Mommy and Daddy: Please stop fighting.
As promised, I'm back.
What a roller-coaster few days it's been as the NFL lockout inched dangerously close to August 1st, and things starting to get missed. The 2011 NFL lockout has been looming over football fans since the beginning of the 2010 season. All last year it was “This could be the last Super Bowl for a few years” “With the impending labor situation…..” and my personal favorite thing to tag at the end of any football sentence “…if there is football* next year.”
All along, I’ve been fairly unwavering in my prediction. I said that yes, there would be a lockout, and it would last awhile. But I always thought it would be settled at the last possible moment before games started getting cancelled. Now that we were at that time, last week seemed like the week it finally came to an end. The players would vote Wednesday, the owners Thursday, and the warm glow of football would be washing over us by next week. But then the players didn’t vote Wednesday. Or Thursday. After the owners ratified, the players screamed Shenanigans and said the owners were trying to screw them. But by Thursday night, we were told all had calmed down and they would vote Friday. Then they didn’t vote Friday and we were told they weren’t going to work over the weekend. Oh and by the way, no vote Monday either. Or Tuesday. Suddenly the players, the sympathetic ones in this whole thing, were acting like entitled pricks. They were the only guy in the frat house sober enough to drive. “Dude, we’ll go when I’m ready to go. Shut up.” After months of being confident, yesterday I switched my demeanor to “this isn’t getting done until at least September.”
Are you tired of seeing images like this yet? AP thinks they're clever every time.
But today, there’s been progress. The most unlikely scenario came true. Roger Goddell and DeMaurice Smith, who’ve basically spent the last 6 months calling each other Hitler-in-a-suit got together and hashed it out. The players committee votes to recommend passage Monday. The doors open Wednesday and by Friday, the whole union recertifies and ratifies.
The lockout is over.
We all should be pretty pissed. This thing could have been done in April. I’m sure if you took what both of their positions were at the start of this thing and met each one halfway, it would look remarkably similar to what the final CBA will end up looking like. Roger Goddell let Jerry Richardson, a guy who has owned a team for 15 years (an infancy in the NFL, where families like the Halas’s, Mara’s, and Brown’s have owned teams anywhere from 50-80 years) dictate a hard-line approach that forced the players to dig in. DeMaurice Smith played the part of hotshot new union head who wanted to stand up to the man and in the process make a name for himself outside of football (rumor has it Smith has his eyes on political office eventually). They played this incredibly ballsy game of chicken and were within days of killing the golden goose.
But when I finally saw from credible sources that this thing was done- not close, or progressing well, but done, all I felt was relief. I am just so glad there’s going to be football this year that I’m not even mad about the lockout. I’m like a wife who’s finally fed up with her husband, but when he comes back with a dozen roses, all is instantly forgiven. But it’s not just because football is my favorite sport, and the Giants are my favorite team. It’s that unlike any other sport or team, my life is tangibly better during football season. I spend all week looking forward to the games, making picks, participating in fantasy football, and talking about what to expect the next week. In
I haven't had a Coke in 4 months. When the season finally comes I'm going to hammer like twice my usual output. And my usual amount is like twice what a normal human should drink.
In a lot of ways, this lockout has made me appreciate football more, as strange as that seems. My sports year has a pretty regular flow to it. February is slow, punctuated only by La Salle A-10 games and Knicks games- which are almost always maddeningly at the same time. Then in March is my annual trip to AC for the Atlantic 10 tournament. Right after that it’s 3 weeks of March Madness. The first week of April is Opening Day of the baseball season and Wrestlemania. After that it’s the basketball playoffs right up through June. During all of this, baseball ebbs and flows. I might watch every pitch of every inning for a week straight, and then barely catch any of the next 3 or 4 games. Once it’s just baseball in mid-June, we’re in a bit of a dead-zone.
By about August 1st, I start feeling the itch. The heat starts getting annoying, baseball hits the dog days, and I start looking forward to the first Sunday after Labor Day. As we’ve been getting closer to August, and the lockout was still in place, the concern of my usual routine being interrupted started upsetting me. I wanted to believe all of the good news, because I was simply too scared of what the bad news might mean for me.
But now that we look pretty good for this thing to end, with only the Hall of Fame game being sacrificed, I’m too relieved to be pissed. NFL football is simply different then every other sport because every game is an occasion, every week a holiday. So now that the prospect of missing it was becoming very real, I’m going to be that much more grateful when it’s back.
Sunday at 1 on September 11th can’t come soon enough.
*For the purposes of this article (and really this site) football means NFL football. If you think it means soccer or college football, I’d like to invite you to go back to Europe or
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