NFL Week Six: The Seahawks Dethroned

Tonight NFL Week Seven gets underway with a Jets-Patriots match-up in Foxborough. Belichik's Patriots are the closest thing to a machine in the NFL. The last several seasons though, since their Super Bowl XLVI defeat by the Giants, New England has looked all too human.

Nonetheless, Belichik, though I have loathed his teams for decades, is hard to bet against. He knows how to win, and his Patriots, led by the aging "teen idol" Tom Brady, are always atop the AFC East. A couple Sundays back I caught the first half of the evening game against the undefeated Bengals. Brady led the Patriots offense with ruthless precision.

The Rex Ryan Jets are another story. Once endowed with the league's most formidable defense, the Jets at 1-5 are a team adrift. Ryan probably should have been fired at the end of last season. Maybe tonight New York will surprise us, but that is most unlikely. The Patriots at home have proven to be almost unbeatable in the regular season.

Now that these Thursday night games are available on broadcast television, I must say that I look forward to them; it is something akin to the tradition of the Thursday night party that fraternities put on while I was at the university. Though I was never a member of a frat, their Thursday night parties had a spillover effect for everyone else on campus -- a bridge to the weekend, a way to chop down the five-day work week.

But the Thursday night game is not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the humiliating defeat suffered by the Super Bowl XLVIII Champion Seattle Seahawks by Dallas.

I tossed and turned all night long this past Sunday. I awoke every 90 minutes. The most searing episode was around 2 AM when I jolted up muttering to myself about the offense.

While it is true that the defense was manhandled by the Cowboys, if the Seahawks had mustered one or two sustained drives, I think the outcome would have been different. The planned and hoped for (by the Carroll brain trust) transformation of the offense this year from a power-rushing attack to a West Coast style passing attack has, after five games, been a bust. It's time to either return to Beast Mode or start heaving bombs down the field to Harvin and Richardson.

I've compared these weekly posts on the NFL to a dream journal, a brief mostly colorless record of my bachelor Sunday waking dream life, lying on my mattress on the floor in front of a 13-inch color TV, absorbing the various telecasts from 10 AM to the end of the Sunday night game on NBC. Well, the Cowboys-Seahawks Week Six game was a nightmare. Prompting the question, Why am I so attached to this team? Sure, they are Super Bowl Champions. But the Holmgren Seahawks were almost Super Bowl Champions -- and I loathed that team.

It has something to do with the composition of the squad. The fact that the Seahawks marquee players are all black, young and appealing (to me at least) has a lot to do with it. Even though a Richard Sherman and a Marshawn Lynch are extremely wealthy by working-class standards, they strike me as representative of the rest of us struggling on the front lines of the rat race with our degraded lives at work.

The reverse image of the National Football League is the repetitious, "trial by ordeal," soul crunching, 50 out of 52 weeks a year American way of earning a living where no respect is given and any dignity we manage to display we do on our own dime.

But the home team offers an idealized space where we are young, strong, fast and potent. Every Sunday we are allowed to transfer our identity out of our mundane, hopeless lot to a collective consciousness of positive actualization.

Until, of course, a beat down like last Sunday happens. Then one's world is turned upside down. The order of the mundane soulless routine is cast asunder. I began to question my attachment -- and how attachment defines identity.

To make matters worse, on the train ride to work Monday morning, a bevy of Cowboys fans, wearing their team jerseys and sporting Lone Star paraphernalia, crowed and boasted of their dominance on their way to the airport.

One guy, a black guy from Baton Rouge sporting a Dez Bryant jersey, traveling with his young son and demure wife, was particularly boorish. Talking at the top of his voice for 45 minutes, he relived the entire game, belittling the Seahawks -- "There's no way they're going back to the Super Bowl. No way. They're done." -- celebrating the dominance of his Cowboys. A young white couple with big dark blue Lone Stars on their chests nodded and cackled in agreement at every dull pearl the Baton Rouge Dez Bryant uttered.

I gritted my teeth and tried to read the newspaper. It was painful, but I held my tongue. Then when the train pulled into its last stop at the airport station I couldn't resist one parting comment. "Well, for your sake, I hope you can keep DeMarco Murray healthy."

The young white couple politely responded, "Oh, yes."

