Over Ruled

After wasting most of my day watching NFL yesterday...I need to cut myself off. The end of the Bears-Lions game left a bitter taste in my mouth. It was a metaphor for the problem with America today. Calvin Johnson catches what is an obvious game-winning touchdown. But per the "rules," a receiver must "maintain control of the ball after he touches the ground, whether in the field of play or the end zone. If he loses control of the ball, and the ball touches the ground before he regains control, the pass is incomplete."

To watch the game it was an obvious touchdown. He catches the ball, has both feet on the ground, is in the endzone, and falls down. As he falls, he puts an arm out to break the fall and palms the ball in his other hand where it hits the ground and squirts loose. CJ thought he had a touchdown and was celebrating. Everyone in the bar I watch the game with thought it was a touchdown. The refs called it a touchdown on the field. Common sense says "touchdown." But instead, we watch 6 minutes of replay and the referee comes out and overturns the call. Sure, he can cite the rule. Sure, both coaches after the game don't blame the refs or the rules. That isn't the point. The point is - we've sucked the life out of the moment. We've sucked the life from the game. We've ruined what is beautiful for what is precise. We treat scoring a last minute touchdown as if it were a legal brief or engineering problem. We review, review, review, losing all sorts of momentum, all sorts of enjoyment, all the pleasure of watching sport in real time. And we slow it down to a frame-by-frame analysis, we need to refer to the "rule-book" and waste our Sunday afternoon and lives under a bureaucratic mess of contradictory rules that don't correlate with common sense.

Everyone complained during the World Cup about the mistakes made by refs that computers and replays wouldn't have made. My answer: so fucking what? Mistakes get made. This is life. This is sport. Live with it. You don't get to go back in time and correct all the things you did wrong in life. Who would want to? Who wants to live so goddamn precisely? Who cares? There is no respect or understanding of time in this whole debate. Doesn't time and pace matter to anyone? The enjoyment of sport is in the speed and the real-time drama. If I wanted to edit a goddamn movie or a goddamn legal brief, I'd spend my Sunday afternoon as a movie editor or a law clerk and not watching NFL.

It is a metaphor for American society - we've all consented to being overlawyered and over-ruled because everyone is so caught up trying to get a good grade in glass and seek approval from one another. It's fucking pathetic. Everyone wants excessive regulation to prevent bad things from happening, as if it will do anything at all. Every time something goes wrong, someone is to blame - the government or someone else. If only there were more rules in place, if only someone had paid more attention or done something else. Guess what? That's the world. That's the universe. That's life. Shit happens. Life's messy, imperfect, sloppy. But there is beauty in it. There is rhythm. There is a way to live it right. And choosing precision is for all the nerdy kids in school who raise their hands "but teacher, teacher, I need to know the correct multiple choice answer." And the answer these people want is A, B, C, or D. They don't seek the knowledge. They seek validation. Fuck those people.