Sports comes equipped with handy, inspiration sayings and motivational cliches, usually dismissed by the students aware enough to pay attention to them and altogether ignored by the rest. Because they're cliches that all more or less reinforce variations on a lesson about the value of effort over the ultimate result, and because they're directed at an age group prone to scoffing at nostrums, an injunction like "leave it all on the course" raises a perenniel issue: what do we do with received wisdom? Ignoring it usually brings some combination of liberating joy and unforeseen loss (which can easily be viewed as a punishment). The consequences of ignoring wisdom to follow one's bliss: this is Philip Roth's great theme. To hew close to wisdom keeps you out of trouble and enables you to reproduce your traditions with all their good and all their bad. You know intellectually why you do what you do, but the lessons land in the heart only when you're old enough to be the coach.
It's not strange how much our culture invests in the figure of the coach--especially the high school coach, on whom the expectations of character building that implicitly weigh on all high school teachers fall hardest. The best coaches assume that responsibility (which is all about teaching the value of responsibility) and understand their role in the formation of students. Friday Night Lights captures perfectly the dynamics of coaches, community, and character formation, responsibility for which places the Taylor family at the nexus of Dillon's many conflicts, which all converge on the high-gravity space of the football field.
TR said that, versus the mollycoddle critic, the doer of deeds is someone "who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat." The reasons why it's better to try and fail (and then, knowing you tried, own that failure as possibly personal lack--though you are advived always to try, try again) than not to try at all aren't that clear upon examination. What does defeat bring you except genuine diminishment and the cold comfort of self-knowledge? TR's consolatory "at least you suited up" mentality doesn't go far enough to countenance the genuine pain of losing.
More later...and more pictures later--there are some good ones coming very soon!
No comments:
Post a Comment