But Dez Bryant, with a foul look smeared on his face, didn't say a word. He knows the truth. The truth is that DeMarco Murray has been injured each of the last two seasons, missing a significant amount of time. When that happens the Cowboys become one-dimensional with Romo throwing the ball non-stop. They don't win that way.

Murray already has 130 carries after 5 games. Chances are good given past history that he will sustain another injury. I don't wish that upon DeMarco Murray. He is an excellent running back and seems like a good young man. But Dez Bryant from Baton Rouge should be a little more discrete on a commuter train in Seattle. Dallas has not won the Super Bowl yet.

As for the defending Super Bowl Champion Seattle Seahawks, things do not look good. Injuries on defense and an offense that cannot establish a rhythm (and haven't been able to all season minus the home opener against Green Bay) portend a brutal, painful year ahead.

I've been down this road before with the defending Super Bowl Champion San Francisco 49ers during the 1985 regular season. That season changed my life. I became an alcoholic. I dropped out of the university for a semester. The 1985 49ers showed true grit just to make it to the playoffs as a wild card.

We'll see what the Seahawks are made of -- if they have the toughness of those '85 49ers. Sunday in St. Louis will be a good indication. The Rams are a dangerous team despite their poor record. St. Louis was up early at home against Dallas and San Francisco. Both the Cowboys and the 49ers were able to come back. But the Seahawks so far have not shown an offense that can mount a comeback.

In a nutshell, NFL Sunday Week 7 will point the way to whether Seattle makes the playoffs. A loss to the Rams means that the Seahawks will not repeat as Super Bowl Champions.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #33

This letter to my friend Jeff begins with another a trip down memory lane of the 1985 San Francisco 49ers season, something I discussed at length in the introduction to letter number four. Then, mercifully, it shifts to a description of the moment I quit my job as a proofreader at a Wall Street law firm. The insights about work ring just as true today.

I never figured a way out of the rat race, only how to be a more pleasant and faster rat.

Winter 1990

Jeff,

Got your letter the other day. It was a good one. Thanks. I'm sorry to hear about your dog. That's a tough one, made worse of course by what Shale said -- "Why not just get another one?" -- Why not just get another mother? That's what it amounts to.

Wow! That was some street story, complete with gunfire and karate kicks. I've never been around something of that magnitude.

Well, I hate to gloat, but 30-3, that's one solid whipping. I thought the Rams were going to play them tough, but it just goes to show you, Jim Everett at this point is still just a lot hype. Flipper Anderson and Henry Ellard are two of the best receivers in football, easy; and the Ram offensive line is probably the best. So why isn't Everett a helluva lot better than he is? (But in his defense there is and will always be, only one Joe Montana.) I'll be honest with you though, the 49ers are beginning to scare me. They're starting to look like a machine, like the Steelers looked in '78 and '79; they're losing their unpredictable good-guy feel. This is coming from somebody who has bled red and gold since the 5th grade, from somebody who has suffered through the 2-14 DeBerg years. The 49ers have never been a machine; they've always been fuck-ups, winning the tough games graciously and then dropping the easy ones to a team like the Lions. I'll never forget the 1985 season. It was the year after the '9ers beat the Dolphins in the Super Bowl. Every Sunday I'd go over to my buddy Oliver's and we'd hoot and holler and cook and drink. I was so completely wed to the team that year that whenever I'd go to study at a cafe I'd end up leafing through the Sporting Green, soaking in Wendell Tyler and Roger Craig's rushing-yardage per carry and Joe Montana's interception total; at night when I had trouble sleeping I'd recite the S.F. schedule complete with scores of games that'd already been played, as well as the starting offense, the starting defense, and the disabled list. Yep, I was a goner. That was my team that year -- I would've died for then, if anybody would've asked me to. The problem about it was that that was probably the roughest season the 49ers went through in the last 13 years. -- Their first game was in Minnesota against a very poor Vikings team (I think they only won three games the year before). Nine o'clock Saturday morning I tooled the bug down Telegraph. Ashley rode along for the season opener, sitting in the passenger seat, knitting up a storm. I turned up Ashby and parked in front of DREAM FLUFF DONUTS. I got out and purchased an assorted dozen. I handed the box to Ashley and slid behind the wheel, pushing the Volks back towards Telegraph. At the Berkeley-Oakland border I pulled into the parking lot of WHITE HORSE LIQUORS on 66th Street there. I stepped out and walked in through the open plate-glass doors and bought a cold pack of Coors (cans). Anyway, fuck this! I'm boring you, and I'm boring myself. I'm drunk and there's nothing good about me telling this tale; it happened too long ago. And the only reason I went into this was so I could tell you how great it was, how great it tasted, to drink beer while chomping down glazed donuts -- it was like the 4th of July; anyway, the 49ers lost the game (three fumbles in the first half, mostly due to Wendell) and ended up the season struggling to the wild-card game with a 10-6 record, only to lose substantially to the Giants, 17-3; the Rams won the division that year but lost to Chicago at Soldier Field in the NFC Championship Game, back when Soldier Field was artificial turf and too cold and too hard for poor Eric to run on.

