Single Mountain
Something For Joey was a book I read and then a TV movie I never watched about Penn State football. It starred, for lack of a less meta word, John Cappelletti as a white running back and Joey Cappelletti as his leukemia-stricken younger brother. It’s mawkish in the way sports stuff usually is outside sports stuff. (Sports need to be in their own world but it never happens that way.) Tonally the book is less biography than novelization. There’s also a lot of true life about the craziness of college football.
John Cappelletti won the Heisman Trophy in 1973. Joe Paterno was his coach. The reason there’s a book and a TV movie about Cappelletti is not because he won the Heisman but because at the award ceremony in New York, he gave the trophy to his little brother. Something For Joey is about the Cappelletti family, living in Pennsylvania in the seventies, following Penn State football, running a construction business, dealing with local, then national celebrity and a sick kid. They lived in Upper Darby, a Philadelphia suburb. They drove to and from the Penn State games, the entire extended family did, and John came home and worked construction in the offseason. Supposedly this is the way everyone used to live.
Joey had the run of the Penn State locker room. He even had a neo-Gipper moment, impossibly maudlin except it happened, when he asked John to score four touchdowns for his, Joey’s, birthday. I’m not bringing up kids in the locker room to be gauche. I was a sports-loving kid who couldn’t play them that well and grew up disparaged by my jockier friends. I’d have still killed to be in a locker room, to at least be circulatory in that system.
Why are sports the opiate of the masses? And why are college sports so much weirder and darker than the pros? The go-to analogy to the Penn State tragedy, the Catholic church’s cover-up(s), is more correct when it’s once removed; if mandated celibacy can be said to mutate, the extreme pains the NCAA takes to keep its programs and student-athletes dancey-clean aren’t inconsequential either. The lid’s been off college athletics for awhile now; outside finance and film/tv it’s the most twisted area of American life.
But nobody cares, because sports is the world’s largest religion—nodal, heterogeneous, highly-diffusive. Sports gets people hooked on competition early in their lives so that by the time they’re adults, they’re owned. In addition to being a little kid haplessly into sports, I was also a little kid raised Christianist. Now, I don’t know which has impacted my so-called adult life more, memorizing every Super Bowl ever or memorizing upwards of two thousand Bible verses in blocks of 500 so I could compete nationally against other sadsack nerds.
The largest sports facilities America has aren’t for pro teams in MMAs, they’re for universities in Austin and Ann Arbor and Tuscaloosa. The differences between following a pro football team and a college one are mostly martial, a little regional, and also a lot sentimental. Big-time fans of big-time college football are largely weirdos. My dad is the sanest man I know, but he is a Missouri University graduate and on fall Saturdays when the Tigers are losing he gets like that Miss Kittin song. He’s a total Luddite but reads Missouri football blogs avidly as though hunched over a microfiche. He doesn’t have a favorite NFL team, meanwhile. There are tons of men my father’s age who are like that; they went to college, idolized the jocks, and continued to be smitten with the vicarious disease long after they’re no longer doing what they went to college to do in the first place. And the college game reinstates them in a way the pros can’t.
My relationship with formal education has been so fraught it’s possible I’m uniquely unqualified to judge how people develop a lifetime bond with their schools. But Andy Bernard’s and Toofer Spurlock’s constant name-dropping of Cornell and Harvard on The Office and 30 Rock respectively suggest it’s a popular kind of asshole to be bugged by. How soon the kids catch on is what I don’t get. What makes an eighteen-year-old decide he will sell everything he owns, effectively, and follow a university for the rest of his life? (Americans didn’t invent hooliganism any more than the Classical composers invented the symphony; they just perfected it.)
Unfortunately Penn State has always been easy to hate. As a St. Louis Cardinals fan I don’t say that lightly; nobody hates mediocre teams or organizations. But Penn State has always packaged its players in Wal-Mart colors and as avis of clean-cut, forthright public trust while, frustratingly, being good most of the time. Penn State also plays in a place called Happy Valley—nauseating—and had, until last night, the same head coach since Mad Men. In the nineties when they put Nike swooshes on their famously blank unis, there was anti-corporate outcry, nvm that Penn State was a legendary offender in making their football teams anonymous units of soulless production.
What happened at Penn State shouldn’t have to be about football. If it is, it’s mostly about the conversion disorder that’s the most dangerous outgrowth of sports in American culture over the last century. Like Wall Street and Hollywood, blindness is endemic to it.
In Something For Joey, when John Cappelletti is speaking about his brother’s condition, Joe Paterno lifts his glasses to dry his eyes. I wonder if he remembers that.
