Henry James' Guide to Sports

Among the dust-orange brick and low-slung rowhouses of the city north of our capitol, the sunken but not sunk polis of Baltimore, which, though it bears the weather-beaten visage that has faced hardship without the benefit of turning away, does still fairly stand, amidst this loss are perched the Ravens, wings black as ink, as if they had taken on the grit and grime of the city over which they stand guard. Other towns have come and gone, surely gone, for Baltimore has indeed watched as industries have closed as if they never were more than the thin wood of their front shutters and the ephemeral smoke that pumped out their tall and now stagnant chimneys. But Baltimore powers on, even as upstart Houston aligns against them from the south, Houston still with that shine and puck of the new, the innocent guise of a debutante who knows not yet rejection, who has not been in attendance when death has taken elders and poverty taken younger, who has not known harsh winters but only pleasant springs, and feels the breeze as a benefaction from nature rather than a warning. Of all the finer human qualities on earth, innocence most differs in its effects on its owners as on its observers, for the innocent alone are ignorant of the temporal nature of their state—indeed, it is that ignorance of time that makes up the state itself—and thus as we look fondly on a representation of our former selves, we are always interrupted by the eternal shoulder tapper, reality, there to remind us that of all the happinesses that are fleeting, none is relinquished with more regret, indeed, in the end, pried from us with more force, than the ignorance of fleetingness itself. Thus as Houston is delivered its first playoff loss in franchise history by the ink-stained Ravens today, they will know that innocence is not a whiff of the crisp spring to come, but the first gust of a long, cold winter.

Henry James’ Pick: Baltimore Ravens

It is a rare but undeniable occurrence that the world will so arrange itself as to tempt us to bestow pity, that final car of emotion, onto those who in every way best us. To pity Tom Brady seems initially, and indeed almost finally, so a perversion of the natural currents of sympathy that one suspects our sensorial gravity has been supernally and unfairly altered. And yet, those occasional men of proven measure, medalled and honored, hoisted upon pedestals and statued in action, as if the world’s adoration were so excessive that it felt it needs must embalm its heroes so as not to lose them, those men who stand in reverence to most stand in challenge to a few who will never tire of rushing the pedestals and dividing the prize of worship for the loot of fame. To be, as Brady is, armored in the suit of perfection is surely to invite the constant lance-thrusts of those knights-errant who feel inviolability a challenge to the very inclusion of themselves in the high zones of existence. Eventually he will be cut, as indeed Brady has. And if the knights-errant do eventually return to their hamlets with but the pejorative jingle of small change rather than the trumpet blasts of monarchic respect, so too are the statues chipped away at, the failure of the challengers also, in the end, the fall of the challenged. Eventually, we must suspect that the scales of perfection are not the protection once assumed. Even if the statue stands a little longer, as indeed Brady has a few more playoff victories in him, how long until the final blow is landed, one that itself is of no great inspiration or execution, but is simply the final in a long line of protest of the singular on behalf of the teeming plural.

Henry James’ Pick: New England Patriots

There is no greater misdemeanor of the soul than that of underestimation of others. For surely our worth must stand in the exact relation as those who peer into ourselves and take our measure, and thus stand we at each other like towers, seeing in the slant of those before us our own sad lean as if in a mirror and decrying our weakness as theirs; it is precisely the knowledge of our own shortcomings that so vouch us in the identification of others’. An equitable state is reached, for if we all guilty of projecting our faults outward onto those we meet, and they do so to us as well, the excesses of vanity become achieve, in their very misplacement, a veracity, as two drunks leaning onto each others’ shoulders do hold very much hold one another up.

But one might detect movement around the base of these towers—for not all loom so high as to come into the purlieu of misjudgment—and it is here that the misdemeanor of underestimation becomes a felony perpetrated back upon the self. Indeed, one may never miss the high floors of a Drew Brees, a skyline of talent visible even to those who try to turn away, and it is a truth surely old as sport itself that that which we may never miss will in the end never get by us. It is while we rest our eyes upon the sky-reaching personages, those celebrities of athletic craft who do our attention all consume, that we miss the nameless practitioners of that selfsame craft, who, for their very diminutive presence, sneak right by us. We may not find ourselves capable, at least in the moment, of naming a member of the 49ers, as indeed a Roman general may pride himself on not being able to name any particular barbarian at his gate. But his is the felony of underestimation. From up in his tower, he thinks the anonymity of his opponent a measure of their power, but it is only an estimation of his own. Thus will the 49ers gather at the gates of the second round, known to none, a skyline too low to set off its silhouette against a setting sun, and before we have even noticed them they will be in the endzone, nameless still, but victorious nonetheless.

Henry James’ Pick: San Francisco 49ers

If it is rather, in the end, true, as my brother would have it, that the religious experience is indeed a varied and individual one, what make us of loss, indeed, of loss suffered no less in our efforts, moral or otherwise, to realize ourselves, than of loss of ourselves in the entire, namely our bones, our muscles, our very lifeform? For it is into these bodies we are born—once these bodies are fully formed, and expelled—and it is our body, no less than our character, all due respect to the philosopher from Ephesus, that is fate. When one breaks or sprains, twists or strains, he himself is broken, sprained, twisted, strained. We are monsters all, thrashing about. Ben Roethlisberger steps tenderly upon his ankle, yes, for he is as careful with his foot as he was careless with others. He has broken others and in turn been broken himself, and he does weekly hobble out onto the field to show us the semblance of man after a piece of him has been taken, and, as if by some spectral power, flung to and fro, and snapped. Did Achilles do less? Or did Achilles charge those stony gates of Troy and slaughter Hector less out of vengeance for poor Patroclus than out of a roar of moral pain that told all who watched woefully from the Trojan shores that even great Achilles was flawed, a flaw that found its objective correlative in the corpse of Hector?

