Adjacent News

It is Saturday morning in the Southeastern Conference, and the air smells entirely too clean. There is no odor of damp harness leather, no low, mournful braying of a Missouri mule herd tethered to the wagon wheels behind the north end zone, and certainly no sensible man greasing his ankles with rendered mutton tallow to ward off a five-mile slog through red-clay mire. We sit instead in a modern press box suspended four hundred feet above the turf, where the glass does not rattle and the coffee arrives in cylindrical paper cylinders with little green stir sticks. General Douglas MacArthur never used a stir stick. He used a straight-grained hickory branch he whittled himself while waiting for the transport to clear the gorge. One wonders what the modern pass-catcher, accustomed to soft leather seats and pre-game fruit smoothies, would do if confronted with a two-day journey in the back of an unspringed hay-wain behind a stubborn gelding named Barnaby. They would check their wrists for a signal light that does not glow. They would look for an outlet to charge their personal communication slates. They would weep into their white-and-gold towels until the athletic trainer had to bring out the cold compresses and the citrus wedges. We have engineered all the grit right out of the Saturday afternoon landscape, trading the honest sweat of draft animals for carpeted interview rooms where young men with four-syllable hyphenated names explain how they plan to execute their brand. The only brand worth speaking of in 1932 was the one burned into the flank of a four-year-old steer to prove it belonged to the county extension office in Starkville. Now we have luxury motorcoaches idling in the tunnel with individual reclining captain's chairs and satellite television packages that broadcast weather reports from regions where football is barely tolerated. The referees arrive in polished sedans with air conditioning that blows directly upon their necks, entirely ignorant of what it took to arrive at a county seat when the macadam gave way to limestone washboard and the axle grease froze solid before the third quarter. It makes a man yearn for the days when the only thing electronic in the stadium was the hand-cranked siren some junior-varsity manager borrowed from the local volunteer fire department. When Mississippi State or Auburn traveled across the state line, they did so on iron wheels that bit into the ruts and stayed there until the spring thaw released them. Today's players step off a climate-controlled bus wearing noise-canceling headphones to protect their delicate ears from the roar of four hundred farmers leaning against fence rails. We are breeding a generation of athletes who would not know how to wedge a wedge-block under a slipping linchpin if their scholarship depended on it. They drop passes because the air pressure in the room is off by half a millibar or because the turf pellet distribution under their cleats feels slightly uncooperative. I remember when a man played four quarters in wet wool trousers that weighed thirty pounds by halftime, and he didn't complain until the post-game meal of cold salt pork and tepid well water was served without a proper spoon. We have traded our birthright for padded bench warmers and high-definition replay monitors that show every missed assignment in glorious color. It is enough to make a muleskinner weep into his oats.