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There’s a dream somewhere, ending at this moment. Maybe an alarm rings, maybe a sudden noise jolts it to an end. But it’s over, because that’s life. Nothing lasts forever, unless it’s death, so they say, which is the antithesis of life, so that must mean…well…that nothing lasts forever.
I realized a few things tonight, as Tom Brady’s final pass fell to the ground, ending Super Bowl “whatever the hell it was.” I realized that evil always beats good, and that hard work is another synonym for “second place.” The world is not led by those who grinded to get there, it’s rather championed mostly by those who were given every opportunity to fail and still be on top. I’m not a fan of reality right now, because the cold, callous facts are that reality hates the un-privileged. It hates effort. It likes the silver spoon. It likes the built in advantage.
People hate the Patriots, and I get it. Winning breeds contempt, and cute stories are only cute so long as they end in 90 minutes and don’t drag on for a double DVD set. After all, it was only 11 years ago that the Patriots were everyone’s answer to the St. Louis Rams, the team the world was desperate to stop hearing about only one year after they couldn’t get enough of their rags to riches story and grocery clerk MVP quarterback. Someone, anyone, needed to knock them off. And if it could be the “team first” cast-off led New England Patriots, with their once-failed head coach and quarterback who was never supposed to exist as a starter…all the better.
After that though, something happened. That QB started to win. A bunch. And that coach? He wasn’t such a one time failure anymore. So people started hating. After all, people hate winners even though they strive so badly to be them in real life. You never hear anyone say “I’d love to be a loser forever.” Yet all those same people do is rail on those who have success.
Tonight, I won’t lie, a part of me died. I’ll take a break from sports for a bit, and probably from life, because for a moment in time, I just no longer believe in any of it. I’ve built my life as a dumb-luck hard worker who had to figure out ways to make the team, get the scholarship, out-work the guy in front. When it was sleeting on a Friday night, I was outside at the park shooting buckets. And it’s worked, which is why I desperately cling to these Patriots and always have. Hate them if you want, but their quarterback is a guy nobody wanted…even in college, and half their team is made up of guys who were told they weren’t good enough, or nearly as good as they thought they were.
Take a recent Newsweek article regarding Brady and Eli Manning, who gets plenty of love as the “country bumpkin, regular guy.” When asked about what was most important to them, Eli mentioned a hotel which he apparently owns. Brady? His wife. But yet Brady’s the one everyone associates detachment to? Priorities misplaced, I’d say.
The Patriots have always been my model, as a person, as an athlete, as a coach. That hard work, tireless effort to get better while others are asleep, that is what makes a man a champion. That the world is a level playing field, and all that separates greatness from mediocrity is the ability to work harder. Again tonight, just as four years ago, that model seems defunct. The layman doesn’t know it as they’re glazed in hatred, but the Patriots represent everything we respect as a country. Tom Brady. Danny Woodhead. Wes Welker. Sterling Moore. They’re a who’s who of individuals who were told they weren’t good enough, expendable, and useless. Yet there they were, staring down a play or two to become immortal.
But if sports detaches us from life if only for a moment, it serves to bring it back full circle as well. So the Giants won, because life is less about how hard you work, more than it is about how hard you actually HAVE to do so to get to the same level. And there will stand Eli, hopefully able to pull the silver spoon out of his mouth long enough to talk while the casual fan cheers on “anyone but the Patriots.”
And then that fan will do something funny the next day. He’ll probably wake up complaining about his job. Doesn’t pay enough, doesn’t reward him for how hard he works. And another one will probably go to a bar, maybe to get a date, and lament the fact that even though he’s a “nice guy,” girls don’t want that, they want the over hair gel’d guy wearing the Affliction t-shirt. And yet another will turn in his extension papers to the unemployment line, knowing he’d work 10 times harder than 90% of those who have jobs. They’ll all be thrilled the Giants won, because they don’t get it.
In the end, sports are a microcosm of life. We all want to win, yet hate those that do, expecting if we ever get there, we wouldn’t act the exact same. It’s a fallacy. In the end, we all pull for the underdog, because that’s who we are, not knowing which group actually fits that bill. In the end, time will move on, and the hurt from this will pass. Maybe. The Patriots have long been more than a football team to me. They’re my belief system. Hard work in the face of adversity. Defiance when those around you tell you that you cannot accomplish something. Substance over style. It might be a flawed belief system, but I hope not. There might not be a next year, but I hope there is. In the end, a part of me died for good tonight, and I hope just one more time, a Lazarus Project awaits. This time though, I don’t expect it to. The bad guys, it appears, always seem to cover the spread.