Good news. I quit my job. It happened two weeks ago today. I was called into the supervisor's office, which isn't an office but a nasty little austere cubicle. She sat me down in a chair directly across from her desk.

"How long do you plan on working here?"

"For a while longer, I guess ... Why?"

"We've had some complaints about your language."

"What? Who?"

"That's not any of your concern."

My head began to swim, the walls were spinning. I was being treated like a brat, a schoolboy; I was in the principal's office at Louise Van Meter Elementary School and I was being accused of sneaking into the girl's bathroom during afternoon recess and there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn't think. I felt like I was stoned. I tried to speak, to say something in my defense, but all that came out was a slush of gibberish. The supervisor frowned coldly:

"Either clean up your language, or look for work elsewhere. It's reached that point."

A threat! An ultimatum! The blond beast in my belly stood up; the fog bolted from my brow. I was whole again! After months of demeaning proofreading and premeditatedly brain-deadening lunch-time beer steins and bourbon shots I was finally thinking clearly again. The only problem was that I was mad and getting madder by the second. The blond beast was fighting his way out of the belly and clawing up into my lungs. I took two deep breaths and exhaled loudly. The supervisor's eyes got big and round and white like two salty soft-boiled eggs. But it didn't do any good, the beast kept moving, inching up my neck and burrowing into my skull and nestling in my brain pan. I couldn't think anymore; all that beautiful clarity, and it had only lasted a few seconds. Everything I saw -- her face, the white walls, the dull sky through the dirty window (that dull bullshit New York Wall Street street steam Staten Island Ferry sky, it makes me sick) --it all looked red. For a moment I thought of grabbing a chair and hurling it through the window; then I wondered if I had the strength in my arms to wrench the desk off the carpeted floor and bring it whistling down on top of her stupid body. --Yep, that would've been the best: seeing her hideous middle-aged weather-beaten face staring up glassy-eyed and bloody-nosed at the fluorescent tubes strung from the ceiling, a huge Kodiak bear of a brown desk perched atop her heaving and splintered balsa wood chest. Instead, I gathered myself and walked to the door and turned and modestly said, "I quit." I went for the nonchalant, "baby-there's-nothing-you-can-do-that'll-get-to-me" approach because in between seeing red I'd figured out, in a millisecond or two, that this bitch was gonna get off, erotically, on any bit of fuss and battle that I put up; so fuck her -- the sadist. I nipped it in the bud.

That was it. I went to my desk, packed up my stuff, said my goodbyes. The next thing I knew I was out on Wall Street -- a free man for the first time since July 14th, 1989. Amen.

And let me tell you, Goddamn does it feel good to be out of work. Working steady 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, January to December -- in fact the whole corporate, industrial, american, money-making life-pattern myth -- is such a blow job, and a bad one at that, that I'm mystified how generation after generation can accept and endorse and then get ripped apart and put in the tomb by it. I'm all the more mystified because I'm as big an accepter as anyone. I've been working since I was 18, which isn't much compared to most, but it's put me in the frame of mind that whenever I'm out of work for more than a few days I start to feel that nauseating bite of conscience; I start to feel like a soft effeminate flunky; and at that point I'll rashly take any old shitty work that comes my way: pulling weeds for an Oakland hills housewife, teaching reading and composition to university freshmen, hauling sheet rock all over the Bay Area, researching scholarly materials for a chocolate-eating pear-shaped professor, painting San Francisco churches with an ex-con as an unforgiving foreman, night-shift data entry in a Times Square skyscraper, paging books in Doe Library during the butter of my college youth, running a microfilm machine in the shadow of the New York Stock Exchange, proofreading for a big musty & suspendered Wall Street law firm ... Oh man, it goes on and on to all points of boredom and oblivion and through it all, all jobs are the same but with the occasional exception that some are better than others.

