Hate is a strong word, describing an evil thing: an extreme dislike of someone or something which historically has driven people to do terrible atrocities. But, perhaps indicating that “hate” is an overused word in modern English, there are several types and levels of hatred. The type which I would say I am currently most filled with is known as “sports hate.”
Sports hatred is usually a product of jealousy, frustration, and other negative emotions which typically result when your team loses, or comes far too close for comfort. I have hated hated hated Peyton Manning ever since I started following football. He was the guy who was in direct competition with Tom Brady for the consensus top quarterback in the game, perhaps of all time. He had an infuriating knack for the fourth quarter comeback. He was sacked only rarely, and he threw very few picks. He had the Manning face when things did not go well. All his backups were colossal failures, something which might suggest that he is not much of a mentor (contrast that to Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers, whose backups, because of them or not, have been stellar by comparison). He had a habit of throwing his offensive line under the bus after losses. He was in seemingly thousands of commercials, always acting in a way which just seemed generally irritating for some reason. All in all, there were lots of things which, if viewed through a heavily anti-Manning bias, made him into a very easy figure to hate.
Something I have found this year, however, is that my hatred of the man has evaporated. He did not play at all this season, and it seems like he may never play again. His team completely collapsed without him, getting wins number one and two in weeks 16 and 17 respectively, and it is a near certainty that they will use their #1 overall draft pick on Andrew Luck, widely regarded as the best quarterback prospect since, well, Peyton Manning himself.
Looking back, It seems that the most critical part of my Peyton hate, and sports hatred in general, is that he could be counted on not to do what I wanted him to, and instead do the very opposite. Sometimes he would make a critical mistake, and for that moment an individual pulling against him would be completely ecstatic, but those moments were very few and far between. Now that he is not single handedly winning games with two minute, fourth quarter comeback drives which, despite the very low odds of success for an typical team, always seemed inevitable the instant he had the ball, I have no enraged distracting emotions to replenish that hate and fear, and nothing at all to stop me from looking back at his career, at everything he managed to do that made me hate him so much, and realize not only that he was really damn good, but that I have a tremendous amount of respect and, even more surprisingly, well wishes for him. I want him to be able to come back. I don’t want him to go out like this, forced away from his no question hall of fame career by a shoulder injury, the approaching deadline for his $20 million bonus, and the inevitable competition from a younger, possibly better, and unquestionably more valuable Andrew Luck. Heck, I can even admit that some of those commercials were kind of funny.
Without question the worst moment of my professional sports watching life was Superbowl XLII, the game which has come to be known as “Black Sunday” in those parts of the internet Patriots fans frequent. For whatever reason, I have only a minimal memory of that game, as I suspect my mind has tried to wipe it away for my sake. Of the critical missed interceptions by Asante Samuel and Brandon Merriweather on the final drive I have no memory. I have some memory of both game winning touchdowns. But two plays remain all too clear in my mind, maliciously playing on as I type.
Third and five for the Giants from their own 44. Manning drops back into the pocket, which quickly collapses under the rush. Manning, suddenly in trouble, ducks as a cloud of blue and silver envelopes him. For a moment, he is gone, sacked! 4th and long! But there he is again, out of the mob, unharmed, his jersey caught in some desperate lineman’s hand, momentarily stretched far more than should be possible, the cloud of Patriots somehow behind him and completely out of the play. He throws, and the ball is at a Patriot, Intercepted! No? Caught, by a Giant, with a Patriot all over him, dragged to the ground with the ball still there, caught and held against his helmet, just out of reach and thirty yards down field. 1st down. Seemingly moments later, Touchdown. 17-14, New York.
Third and twenty at their own sixteen for New England. Brady in the shotgun, takes the snap, drops back, dodges a rusher from his left, runs to his right to about the thirteen and launches the ball far and deep for Moss, streaking 70 yards down field with the three Giants in coverage, just a step behind. The ball converges on him, nearly into his outstretched arms but barely tipped by a leaping defender and knocked away, incomplete.
The man who made the catch was David Tyree, an otherwise lousy and unimportant backup wide receiver who had managed a stunning seven receptions over the entire 2007 season prior to that play. That catch was the last of Tyree’s career, but it may as well have been the first and only for all the difference it made to his legacy. That catch is his one and only claim to fame, the one thing which makes him anything worth remembering to total strangers who know nothing of his non business life. It does not really help my opinion of him that that catch was possibly the luckiest play in the history of the modern NFL. Manning’s remarkable escape was made possible by two holds, one an almost understandable non call, the other anything but, and the catch itself, lest we forget, involved him pinning a football with considerable forward momentum against his helmet with one hand as Rodney Harrison did all he could to knock it out. Barring god-like powers, that simply does not happen by skill alone.
What makes it all the more infuriating to me, however, is the comparison between the Tyree catch and the third down, 70 yard Hail Mary bomb which fell incomplete. The Giants did almost everything they could have to be beat on that play, from the offensive line collapsing almost immediately before the New England pass rush, then making two holds in an attempt to make up for it, and once Eli did break away, he simply threw a high, floating, Hail-Mary-esque jump ball (when was the last time one of those worked?) to a single receiver, well covered and surrounded by four, count them, four, Patriots defenders. Tyree caught it, barely, had it stripped from one hand so that it was held in place with literally four fingertips and his helmet, and somehow kept it there as he fell to the ground. Contrast that to the Patriots third and twenty play. The pass protection was clean and effective, with Brady easily stepping out of the way of the only pressure that got to him (which was quickly cleaned up by Logan Mankins). Moss, triple covered, manages to split the front two and outrun the safety over the top. Brady throws it to him, the ball traveling from just off the right hash at the eleven yard line to the big “20” all the way on the other side of the field, a good 71 yards all told. The only error here was not getting just another foot on it, giving Corey Webster the chance to catch up and tip the ball away. Obviously luck does not really work like this, but if the Patriots had gotten half as lucky on this play as the giants on the Tyree catch, Moss would have walked into the end zone with the winning score.
