Henry James' Guide to Sports

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