This Week In Balls: There Are Only Two Certainties In Life
We find ourselves in the midst of some evolving stories that have crossed through this space in the past several months: The Flyers‘ increasing viciousness, the unraveling season of the Eagles and lastly a sad and inexplicable tale of rags, riches, blackness and the NFL.
After the jump, Michael Fichman wonders what God hath wrought.
This Week In Balls: Death and Taxes
This week in balls we find ourselves in the midst of some evolving stories that have crossed through this space in the past several months. The first, a story of the Flyers‘ increasing viciousness, the second a tale of near-success in the unraveling season of the Eagles and lastly a sad and inexplicable tale of rags, riches, blackness and the NFL.
For starters, another Flyer done up and got himself suspended for a vicious and reckless hit. This continues the season-long trend of Flyers going beyond the pale to let the rest of the league know that Philadelphia breeds an amoral and violent sort. In hockey, this sort of reputation pays some dividends. Well, as of this writing, Scotty Hartnell is suspended for a mere two games after the shiver he gave to a kneeling Andrew Alberts as Alberts was along the side boards. Take a look:
Dastardlies: 5
Alberts was defenseless along the boards, Hartnell came in hard, charging probably, and elbowed Alberts’ head into the protruding part of the dasher, busting his grill up pretty bad. I’d expect a good five to ten games at least. But not so.
Buncha animals
The lumbering Eagles nearly stole one from the undefeated Patriots this past Sunday night, resulting in a loss that hardly anyone found disappointing. The net result was more quarterback controversy. AJ Feeley had the game of his life against the Pats, throwing for 300-odd yards, 3 touchdowns and three picks. Instead of elevating Feeley’s status to that of the Eagles starter, his performance likely just drove a nail in Donovan McNabb‘s coffin. With the Eagles at 5-6, closer to the bottom of the NFC than a playoff spot, the likelihood of the Eagles finding a playoff birth under the guidance of McNabb is slim and growing slimmer.
Clearly, the Eagles aren’t going to throw their hat in the ring with Feeley for any prolonged stretch of time, but two quick losses and there is little left to play for this season. McNabb is providing returns that are diminishing with each injury, and the emotional resonance of a near-epic upset under the helm of a backup may be enough to push Andy Reid towards considering his own job security as mutually exclusive with McNabb’s.
Are we approaching the end of the line for the Andy Reid impersonator?
Lastly, this week the sports world got a taste of what passes for business-as-usual in Philadelphia, violence destroying the lives of young black men. Redskins safety Sean Taylor was shot and killed in what appears to have been a very calculated burglary on Monday morning. It was almost a year ago that a young Broncos player named Darrent Williams was shot and killed. As they did then, the ill-equipped sports media will attempt to come up with some sort of explanation for this incident. They will fail. Instead of rehashing the words I wrote at the time of the Williams murder, I will merely excerpt them here, for exactly the same message applies.
Waliy Abdur Rahim (better known as Demetrius “Hook” Mitchell), who Jason Kidd and Gary Payton both describe as (my words) “way, way better than me,” held up a video store. His friends and acquaintances (including Brian Shaw and Antonio Davis) went to the NBA. The line is thin. Very thin. Perhaps there is as much Hook Mitchell in Gary Payton as the other way around. Gary Payton, Darrent Williams and the like did not evaporate from the ghetto ether when they got their mugshots on an ESPN player card, which has a text field for “born,” but not one for “died.” They invisibly went on living the life they had before in parallel with the life they earned through their physical talent and hard work. This fact may have been subtly acknowledged in a United Way PSA. We all know living in the hood is more about trap-or-die than it is about reading Dr. Seuss with Tiki Barber, but we damn well don’t want to think about it.
How many more famous young black men have to die before whitebread America begins to think of the senseless deaths of anonymous young black men? I encourage you to read the column I wrote about the Williams murder, because this is a problem that seemed just as unsolvable then as it does now.
You can find it here.
In closing, here’s my favorite clip of the human dynamo that was Sean Taylor, jacking up a punter in the Pro Bowl:
Michael Fichman is a writer and DJ living in Philadelphia. He also blogs at Just Sayin’ and Pour The Science. Read more editions of This Week In Balls here.