A large part of why this is so frustrating to me actually comes back to my interest in baseball stats, and the critical role of recognising and trying to strip out the effects of luck and random variation from a player or team’s statistics. Probably the first thing one learns is the importance of a good sample size in judging performance. 16 football games is not a great sample size, but it is far, far, far better than one game, and over that larger sample size it would be borderline impossible to claim that the Giants (10-6, 14th in points scored, 17th in points allowed) were better than the Patriots (16-0, 1st in points scored, 4th in points allowed). Throw in all the playoff games, adjust for the remarkable luck they had in their week 13 win in Baltimore, and you come to the same conclusion: the Patriots were a far superior team. If they played a large number of Superbowls the Patriots would have won a large majority. But it was the Superbowl, THE Superbowl, and the one game that was played was a New England loss.
I hated Tyree from that point on, but he was in no way alone. I hated Eli Manning, the lucky son of a gun who managed to pull off a key game winning drive (and the MVP) despite taking every opportunity he could to throw away the game, only to be bailed out by stone hands in the Patriots secondary. I despised Plaxico Burress, who caught the actual game winning touchdown. Over time, my hatred of Manning faded (It seems to have flared up again recently, for some reason), and my hatred of Plaxico was somewhat diffused when the idiot walked into a strip club with an unlicensed firearm stuffed into his sweatpants and shot himself in the leg, earning a couple years in jail. Tyree, however, was special. He had faded somewhat, but fully brought back my sports hatred supported with plain old anger at homophobes when he, considering running for a political office, said he would give back “the catch” to block a pro gay marriage act.
Just about everything in politics today is highly controversial, and I have a fairly strong (and consistently leftist) opinion on most of them: welfare, taxes, abortion, healthcare, federal regulations, and on. For all of those listed, I can at least see some logic in the reasoning of the opponent’s viewpoint, even if I disagree with it. The question of when aborting a fetus becomes killing a baby is borderline impossible to answer. Strictly speaking, on a purely financial level, buying health insurance will probably be a net loss. The idea that money you earn should go to you, not other people who don’t actually work, makes some logical sense at the most basic level. If I had a business, I probably would not enjoy the government restricting what I can or cannot do. Etc, etc.
One of the few for which I do not see the logic backing the opposition, however, is the issue of homosexual marriage rights. The idea that the government should be able to choose if two mutually consenting adults can marry each other makes no sense to me. Seemingly the most common argument is the religious one, as the bible can and has been interpreted to say that homosexuality is immoral, wrong, and will result in an eternity spent in the fiery pits of hell. There is some actual logic going into that decision, at least: If you believe in the literal truth of the bible, then allowing homosexuals to have sex is wrong. However, a belief that not allowing them to marry will stop them from having sex is extremely naive and completely false: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, Washington, Maryland, DC, and California are certainly not the only places where homosexual couples have sex with eachother. In addition, and I would say most importantly, the Bible preaches kindness and acceptance of others. Jesus himself is quoted saying “Do to others whatever you would like them to do to you” (Matthew 7:12) and “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39). Nowhere does Jesus mention homosexuality as an exception to these.
The biggest argument in opposition to homosexual marriage which I simply cannot understand any reasoning for is the “we must protect the sanctity of marriage!” argument. There have been quite a few satirists who had considerable fun with this argument (
The Onion, for example), but arguments in favor which use actual logic and evidence are virtually nonexistent. A look at the “Marriage Talking Points”
page on the “National Organization For Marriage” website reveals some rather irritating talking points. The biggest piece of advice they give is that “Marriage is the issue. Marriage is what we care about. Marriage really matters. It’s just common sense.” They emphasize avoiding saying things like “ban same sex marriage,” instead, it explains, “Say we’re against ‘redefining marriage’ or in favor or [of] ‘marriage as the union of husband and wife.’” This is clearly a pathos centered argument, which is not surprising given the fact that “marriage” is a bit of a buzzword. They consistently make claims that having a mother and a father is essential to their children (studies like
this one have shown that this is false, both for families which have good relationships and those which go through a divorce), and seem to think that because 60% of African Americans oppose homosexual marriage, opposing it must not be bigotry. While the idea that ‘losing the rights to define marriage’ will actually harm people is heavily implied multiple times, no reasoning for how that will hurt anyone is given, and they completely ignore the possibility that those people might want to define marriage as Massachusetts and the ten others listed above have. Are they afraid of the potential
collateral damage?
I now hate Tyree not only for his catch, and not only because he is opposed to LGBT rights. I hate the fact that this lucky mediocrity tried to cash in on his one insanely lucky moment to do something which was (in my mind) bigoted and blatantly wrong. I hate almost as much the fact that if I actually had the choice to take him up on his offer, I hate myself for being even remotely uncertain which I would actually choose. It has to be letting homosexuals get married. 19-0 would have been awesome of course, but allowing ~10% of the population to do something I would consider a basic human right would of course be far more important. It is such an obvious choice that even the slightest thought of an alternative choice in this hypothetical and completely impossible scenario makes me very angry at myself. In my head I can reconcile that truly insane thought with the specific wording: I believe his quote referred to that specific bill, which if I remember correctly did not actually pass. I mean, I know I would pick homosexual marriage rights. But it is just the thought that I might even consider the other option which makes me so annoyed. In short, part of why I hate David Tyree is because he makes me hate myself.
