a tale of two games
a mirror … offers two choices
reflect … or correct
This essay is about the Michigan – Michigan State football game but the Michigan – Michigan State football game is incidental to what this essay on the Michigan – Michigan State football game is really all about.
I grew up into being a newspaper junkie.
In 6th grade, my teacher at Grand Rapids Crestview Elementary School, Mr. Vanderwheel, had us watch a movie on HOW TO READ A NEWSPAPER.
One of those odd movies where the feller OFF SCREEN NARRATES and ASKS QUESTIONS to the feller in the movie.
The feller broke the 4th plane and admitted to audience he didn’t know nuthin about an upcoming election and the narrator convinced him to buy a local paper and then walked him through reading the paper.
Buy the end of this short movie, the feller in question was reading TWO newspapers everyday to look for confirmation of facts or new or conflicting information.
From that day, I have refused to accept almost any information without two sources and let me tell you has that caused me a life time of grief.
Always asking, has anyone confirmed that?
Always asking, has any other source been found for that?
Just look at the Sally Hemmings history, where all the sources are citing each other.
Oh GEE WHIZ.
ANYWAY, it became my habit, before the world wide web, to go downtown in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I lived, to Elliott’s Newsstand down by the Bus Depot and buy out of town newspapers.
At home my Dad already subscribed to HOME delivery of the Detroit Free Press and the Grand Rapids Press.
And at Elliott’s, I would look over papers from all across the world.
I would often grab a Chicago Tribune or some exotic paper like the Los Angeles Times or the London Financial Times (it was pink) or the Atlanta Journal Constitution (because I loved that name) and almost always, a copy of the New York Times.
The paper that considered itself the paper of record of the United States.
In other words, if it was in the NYT, there was no need to question anything about it.
Well kinda sorta kinda.
But I did think that the NYT was the big time.
To make it into the pages of the New York Times was about all you could ask.
So I was pretty pleased when on October 13, 1986, I paged through the NYT to find the article, Signs of Fall in Michigan: Faces of Maize of Green (CLICK HERE), by Isabel Wilkerson.
It was a charming article.
It was really a charming picture of what I had grown up with here in the State of Michigan.
Ms. Wilkerson wrote: There are other great rivalries and perhaps equally rabid fans, but there is no match for the crowds the Big Ten draws. More people come to see University of Michigan football than go to see that of any other school in the country, and, with a turnout of 106,141 on Saturday, this year’s Michigan-Michigan State pairing drew more people than any other college football game so far this decade, officials said.
In the end, the Spartans would fall to the Wolverines, 27 to 6, but, as fans on either side would say, the game is, in many ways, secondary.
From Dawn Till Night People pull into campus just after dawn for a game that begins at 2:30 P.M. They set up the grills and potato salad for daylong tailgate parties, bicker over whose marching band is superior, and linger well into the night, drinking and playing touch football until they can no longer see the ball.
For 11 all-too-brief Saturdays, Big Ten football is a welcome distraction for people from small Middle Western towns and is an eagerly anticipated excuse for otherwise sane adults to act 12 years old again.
I loved the article and I loved the scene and the setting and the way it was portrayed and the story behind.
It’s much more than football, it’s the food, the partying, the people. It’s like a cult.
It made us, both sides of the coin, so cool!
Just goofy … goofy innocent, know what I mean?
And it was in the New York Times so it wasn’t a fabrication or a fairy tale, it was all true.
(For transparency’s sake I have to mention that the NYT has always had something of a love affair with Michigan but the paper comes by it somewhat honestly. New York city has the highest concentration of Michigan Alumni outside of the State of Michigan in the world. See … back in the day, the Ivy League schools had a quota, a limit on the number of Jewish students that could be admitted and the accepted place to go after those Ivy leaguers closed their doors, was in Ann Arbor … ).
I loved that story and I cut if out of the NYT and for years it was taped to my wall.
Fast forward almost 40 years and I still read the New York Times and a butt load of other newspapers on a daily basis.
For a newspaper junkie, the World Wide Web is both the best and worst of all worlds.
I swiped my way through the pages of the NYT and once again, there was a story about the Michigan – Michigan State game.
Instead of kindly Signs of Fall though, this new headline read, “A rivalry too toxic? Michigan, Michigan State grapple with the future. (CLICK HERE)”
Austin Meek writes in this article, “The Michigan-Michigan State rivalry fits a familiar archetype in college football: the massive research institution on the hill and former land-grant agricultural college down the road. The schools have played each other since 1898 and have been conference rivals since 1949, despite Michigan’s backroom maneuvering to keep Michigan State out of the Big Ten.
“I think Michigan State fans look at Michigan as arrogant and pompous and unjustifiably elite,” said Greg Dooley, a lecturer at Michigan who grew up rooting for Michigan State and teaches a course on the history of college athletics. “I know Michigan fans look down a little bit at State. State prides themselves from a football perspective on toughness, being a little more blue-collar, and deserving of being on the same playing field with Michigan.”
The rivalry has always been intense, but it’s grown more hostile in recent years. In 2007, Michigan running back Mike Hart, now the school’s running backs coach, famously referred to Michigan State as “little brother.” Mark Dantonio, Michigan State’s new head coach, fired back that
“pride comes before the fall,” signaling a new era of hostilities between the programs.
The last game ended up in brawl that ended up in hospitals and court rooms.
What happened to this game?
What happened to this weekend.
Where did all this hate come from?
Not rivalry hate but gouge your eyes out hate.
Like I said, this essay is about the Michigan – Michigan State football game but the Michigan – Michigan State football game is incidental to what this essay on the Michigan – Michigan State football game is really all about.
These two stories, and I invite you to read them, are stories from the same place from the same event and are so different.
A mirror of our times.
So much hate.
How did this happen?
Why did this happen?
Mr. Meek quotes CBS announcer (and Penn State Grad) Todd Blackledge saying, “The game’s too good. The rivalry is too important. It’s too special to have it marred by something that’s unnecessary.”
Beyond the game, I want to say, I hope I can say, this country is too special to have it marred by something that’s unnecessary.”
The game, these stories are a mirror.
As the Rev. Al would say, you can use a mirror to reflect yourself …
Or you can use a mirror to correct yourself.
No Haiku For You 