Comes now your correspondent to torture Cal Bear fans with a reflection on Missouri University’s No. 1 college football ranking.
The sports gods can be counted on to distribute their goodies with special attention to sadism. So in a twisty season when upsets pinballed usual suspects all over and out of the rankings, passionate local enthusiasts had to watch the Golden Bears peak one Oregon State game play short of No. 1 before freefalling. Meanwhile, though I couldn’t care less, I get to see the Tigers of my native state’s flagship public university scale gridiron heights unseen since 1960.
But whether Cal diehards appreciate this or not, they may be the real winners. For the rancid imagery of college football invariably pollutes the best and cleanest fun.
Prior to Saturday night’s Missouri-Kansas clash, I wouldn’t have been able to tell Mizzou quarterback Chase Daniel apart from Mizzou tight end Chase Coffman in a police lineup. When the announcers called Jeremy Maclin, the Tigers’ fine pass receiver and kick returner, a freshman rather than a “true freshman,” my son explained this meant that Maclin is anywhere from 19 to 29 years old.
Having expended inordinate adult energy defending red-state values to cultural-elite friends in Berkeley, I found the hype at first fascinating but ultimately creepy.
In The New York Times, a history Ph.D. candidate from Washington University of St. Louis had traced the roots of this traditional football “Border War” to the violence in “bleeding Kansas” in the 1850s, when 200 died in a sequence of events foreshadowing national civil war.
A Sports Illustrated cover story offered more of the same, adding the ravings of a retired Kansas coach who, in his annual invitational pep talk to the current charges, rejects the politically correct downgrading of the Border War to “Border Showdown.”
A St. Louis Post-Dispatch backgrounder told of a Mizzou fan who campaigned for a monument to William Quantrill, the leader of the guerrillas who burned down the abolitionist Kansan capital, Lawrence, in 1863, with the logic that Quantrill was more than redeemed by the fact that the path of the carnage included the Kansas University campus.
Funny, but growing up in St. Louis I had zero memory of the embedding of this simple athletic rivalry in the real-life horrors of the disintegrating Union. Maybe it’s a Western Missouri thing, or maybe I was just out of touch.
I further doubt that the predominantly African-American players on the Missouri side of the ball Saturday night were aware that they represented pro-slavery Bushwackers against anti-slavery Jayhawkers. No one was about to reinstall the Dred Scott decision on the basis of a football game -- an event that needs such trappings about as much as public universities need to define their mission by hiring unpaid gladiators to provide late-empire violent entertainment for the unaffiliated masses. (What? You say that’s already happening?)
I give the last word on Missouri’s surge to the top of the Bowl Championship Series heap to Aaron O’Neal. A 19-year- old linebacker for the Tigers, O’Neal collapsed and died July 12, 2005, in the heat of one of those “voluntary” practices that coach Gary Pinkel, like his fellow educators throughout the National Collegiate Athletic Association, schedules 12 months a year in order to build the character of their precious “student-athletes.”
Memo to Golden Bear fans: If that’s what it takes to get to No. 1, then I’ll take Cal’s 6-5 record. And I’ll even throw in a loss to Stanford in Saturday’s Big Game. At least that one isn’t a Big War … not yet, anyway.