TCU Football: A Play In Time

It has taken a mere 37 years, 9 months, and 24 days--that is to say, in deliberately estranging terms, 339,936 hours (assuming my calculations are correct)--but it has happened. My father's dream for his son has come true, and he is a bona fide football aficionado. Unfortunately, this long prodigal son is now pushing forty, so living up to the father's hopes for a successful football career might remain for the old man a dream permanently deferred. Nevertheless, it is true that on October 15, 2022, I, Tyler Brown, fell in love with the sport of football.

The genesis of this piece was a breakfast in which I was introduced to two friends of Barry Lewis', Andrew and Olin, who thought I might make an amusing guest on their podcast. I was, needless to say, flattered by their invitation, and hastened to accede to their request. In the middle of one of our discussions, Andrew asked what, it seemed to me, was the most appealing aspect of football. Because I had, fourteen hours before, been witness to it, my response was immediate and accurate: time.

I am a poet. And one of the jobs of the poet, or any artist for that matter, is to bring us back to the fundamental foreignness of our sensory experience. The musician shapes our hearing, the painter our vision, the novelist our psyche. The poet shapes our language. For a poet, language is not something to be taken for granted and used as thoughtlessly and habitually as currency, each preposition a penny and noun a nickle, but a domain of being itself. Thus, when Richard Wilbur writes "The morning air is all awash with angels"--while describing laundry flapping on a line--the reader sees both angels and laundry a little differently; by a feat of language, the mundane error of a man waking from unsettling dreams to see, through his window, laundry flapping in the air becomes a transcendent revelation: the clean sheets, with their freshly washed scents, he will wear through "the punctual rape of every blessed day" are also the angels guarding and guiding him through his sad and uniquely ordained journey of human existence. And those very angels are, by necessity, of the same daily material as he.

On October 15th at the Carter, seven minutes remaining in the 4th quarter, TCU trailing by seven, it became evident to me, as the ball traced the sky and seared indelibly its image in the eyes of all who saw it, to land in Thomas Armstrong's gloves, that time had become similarly distorted and clarified, revealed and veiled, as I was aware, as were fifty thousand others, that within the hour we would know what the net result of the play amounted to. And as TCU continued to gain, yard by yard, to tie the quarter and ultimately win, time had become present in its primordial reality. No longer was the hour a workday's labor, nor the minute a lunchtime's leisure. Each moment, incalculable, though the seconds dwindled on the scoreboard, swelled with possibility and promise. Time contained, like a divine being, all our hopes, our fear of disappointment, and the narratives we thrust upon it: that it was simply not possible that the great gains we had made would have been for naught, we had to win, for the justification of a mythos almost cosmic.

As long as our faculties do not fail us, each of us will remember that game. We may not remember the exact date, perhaps not even the year, but we will always say, to our spouses and lovers, our friends and neighbors, and yes, our parents and sons and daughters: "do you remember when . . . ?"

Nostalgia gets a bad rap. But far from the pointless yearning for an idyllic past it is dismissed as being, it is often, in truth, the painful desire for something far more vital. It is for this reason businessmen adorn their offices with pennants and trophies decades old, elderly couples patiently grant the losing team their faith and attendance each week, and mothers dress their children in the colors of their alma mater. These colors and mementos and decorations and hardware are tokens of having been, that meaning and joy and fear and pity and ambition and pride were not always foreign to us. At one point, those qualities were not of the "having been" but of the moment, the almighty, perpetually vanishing "is." And to that end, nostalgia always contains a promise of the future: that what was will yet be, the "having been" be again. Thus, critics are not wrong to point out that athletic worship is a kind of religion. They are mistaken, however, in being dismissive of the fact. Retrieving meaning from time, relative to our mortality, is the essence of all religion, secular or otherwise.

What to account for this seemingly absurd relationship? Why should a game, where the stakes are not too high, drive us to such emotional heights? I like to think the answer lies further in time. It is recorded in the Tanakh that after victory in battle, the women of the tribes of Israel would engage in dances to celebrate their triumphant warriors--not unlike cheerleaders. Certainly the Greek tragedies and epics are full of the benefits to be gained from loyalty to the warrior set--the thriving of the community--and the inevitable punishment for falling away--death, disease, famine, etc. This speaks to the shame inherent in being "a fair-weather fan."

The degree to which modern sport is a relatively safe way of appealing to our primitive tribal impulses is of less interest to me than the need to point out that only in sport and war does time seem so immediately present. Where narrative exists, time is continually kept safely at bay--we can only know its meaning once the entire play or film or novel is over, and retroactively understand what has been done. In The Godfather Part 2, as an obvious example, the mutual betrayal of the Corleone brothers is so aesthetically satisfying because it was not necessary, the Corleone family could have been happy, or Fredo sent safely to rehab, but by the judicious determination of a screenwriter and filmmaker, the conclusion felt not only necessary but inevitable. In competition, however, in which there is no design, no suspension of disbelief, where chaos reigns and the only order, aside from the rules of the game, is the hard hierarchy of winner and loser, time does not postpone itself till the finale or the denouement or the encore. It announces itself in every step and gesture, shimmer, run, play, huddle, hand clap, and tremor. What meaning it has we impose upon it entirely, lacking a poet. It is for this reason Vince McMahon, no fool, insisted professional wrestling was unscripted for as long as he could. The moment we know there's a design, time disappears, and with it, the vitality of being.

In ten years, no doubt, this essay will cease to exist. Or, if it does somehow remain in print, it will likely only persist in the vast unread library of an anonymous hard drive we have laughingly coined "memory." But its prophecy is sound. What it reports is true, everyone witness to that game will always remember it as long as they wear the purple and the white, how we all knew, in the late-afternoon/early-evening of October 15, we were witness to something we could never forget: a peak episode in the extraordinary story of our own lives, in real time.

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