Sidelined

Last night my son texted me-- root for the Chargers, he said.  I admit I root for anyone but the Chiefs... they've had enough success... not to mention the fact that their extraordinarily well-compensated stars consume as well a lion's share of the extensive advertising space. Dandruff shampoo, artificially dyed breakfast cereal-- health insurance... medications... nothing is beneath them if the money is there... and the money continues to roll in. Not to mention the women, the attention, the endorsements and 'gifts'. 

How did I get entrapped into amateur football fandom? Me-- the Bohemian rock musican/closet literary intellectual who haunted art galleries and museums from adolescence and beyond...  dismissively refusing to even watch my high school boyfriend's soccer games which I designated as absurd and sweaty and pointless? We parents must adapt to our kids' obsessions-- to tune in, so to speak.  The funny part is my son maintains this tiny corner of childhood belief that I (even still) bring him luck. 

What fascinates me, analyzing my role as audience here... is the way all sports fans seem to harbor this childlike faith that our presence-- even on the couch-- can somehow alter the game.  We yell, we root, we cheer, we groan... but we continue to watch.  Ditto-- or moreso, when our kids played competitive sports.  We absolutely HAD to be there.  Not just for support, but for this absurd incredibility that somehow we'd change the outcome.  They wouldn't win without us-- our fervent parental praying they would make the shot... holding their lucky undershirt or the little dinosaur towel I carried in a bag from nursery school onward. These tokens.

And the uniforms.  Nothing transforms a boy like his first baseball jersey...  his first pair of serious Nikes or Jordans. The mini-helmets and shin guards... the hockey skates and shoulder pads... like a superhero.  The fantasy is palpable; talent and practice are another thing-- but here-- a little piece of imitation reality and your child is wearing it. 

Some of the parents dream along. They coach, they carpool, they enroll and hire trainers.  They drive to tryouts, they pay for all kinds of leagues and venues... they take their kids to the professional arenas, no matter what the cost.  If they win the athletic lottery, the payoff is huge. Children are the second chance for many adults. Similarly, they buy them guitars and amplifiers... they get lessons and are driven to concerts.  Some of them have talent; some of them burn out before high school. 

But the dream... it's bigger than ever.  The Taylor Swifts and Patrick Mahomes's of the world.  Yesterday a 26-year-old baseball player signed a $765 million contract for doing what he loves. His agent made more in a day than Babe Ruth made in his entire career, even after inflation adjustment.  Assad was deposed yesterday; Haitian gangs massacred 150 elderly people... but more Americans were thinking ahead toward the 2025 baseball season.  Well, as Peter Pan urged us-- happier thoughts give us just that much more power. 

And without the audience, sports would be sort of a dud.  The pandemic confirmed this.  We participate, we fantasize...we bet-- another huge industry-- and we buy tickets and watch.  Those of us at home-- we pay, too.  I have to buy ESPN channels so my son can enjoy holidays here without depriving himself of football or baseball championships. Which came first?  The game or the money?  We know which, of course... but the investments roll on, the industry and marketing explodes with exponential regularity. We are, most of us, victims somehow-- willing, excited, happy victims.  Everyone seems to have their team. Vicarious thrill, sportsmanship, fandom, bromances, reality escape.... whatever... it accelerates.  It has a season-- a beginning and an endpoint.  Infinity of journalists and analysts-- biographers, documentarists... and now the television contracts for retired players-- competitive channels and entertainment platforms.  We cannot seem to get enough despite constant commercial interruption and annoying solicitations... there will be a winner.  A trophy... a ring. 

