Volume 67, Issue 7

Ramblings Discusses Fashion and Football (?!)
by Avi Mermelstein

There is a pestilence upon this land.  A dark blue swarm has blown in with the first chill wind of winter.  It struts about the streets with the heedless confidence of a mob, sweeping away or assimilating all who oppose it.

I refer, of course, to the latest trend in outerwear: those overcoats with buttons that come in dark blue (though some come in black and look very distinct from a distance of three feet or less).  They are very elegant and, now that they come with hoods, they are probably reasonably warm.  They come in lengths ranging from waist to ankle.  Their biggest drawback and biggest attraction is that everybody has one.

By now, if you don’t have one, it’s too late to get one.  The trend has officially peaked and buying one on the downside of the trend will mark you as too slow to react and too weak to resist.  Besides, you should save your money for the next trend which should begin in a few months – a maybe you’ll catch that one a bit earlier.

If you already have one, then you are safely within the fold.  But I have several questions for you: If you wear that thing every day then what do you wear to dress up?  If you are being pursued by somebody in a ski jacket, won’t you inevitably trip over your flapping belt or your flowing coat?  If you already wear the same kippa, shirt, pants, and glasses as everyone else, how are we supposed to recognize you now?

In other old fashion news, worn-out jeans have reached an absurd new level.  They now feature a stonewashed streak that encompasses almost the entire front and back of the pants, leaving only the dark sides untouched, for reasons beyond my comprehension.  What, exactly, were the jeans doing in their previous lives to wear themselves out so thoroughly in those places?

And I’m glad nobody wears cargo pants anymore.  The last thing I ever needed was another pocket in which to misplace my ID.

And now, in keeping with The Commentator’s new policy about restrictions on the number of stories in the sports section (and other less important sections as well), I will be forced to use the rest of my column to discuss the state of another blue pestilence, the New York (football (a qualifying adjective that apparently operates under the touching belief that the baseball ones are coming back any minute now)) Giants.

Any team can stink.  Futility requires a certain lack of talent, desire, coaching, or teamwork and losing grows like a cancer until it infects the few sound areas of the losing team.  Soon, the losing habit so pervades a team that the team will take the field unable to think of a reason why it should possibly win.  Games end before they begin.  Schedule watchers pencil in results weeks in advance.  The team fires its coach or allows him to resign with mock dignity.  The futile team gets a chance at a highly prized talent in the early stages of the draft.  It happens every year.

Creative futility happens less often.  A creatively futile team, unsatisfied by ineptitude, will settle for nothing less than remaking the definition of losing in its own image.  The ’62 Mets, the ’76 Buccaneers, the New Jersey Nets most years after 1994—these teams lacked talent, certainly, but what set them apart was a remarkable will to lose, to lose frequently, to lose comically, to lose in ways most people would never have thought possible.  These teams carved out their own niches in history, a golden cellar for other teams to look down upon in awe, a place from which run-of-the-mill losers could derive comparative comfort.

But somewhere near the middle of the standings lurks a less benevolent futility, a pernicious mediocrity that conceals within its torpid record the broken hearts and stillborn hopes of blindly loyal fans.  The teams that court such evil tease their fans with flashes of talent.  With bits of skill and pieces of luck, they coax the glowing embers of partisanship in their fans’ hearts into a roaring flame of belief.  They do so slowly, mixing defeats with victories in a pattern that hints at a power to overcome adversity.  Their season reaches a crisis.  Suddenly, they muster their talent, determination, and every ounce of luck, harnessing the elements into a winning streak that throws their followers into ecstasies of hope reborn, into joyful states that bloom with grand postseason visions.

Most readers know what happens next; some know from personal experience.  Then there are those who know from repeated personal experience – it seems that this type of tortured fandom is all they’ve ever known and they wonder how they ever got started.

Well, Giants fans, you may have gotten started in 1986 or 1990 or whenever, but you have paid for that success and for any future successes that you may witness in your lifetimes.  If the Giants would win the Super Bowl four years in a row, they might repay the debt that they owe us fans.  But even then they probably won’t have healed the emotional scarring of seasons gone by, seasons begun under false pretences, seasons ended with false hopes crushed underfoot.  Seasons like this one.

Yes, Giants fans had their schedules at the ready, Week 12, plotting the inevitable success of their team.  The upcoming opponents were mostly awful.  Even assuming that the team would not beat decent opponents such as Philadelphia or Tennessee, thought the most reasonable fans, the Giants should cruise to a 10-6 record, which should virtually guarantee them a playoff spot.

Then the Giants lost to the expansion Houston Texans.  Then they lost to the Titans in overtime at home, throwing away an 11 point lead in the fourth quarter, allowing the Titans to move the ball at will.  Bitter irony transformed Coach Jim Fassel’s seemingly logical decision to eschew the extra point for an attempted two-point conversion into a tragic error worthy of a Greek hero.

The most frustrating thing for fans is not that the Giants blew their chance for a playoff spot—it’s that they convinced us that they had a chance for a playoff spot in the first place.  After all, this was supposed to be a rebuilding year after the Giants purged their roster of veteran salaries, ripping out Jessie Armstead, the heart of their defense and jettisoning Pro Bowler Ron Stone, their only competent offensive lineman.  But the Giants began the season by frightening the well-regarded 49ers before folding on the last drive as always, then beating the (at the time) respected Rams in St. Louis.  They hovered around .500 before charging to a four game winning streak.

In retrospect, we should have expected the collapse that followed.  Every win came in almost impossibly ugly fashion, with missed field goals and extra points, with mounting injuries, with a willingness to give opponents, no matter how inferior, a reasonable chance to win in the last few minutes.  But each Giants escape further banished the rule of logic from the minds of the fans, replacing rationality with a belief that the team would find a way to win.

That was the moment Big Blue was waiting for.  Once the fans had thrown aside the cushioning expectations of disappointment, once they had put logic away, the faith that had flowered in their minds could be trampled in the most cruel and crushing manner.

Of course the Giants did not stop at this point.  They beat the Redskins a week later.  They will do all they can to extend their season, hoping to lure fans into holding out hope against every mathematical consideration.  Then, just when it seems that they might succeed, they will find a way to lose in a reasonably familiar yet agonizingly original example of infuriating mediocrity.  And my heart will find an uncalloused spot on itself to welcome the pain.♦

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