All right. I've tortured you enough with my drunkenness. I finally had Ashley print out that astrological chart I've been promising to send you since who knows when. You must've requested it three months ago. -- I'm sorry, but I'm as lazy as a turtle.

I'm looking forward to hearing from you again.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #4

I worked with both Oliver and Lyn at Doe Library -- actually a book delivery service called Baker that was part of Doe. They were friends approaching the status of kin. They're the couple, referred to in a previous post, who my wife and I were with when we came across the guy mugged and moaning on the sidewalk in front of the Fort Washington Men's Shelter.

Looking back on my university years this Super Bowl weekend I realize that one of my finest achievements of that era was to suffer through every single game of the 49ers 1985 season.  I did that with Oliver. 

That season San Francisco was coming off a big Super Bowl win against Don Shula's Dolphins. Expectations were high for a repeat. On Sundays my wife and I would get into a Volkswagen Beetle (that we had purchased from another one of my Baker coworkers) and drive south down Telegraph to where Oliver and Lyn had a sweet little duplex cottage at the Berkeley-Oakland border. We'd usually bring beer and, if it was a game with a 10 AM kickoff, we'd stop off along the way at Dream Fluff Donuts. Oliver and Lyn were excellent hosts. Their home was always clean; their TV large; and they always prepared food.

The season opener was on the road in the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome against a mediocre Vikings team. San Francisco lost and Oliver, keenly perceptive when identifying the dark cast of clouds, said something to the effect of, "Get ready. It's going to be this way the whole year."

I wasn't prepared to accept that. I thought the loss was a one-off. How many times are you going to fumble seven times in a single game? And sure enough the next two weeks the 49ers chalked up impressive wins against the Falcons and the Raiders. But then the turd again appeared in the punch bowl when New Orleans, a weak divisional opponent, came into Candlestick and beat the 49ers in the fourth quarter. David Wilson threw for more yards than Joe Montana and Wayne Wilson out-rushed Wendell Tyler. I don't recall much of this game, other than when I study the box score a mist of pain settles anew on my heart.

After beating Atlanta again, the 49ers hosted the ascendant "Super Bowl Shuffle" Bears on a perfect sunny day at Candlestick. Walter Payton ran the ball down our throats and the vaunted Bill Walsh offense was blanked in the second half by Buddy Ryan's 46 defense. Oliver and I were speechless. I remember stumbling out into the bright California autumn sun afterwards. Oliver and Lyn's cottage was tucked back off the street; they had a nice front yard with grass and flowering plants and small trees; it was a little Shangri La. And there I stood stunned, reeling in their little Shangri La; the world had turned upside down. Mike Ditka must have felt the same way because he was arrested after the game for drunk driving.

The 49ers were .500 at this point, but worse was to come the following week on the road at the Pontiac Silverdome. This was for me the nadir (excluding the the season-ending, soul-crunching Wild Card Round playoff loss to New York in an icy Giants Stadium). I sat on Oliver and Lyn's couch drunk by 10:30 AM, eating glazed donuts while my wife knit a sweater next to me. When Detroit scored first on a punt return Oliver and I bellowed in agony. And it would just get worse. Lions running back James Jones rushed 30 times for 116 yards; Eddie Murray kicked three field goals; and Joe Montana was ineffective, passing for less than a hundred yards. By the time the game was over at 1 o'clock I was wasted; the day ruined. Oliver once again was speechless. I went home and slept the rest of the afternoon away.

The season, close to the halfway point, would turn around for San Francisco. There was the one-point loss to Denver on Monday Night Football that was questionable due to a snowball tossed from the Mile High Stadium seats as holder Matt Cavanaugh and Ray Wersching attempted the game-winning field goal. Then there was another loss on Monday Night Football to the division arch-rival Los Angeles Rams led by Dieter Brock. But other than those two games the 49ers won the rest of year including an amazingly gritty victory against the despised Cowboys to close out the regular season. Roger Craig became the first player in NFL history to rush  for 1,000 yards and receive 1,000 yards in a single season.