For all flaws, bodily and morally, will in their due time render themselves, as if through an inevitable gargantuan impulse, the great flaw of life, that is, death. Such are the tides of man’s imperfection, ever ebbing away the sands of our possibilities.

Thus does Ben Roethlisberger charge the field in a guilty gait, screaming out sick vengeance not on behalf of any soul close to him, but solely in expression of his inner turpitude; he may, lacking all finer feeling and slung as if from below with an animal lust he cannot control, do no else. One cannot help but think that young Tebow, as naive as an American heiress on European shores, will fulfill the role of Hector in this rapacious demi-play. But where Hector died defending the walls of his city and the honor of his brother, young Tebow will hit hard the ground on behalf of nothing but his own faith, one that doesn’t believe in faults or flaws or cracks in the design, even as one makes those very cracks as one lands on the delicate glass of one’s own beliefs. For Tebow thinks he already knows the ratio between good and evil, between deed and intent, between the loftiness of Man’s promise and the broken ankle and stillborn morality of Ben Roethlisberger—proving that none are so quick to denigrate knowledge as those who falsely assume they possess it.

Henry James’ Pick: Pittsburg Steelers

It is the singular endemic aspect of America, and surely the most illuminating quality of all our newly illuminating qualities—for when on earth have the lights of human effort shone brighter?—that one is sheered from one’s past, voluntarily or by conscription, as yet the moth has no choice but to arrive at its eventual commencement, whether or not it ever dreamt of spreading wings. What, then, thinks the butterfly of its departed curtain, and all the memories and sins held within, indeed one with, that old skin? To be free of our pasts, need we lose them entirely?

So Matt Ryan and his Falcons have soared twice before, only to find that the sky is also a ceiling: two attempts to fly, two falls to earth. Must they think their wings decoration only? Or do those feathered arms project, in the rush of the fall, the roaring winds of victory? That succor was all too well tasted by Eli Manning and his Giants, for they, lumbering beasts though they may be, once climbed clumsily up rocky cliffs to greater heights than those birds have attained. These Giants indeed ought to feel a congruence of supernal proportions as their current ascent does quite mirror their former one; and they may only hope that, in tracing their past glory, they are adding to it, and not forming in their current state a parody of their previous one. For as the Falcons must crave the past, to take from it the determination that is the fermented product of the poison of bitter defeat, so must the Giants pray for the past as well, to feel in it the shape of a victory they need only replicate.

But this is first and foremost a new world, one that leapt oceans to leave the old gate-and-gargoyle edifices to those ghosts who built them and must harbor in them forever. It is our curse and our destiny that we on the just-discovered continent have not yet tired of the discovery—indeed, much as old Europe must always be old, their lot to be trapped within the stony permanence to which they once so strove, so too must America be always new, always renewing, always striving over new seas. Thus will the Giants and the Falcons look to the past this Sunday only to discover that it is quite beyond their sight, across a great pond, protecting them in no way against the undiscovered country of the next game.

Henry James’ Pick: Atlanta Falcons

It is, without being too fine with the subject itself, for it is not only grandness that draws us to the rugged sport but drive and persistence as well, and a need to pick yourself out of the lowly dirt in front of the crowd, yes, even, fairly, to brush the dirt off and in the brushing to show that that what was once vulgar is no longer quite so, not the prime matchup of the postseason. Houston, that hard, dense, oily polis, always a little too south and a tad too east, never quite of the gilded maturity so enjoyed by its neighbor to the north—ah, but where are the Cowboys for all that gilding?—presents the rags of a team, as, indeed, they are but the rags of a franchise. During the regular season the team did achieve fine record, but the last quarter of the grueling charge suggested a ratio that had more propinquity to luck than to greatness. The Bengals, meanwhile, are what may quite be called scrappy, were we to let so scrappy a word into our otherwise stout and structured lexicon. To endure the valley of the season, as Cincinnati did, descending into lowly losses, only to climb the mountain of the other side, has been given the diminutive of the wild card—but is it not, in the last instance, the very thing itself?

Henry James’ Pick: Cincinnati Bengals

In the multitudinous glow of the many-lighted stadium, where stands the individual in relation to his fans, to his city, to his sport and indeed to the firmament? To whom, in the very minute and turn of it, does victory belong? Shall we hand it, as indeed we have before, to Mr. Brees of Austin, Texas, now of the once-swallowed yet ever-swallowing city of New Orleans? For it is in the perfectly placed pass, the coincidence of vision with that which it sees, that the Good is ultimately found, for what is the Good, in the end, but a moral congruence of the material and the ethereal, a wink from that which is beyond us to that which is before us that we all play for the same team? Thus does Mr. Brees’ pass land where it was intended to land, as we all too often wish our own actions achieve what we saw in our proposals of them. And, as Saints before have battled beasts of atavistic vulgarity to attain to their Sainthood, so too must these Saints fight fouling lions, who think with the helmets that protect the brains they seem not to need. Sainthood is not, indeed never has been, easily granted; but granted still it must be to the rightly aimed and rightly caught pass, and once more that wheel of fortune will make its rare turn to the Good, to those few who know that the Good and the Fortunate are not so dissimilar after all.

Henry James’ Pick: New Orleans Saints