We are all of us dreamers in a way... we imagine ourselves on some field of ultimate content... and when we grow up and become ordinary, we sometimes imagine our children garnishing the rewards we once maybe coveted.  My son, who had unusual talent as a player, is very realistic and rational about his abilities.  Yes, he harbored his passion and parlayed that into some kind of career, but he humbly declines any 'could have been' scenarios.  As for me? A  part of me believed.  I support whatever he does, but I do know that he maybe once had a dream.  I remember the way I felt watching him walk out onto his first NCAA court.  It was thrilling. Now-- 16 years later... he's very even-keeled and practical... and ambitious. He still absolutely and passionately loves the game... most games... and he will find his way... and I will root for the Chargers, or whomever he wants. 

I just discovered the 2025 Super Bowl falls on my birthday. We used to have parties, when my son was little... now life is more complicated, or less so... I've learned to watch alone, as many Americans do, although they do this in bars, via their social media, twittering and posting, gambling progressively-- but most of all, we are not just audience-- we participate. Our hearts beat faster, we jump around and coo and curse and celebrate or mope... but as the industry well knows, we are 'in'. Most of us, that is. The sports scrooges among us-- and I know quite a few-- may be missing something culturally significant.  

I'm pretty sure now my acquired or vicarious passion for sports has replaced something else-- maybe my concert attendance or gig-watching.  The same arenas are used for music; at the Super Bowl they become field-fellows... part of the spectacle. Rather than climb grandstands to watch rockstars on a screen with a phone-recording audience, I see games...  young men and women in their prime physically striving for something... I see their fans dressed up and yelling their heads off like family. Partisanship and loyalty are spread among a number of available teams-- geographic loyalties acknowledged.  It seems a little more innocent and less threatening than a political competition. Dare I use the word democratic? Maybe I'm fooling myself  but in this heartbreaking election year I think I feel a kind of Sunday 'hope'. God Bless Detroit-- Buffalo-- the overpaid underdogs since the Jets have virtually imploded.  Forgive me my naïveté... but I am feeling just that bit more 'American'. Amen. 

G(RACE)

Saturdays have become classic movie nights in my household.  Either post-gig or not, it's still a work day and I try to clear my mental clipboard in the 3-5 AM time slot watching something from either my or someone else's past.  The television somehow offers plenty of quality films, without pay-for-view.  So last week I picked The Great White Hope.  I'd been fortunate enough to have seen that on Broadway, with the larger-than-life James Earl Jones, and Jane Alexander-- live-- in the lead roles, well more than 30 years ago.  It was brilliant-- resonant-- devastating.

Yes, I've been re-reading (the great) James Baldwin... Richard Wright-- but watching the theatre version of hard-edged racial tragedy was jarring and upsetting in a way I'd not expected.  In context of the current discussion of reparation and debt... everyone needs to go back and re-evaluate their African-American history course.  The juggernaut of the 'Me Too' movement stirred up some memory of that book title (acknowledged in a Lennon/Ono song) Woman as Nigger.  Even my laptop did not want to type out that phrase.

Now I'm a white woman with a prosecutable Me-Too incident of my own-- a life-warping, hideous, morally reprehensible, humiliating disgrace I have never brought much to light because, as we women well know, the procedural justice process can double-indemnify the victim.  We are sole witness... testifier, prosecutor, injured party-- and we set ourselves up, in the legal system, for the pillory.  Ask Robert Mueller.  But the ethnic and massive cultural wrongs against a group of people brought here as captives-- against their will--- enslaved, mistreated, and then left-- misplaced, without tools and respect in a foreign country-- unable to go back to their homeland, deprived of comfort and dignity-- and identifiable and stigmatized by physical characteristics that were interpreted by status quo as 'less-than-equal'-- well, it's a disgrace beyond comprehension. For most of us in the current culture where Beyonce is American 'royalty'... Hip Hop dominates the music industry-- fashion-- this is not simple.

