08 January 2008

Doughboys



I will not be querulous. I will not start off this year by railing at the broadcasters, or the greedy NCAA Division I schools, or any of the other collective idiots that have so perverted our notion of normal life that the biggest football game of the year is played on a school-night.

I grimly watched enough of the game to have a reasonable confidence in how it was going to turn out. Then, good soldier that I am, turned out the lights and turned into the rack.

I salute the legion of other idiots who care about this nonsense and stayed to the bitter end, and will be grumpy and querulous at work all day. I wish I had the good sense to live on the West Coast, which is where the apparent center of gravity for our national media lives.

The army of fans who care found a National Championship game framed in intense ambivalence. I know we are supposed to pull for the greater good; lining up behind our home conferences. Senator McCain would be big on that, the loyalty thing being one of his core values.

Senator Obama would probably say that we should look for our common humanity, and to the future where we can all stand as one. That is a crock, although a pleasant enough one. It derives from his orientation as a doctrinaire liberal in most regards, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

He is supposed to be from Chicago, though with his time overseas and all the coalition-building and his Ivy League credentials, I suspect that is mostly veneer. I doubt if he is really bothered at all this nonsense about the superiority of SEC schools their football programs over the Big Ten.

I do not know if he has even been asked about it, now that he is the front-runner. I suspect John McCain was pulling for The Ohio State Buckeyes, since he is a traditionalist. But no one has asked him, either as far as I can tell.

Neither of the two Senators is really from anywhere, or more precisely from the states they represent. McCain was a military brat, moving constantly as a kid, and we have heard all about Senator Obama's upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia.

That is sort of a universal thing in this race. Senator Clinton has invented her association with the great state of New York, shopping for the best Senate seat available after her time in the White House was over. Shoot, I have been in Big Pink as long as she has been from the Empire State. Maybe I should run for the Condo Board.

Loyalty to place is a problematic thing these days. Maybe that is why the players who get to introduce themselves with name and scholastic pedigree are all saying the “The” in the name of their alma maters with such emphasis.

The best brief bio of the Big Game weekend was from the NFL playoff game on Sunday. After all the tough young men announced their college affiliations, Pittsburg linebacker Larry Foote announced he was a graduate of Detroit Pershing High, home of the Doughboys.

My ears pricked up, of course, since Big Pink is adjacent to Pershing Road, which is where they are digging the foundations for the neighborhood of tomorrow. My Grandfather Mike was a real Doughboy for the real Pershing.

Larry Foote did not mention that he played his college ball in Ann Arbor, where he was an all-American, consensus All-Big Ten first-team and Defensive Player of the Year, recipient of the Roger Zatkoff Award, and candidate for the Lombardi and Bronco Nagurski Awards.

I liked his style. I wear a recreation of my high school letter jacket when it is cold here. No one knows what it means here and no one cares. The Steelers got their butts kicked anyway.

The curious thing is that I would have been a Doughboy, since I was born and lived my first years about fourteen minutes from Pershing High School. Or at least I would have been a Doughboy if a great city had not thrown itself on a funeral pyre and burned its heart out.

The school is still there, pummeled but proud. It has kept its nick-name and mascot through all the change. The Doughboys are anchored in a world that no longer exists, and like Pershing's boys, deals with the times as they are.

As to the college finale in New Orleans, maybe it was left-over angst about Katrina, or the fact that LSU coach Les Miles played for my Wolverines years ago that was decisive. As the moments passed and the Bucks inexplicably self-destructed, I found myself gratified.

Screw it. I hate Ohio State. I liked seeing the Bucks humiliated, even if it means taking more crap from the SEC. I am trapped by my past, even if I have stopped wearing apparel festooned with the logo.

According to my research this morning, the title game lurched to an end at 11:52, eight minutes before the polls opened in New Hampshire. State law there allows towns with fewer than 100 people to open the polls at midnight, and close as soon as all registered voters have cast their ballots.

There are two of them, and it would be fantastic to party away the football game, discharge your civic duty, and then go hibernate until the first kick-off next fall, or the general election, depending on your preference.

Dixville Notch and Hart's Location are the two towns permitted to operate the polls that way. They are located way north in the Granite State, almost in Canada, and it gives them brief global prominence for a few minutes each decade. The Notch actually doesn't exist, since it was incorporated back in the 1960's solely for the purpose of holding the election and generating some business for the local hotel.

Hart's Location had started the practice just after World War II, since it is a rail junction town and the men had to work during the day when the polls were normally open.

I am not sure what the advantage of having sleeping and irritable workers managing the track switches might be, and apparently the people were, too. They stopped the voting after the Nixon-Kennedy election, and did not start it again until the one for Clinton's second term.

That was before the Bowl Championship Series lunacy started, by the way. Coincidence?

I think not. Go Doughboys.

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com


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