As anyone who's ever looked at this blog or knows me casually is well aware, my professional football allegiance is deeply encoded in my Wisconsin born and bred DNA.
The immensity of the tragedy in South Asia makes looking at the death of one man seem small. But still I find myself processing the premature death and mixed legacy of Reggie White.
The vicarious psychology of the sports fan fascinates me even as I indulge in it. I stumble into work on a Monday morning and pull my green and gold hat off my head.
"How'd your Packers do yesterday?"
"We won."
WE. Like I somehow had anything to do with it. Like I was down on the field throwing that key block that left Donald Driver open in the end zone. Sure. We.
Yet millions of us get caught up in it, our moods wildly swinging from elation to hopelessness based on the performance of a few dozen physically abnormal men who most often have no real identification with or relationship to the team's town beyond some high profile feel-good PR/charity projects. The contracts expire, the bidding begins, the players move on.
But the team stays. The fans stay and still say "We won". The tears on their faces as "We Are The Champions" plays are real. The joy I saw - and yes, experienced - in 1997 when the Packers won the Super Bowl was one of the most genuine and happy feelings I have ever known. And my vicarious emotions were reinforced and amplified by my father and brother who shared that day with me. I was four years old the day of the Ice Bowl and so I had literally waited my whole life for that moment.
For that, I must thank Reggie White.
I learned of Reggie's death on a football Sunday, the day after Christmas. My dad the coach was in the room and my brothers - scattered to hostile Bear, Lion and Viking territory but still loyal Packer Backers - nearby.
The highlight reels and spontaneous, heartfelt tributes filled up the pregame shows. And every commentator felt the need to expound on Reggie's off-field personality He was a big man with a big heart, a deeply religious person who offered friendship to teammate and opponent alike.
My own emotions were genuinely mixed. I fought my distaste for Reggie White's personal politics for the first couple days, even though The Speech was mentioned in passing even in the first obituaries.
Sports fans like to give each other a hard time about their opposing loyalties. I see someone in a Bears hat, he sees me, and we exchange The Look like a couple of territorial bucks. But there's a commonality despite the hostility. We've bonded in our enmity. You've got your team, I've got mine, and our teams are bitter rivals - but we are Loyal To Our Teams and that produces a begrudging mutual respect.
But once one gets outside the psychology of the sports fan and rejoins the real world, the team colors take on other meanings. The only time I've ever been seriously chided for wearing my green and gold was in the spring of 1998.
The tributes last Sunday all showed the briefest of clips from Reggie White's speech to the Wisconsin Legislature. None of them included the content of what he said:
"Homosexuality is a decision, it's not a race. People from all different ethnic backgrounds live in this lifestyle. But people from all different ethnic backgrounds are liars and cheaters and malicious and back-stabbing."
And there was a lot more.
At the time I was working on a local political campaign that ultimately elected the first out lesbian to public office in my state. Some of my friends on that campaign took deep offense at the G. In my real world where boycotts and protests are coin of the realm, my team loyalty was interpreted differently. Not as an endorsement of Reggie White's remarks, they knew me too well for that. But my defensive "I've been a Packer fan my whole life" was certainly insufficient.
How do I justify this? How could I genuinely identify with and cheer on a man who so deeply held such bigoted views?
Athletes, as a group, lean politically conservative. This isn't universal, of course. My own father comes from an athletic background and is an open-minded and reasonable man. And I fondly recall my futile efforts for Bill Bradley. But if you're looking for a young conservative, particulary an African American, a locker room is a good place to start.
I remember studying "The Super Bowl As Spectacle" in grad school, looking at football as a metaphor for American warrior corporate culture. Pro sports is a zero-sum game with absolute winners and losers. Sports values raw physical superiority and (more true in days past) the authoritarian power of the coach. And of course athletes are wealthy which reinforces the political conservatism.
Homophobia remains the last-most-acceptable prejudice in America. Bigotry of other sorts exists, to be sure, but we've progressed to the point where it's "bad manners" to be overtly racist or sexist. Such prejudices need to be couched in more veiled, less blatant ways. But open bigotry against gays and lesbians remains open and is even encouraged in contexts such as the military and sports. People continue to use religion to excuse it, just as they once used it to justify segregation. It was telling that, in the fallout from the 1998 speech, White apologized for remarks about Asians and Hispanics but refused to retract his anti-gay statements.
For some reason, I find such bigotry - and I will call it nothing else - more disturbing coming from an African American. Reggie White was of the first post-civil rights generation yet the battles and arguments as he grew up in the South were still fresh. And as I watch today, as the father of a young black woman, those battles continue.
Why could Reggie White not extend that logic to the freedom and rights of gay Americans? How do we measure him in his death? By his quarterback sacks and the team leadership he showed? By his ministry, friendship, and work with children? Or by his prejudices?
We ask these same questions of other types of artists and performers with reprehensible beliefs or controversial personal lives. How important are the political views of a football player. I went to high school with my parent's state legislator, a man whose public life indicates that he shares many of Reggie White's views. Mike Huebsch has actual power, which is far far more crucial that what some football player says. But Reggie White had the sacks and in our celebrity-driven political-media culture that's what seems to matter.
Do we ever find the answers? I'm no closer to justifying or explaining. The Minister of Defense leaves me with my honest confusion and my genuine sadness.
The old saying is to love the sinner but hate the sin. Reggie White and I might be able to come to common ground on that, even if we'd approach it from opposite directions. And we'd both call ourselves Christians despite our very different interpretation of what that means.
So I offer some honest thought, a prayer perhaps. My thoughts go out to those who truly lost someone, to whom he was a father or a husband or a friend or something more than Number 92. For myself I am thankful for the joy Reggie White gave the world, both in the vicarious sports fan sense and in his very real work in people's lives. By all accounts Reggie White was a man capable of great insight and love. I truly hope that in the last years of his life, his big heart grew to embrace all of God's children.
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