That tough win against Dallas cost San Francisco. Everyone was banged up for the playoff game against the Giants at the Meadowlands. Ronnie Lott basically played with one arm after getting a finger mangled in the ear hole of a Cowboys helmet. Roger Craig had two sore knees and could hardly walk let alone run, cut and take hits on frozen Astro Turf. Wendell Tyler returned early from knee surgery to provide a spark for San Francisco in the second half. It was a truly selfless, heroic effort, but it didn't stop the Parcells Giants from administering a brutal 17-3 thrashing.

I was devastated. Oliver and I didn't watch the game together. I was at my wife's mother's house in snowy Southern Oregon. I was in excruciating pain. I had completely transferred my identity to that team. So when they were hurt and humiliated so was I. No one around could understand what I was feeling. Oliver was 350 miles south. My wife was mildly sympathetic, but she really didn't have a clue as to the kind of pain I was in. I remember after the game I had to help lug a hide-a-bed sofa through the snow and it felt like I was performing Stations of the Cross. I was that low.

I was twenty-one. Little did I know that the 1985 San Francisco 49ers season, with its bright promise overshadowed by crushing disappointment, would serve as an accurate template for adult life ahead; in this experience of suffering I am forever bonded with my buddy Oliver.

The letter below, the fourth installment taken from a folder I retrieved from storage as I sizzled in agony during the Seahawks failed comeback attempt against the Falcons three weeks ago, is one of the few that I actually dated. The poetry reading of my friend Ben that I refer to was noteworthy in that I saw pre-Poetry Grand Slam Champion Paul Beatty read stuff that would end up in Big Bank Take Little Bank. He was awesome that night. The friend recuperating from a broken back in the hospital was a paralegal who was my supervisor at Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP. I introduced him to the literary pleasures of Charles Bukowski, to whom he wrote and received a reply.

11/05/89

I want to thank you Oliver and Lyn for sending those cards along. I've got 'em up on the refrigerator: the Jesus crucified and the Palenque tomb; the Giants getting their butts kicked by Dave Stewart and the drunk getting bruised up for a half an hour by your two Mexican buddies.

I saw Ben's poetry reading when he was here in New York a couple of weeks ago. It was at St. Mark's Church. It was nice and short. I took off immediately afterward. Ashley has me on this new thing where I can't drink in public; and since everybody was going out to drink after the show, I figured it'd be best if I didn't hang around.

You've got to wake up and sniff the coffee grinds sometime, Oliver. I mean come on, best case scenario the Giants couldn't've beat the A's; I mean jeez, Tony Phillips outhit and outplayed Robbie Thompson -- what does that say? I'll tell ya, it says that it was the A's year, plain and simple.

I just got back fron Brooklyn. I took the B line out to see a friend who's in the hospital at 55th and 2nd Ave. He broke his back falling down a flight stairs. He was drunk -- too drunk to walk down a flight of stairs. The hospital is in a neighborhood that looks a lot like East Oakland; so to make my scenic tour a touch more embracing I stopped off at a corner market and got myself a couple of 16 oz. Colt 45's. I perused the streets, sipped my beer, and found the hospital. I took the elevator up to the third floor, meandered down one hall and then up another, passed a few surly looking cops (apparently there because of some bank robber they had freshly shot), poked my head in the door of rm. 3326 and bam! -- there he was: looking doped up and miserable and like he hadn't had a shower in thirty days (his hair looked like a scarecrow's). I delivered him some parcels, chatted peaceably for fifty minutes (he really was doped up), said my goodbyes, and took off back into the East-Oakland-Brooklyn night. I got back on the subway at 52nd and 4th Ave. The Colt was doing me just right. When I walked on the train the first thing I noticed was how clean it was. -- It shone like lemons and polished porcelain and oily hair. Nobody was on the train except for me and maybe three other people. I started thinking about a plain and simple life. I started thinking about a big old house, after it'd been scrubbed and painted; not a new house, but an old house; -- an old house you'd sweat over and pour into, one that'd breathe back golden comfort and white light. Aw shit, where am I gonna find that outside of a beer can and a subway car?