While I Was Busy Hating Vegas, And

Baseball, Boxing, Handball - Sooner Or Later Every Game Gets Compared To Narrative, But Only In Football Are The Plays Perfectly Linear, Drawn Up With Letters, And Only In Football Is The Field Itself Lined Like A Sheet Of Notebook Paper.

I Began Dividing Life In Absolutes... Things And People Were Either Perfectly Bad, Or Perfectly Good, And When Life Didn't Obey This Black-and-white Rule, When Things Or People Were Complex Or Contradictory, I Pretended Otherwise. I Turned Every Defeat Into A Disaster, Every Success Into An Epic Triumph, And Separated All People Into Heroes Or Villains. Unable To Bear Ambiguity, I Built A Barricade Of Delusions Against It.

Long Before It Legally Served Me, The Bar Saved Me. It Restored My Faith When I Was A Boy, Tended Me As A Teenager, And When I Was A Young Man The Bar Embraced Me.

Some Of Football's Gaudiest Displays Of Manliness Are Purely Aesthetic. It's Not What Players Do, It's How They Look Doing It.

While I Fear That We're Drawn To What Abandons Us, And To What Seems Most Likely To Abandon Us, In The End I Believe We're Defined By What Embraces Us.