Football

I was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan at the U of M Hospital. My father was an architecture student born in Battle Creek, Michigan, whose father was a general surgeon; my mother was a pre-med Southern belle whose father promised her she could do anything she wanted in her life. 

As a baby, I was rocked to sleep to "Hail to the Victors Valiant!" But my maternal grandmother also had me singing, "I wish I was in the Land of Cotton" by the time I was in grade school. We had family in Alabama who were plantation owners long ago, and one of my own children now has the middle name Saunders, after them.

Until I was fifteen, no game came close to the Rose Bowl for importance. Michigan often won it, which made them "the champions of the west." My grandparents watched pro football, but it seemed to me as a kid that it never inspired the emotion my parents always had for Big Ten games in the Big House. There was no Super Bowl until 1967, the year everything changed in the American culture around me. (The missile crisis and assassinations alerted me to mortality, but the Summer of Love and rock 'n roll made me want to live, and create, forever.)

Funny, 57 years (not forever) later, I just spent New Year's Day in California only a few miles from the Rose Bowl. I watched Michigan beat Alabama with my whole family, some of them typing "Go Blue! and "Hail!" incessantly, on a group text for those Wolverines. What a great game! (It was hard to believe my mother wasn't watching, somewhere.) I also have a close friend who's an Alabama alum.... Oh well, Tide.

Maybe there is some symbolic reenactment of "The War" in this football game between Yankee and Southern schools. After all, the first Confederate capital was Montgomery, Alabama, and CSA President Jefferson Davis was an Alabamian. On the opposite side when Lincoln called the banners in 1861, he only requested one regiment from Michigan, but the governor enthusiastically sent him seven; one of those was George Armstrong Custer's "Michigan Wolverine Cavalry" which battled J.E.B. Stuart (my namesake!) at Gettysburg.

It's commonly thought that American football is violent, an imitation of warfare. The sport was invented in 1869, only four short years after Appomattox. Maybe this year's Rose Bowl result is a bad omen for the future of slavery (which is exactly what coercive psychiatry immitates). Lots of analogies, symbolism, emotion and hope in all this, right?

On the other hand maybe it's just football, and that's good enough.