Maybe the largest lesson of the Trump presidency-- and I see it as a huge disgusting presidential finger in my face every day-- is the survival of racism.  It's still everywhere.. in spite... despite.
I grew up a relatively privileged little white girl in New York... I had an Irish nanny some of the time, but like most middle-class households in the 50's and 60's.. we had a black housekeeper.  I've written about her many times-- more than a caretaker, she took me to church, sang to me-- loved me in a way no white mother ever did... I used to pray I'd turn black and live with her.  I envied the kids in the projects-- they had a community-- they hung out summer nights playing ball wth friends-- they barbecued and every night seemed like a party.  It seemed so 'safe'.  Little did I understand.

I married a black man.  My first husband-- yes, he was kind of a rockstar.  I'd never dated or been intimate with anyone but white men-- and it was different-- the chemistry was undeniable and the ceremony was like a dare.  I was actually surprised not one member of my family showed up at the wedding.  My parents had seemed like liberal democrats... no, they had no black friends; the soft boundary between me and our housekeeper made my mother nervous, I could see that;  I never told when I went to hang in her 'hood.  And as an aside-- no one in her hood ever made me feel unwelcome or different.  She referred to me as 'My Aimesy' and I loved it.

Was I trying to prove something?  I was not.  I loved the guy.  I was disowned by my family.  They clearly and verbally pronounced that they had one less daughter-- the Princeton/Harvard daughter.  Why was I surprised?  This was bigotry and racism in my own little clan.  It was real.  Was it difficult?  It was.  Even in Harlem people looked at us funny.  He had dreadlocks then and that was not part of Northern American black culture.  We went on a car trip and people in rural New England yelled out their windows at us-- 'Bob Marley go home'.  My girlfriends asked me inappropriate clinical questions about physical traits and ignorant narratives.  I learned things.  Among his people I felt comfortable-- but it was clear they would have preferred dark skin.  We struggled with the normal marital difficulties of rock musicians touring-- separations and misunderstandings... there was no communication technology in those days... just a rotary telephone and letters.

In the end we divorced... yes, we are still very, very  good friends; I am godmother to his 'black' children with his black wife.  I next married a British journalist-- couldn't have been much whiter-- and he was a 'dog' of a husband-- a cheating, hard drinking rogue who never paid a ha'penny of child support.  In the end-- a white non-present baby-Daddy with ghetto behavior.  Do I have the right to talk about racism, bigotry, issues?  To draw conclusions? I do not.

My son who is white British-American might have preferred to have been born black.  He was immersed in basketball culture and Hip Hop from an early age.  He was an incredibly talented young athlete-- was recruited and acknowledged-- and once snapped at me that he had zero chance of becoming an NBA player because of his color.  Not true, but it was his teenaged truth; he was occasionally the only white boy in the better leagues.  His friends are racially diverse in a way that should be normal here in our country.  He was raised just a few blocks from Harlem, and I often walk the streets of my James Baldwin world, remembering and fathoming.  The idea of being a cultural icon in those difficult days, where incarceration and physical threat was a constant-- where inequality and injustice was so ingrained no black person could walk safely down his own street.  Where-- then as now-- white authority represented the biggest threat of all.  Life-stopping.

Last week in the rain I went to cash a check at my bank on 126th Street.  They insisted I remove my hoodie... for the cameras.  Me-- an old white lady.  I retorted I had a hole in my head that would make the customers wretch.   In the end, they let it go.  I showed my ID.    I don't know where this fits in, but it sits there on the pile of racial profiling nonsense we all walk among in this century.  If I'd been a young black man I would have kept my mouth shut-- or I might have given the security guard a reason to put me in a fatal chokehold.  I thought about this on the way out-- how I had the freedom to make a disrespectful quip at what I found a ridiculous and inappropriate request.  

Tension has lightened a bit in the 21st century, but it's still there.  It was still there Friday night when I walked uptown to buy groceries and a kid was shadowing me on the street for whatever reason.  I apologized, in my heart, but I crossed the street.  One hour later on my way back, he was handcuffed and bent against a cop car.  Was he guilty?  Was I guilty? Me and my stupid James Baldwin and my compulsive apologies and my love of blues and black men in white T-shirts...