to the death penalty. Or demanding a lasting peace in the Middle East based on equal justice for Jews and Palestinians. Or even the biggest issue of all: real democracy in America untainted by big money corruption and cronyism. What if we felt so strongly about social justice and equity in America and world affairs that we would leave our desks and our living rooms and take to the streets en masse, showing the same passion for freedom so vividly displayed in the old communist nations after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
But my mind slipped back into the real world. The sea of black and blue took shape once more. We weren’t changing the world. We were just celebrating a football game.
This article appears in Feb 11-17, 2004.
