Watching Favre from Baghdad

puddnhead · Dec 17, 2008

This is an offbeat but cool article from the NY Times. Some of it is Packer centric, but I highlighted the part I think everyone who's a Jets fan (or even a football fan) can relate to.

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By JAMES GLANZ

BAGHDAD ? After nearly five years of covering the conflict here, I am leaving Iraq soon for a saner assignment. Having seen and felt more during those years than I can process or express for now, I am spending a lot of time trying to understand, really understand, why the Green Bay Packers let Brett Favre go to the Jets.

I am a Packers fan from birth, and my father covered some of the great Lombardi teams as a TV sports anchor out of Madison, Wis., when I was in grade school. Vince Lombardi had what now might be called a Favre-like ability to awe and charm at the same time. At Dad?s first news conference in Green Bay, before he knew anyone with the team, Lombardi noticed the new guy 10 rows deep in the gallery and stepped off the podium to offer his hand and that big grin. He said, ?I?m Vince Lombardi.?

?Like I didn?t know,? Dad said Sunday, when I phoned him from Baghdad to catch up and talk a little football. ?I almost had to take out my driver?s license to tell him what my name was.?

The news conference was a first lesson in genuine star power. There would be many more for my father, Irv Glanz, as well as a few for me. But I hadn?t called him to talk about the old days; I wanted to tell him I?d watched the Jets beat the Bills on Sunday after years of not being able to see regular-season football games on satellite television in Baghdad.

A colleague once likened reporting here to sending dispatches from Mars. Sunday was like watching the N.F.L. on Mars. Imagine sitting in a Mars lander on the endless dunes and watching Leon Washington take the ball from Favre and break off a 47-yard run for a touchdown as if he were the only player in a zero-gravity suit. At that moment, the remote and chilly reaches of the solar system all seemed to be friendly places, even if you were not really a Jets fan.

It was so much fun that I asked Mudhafer al-Husseini, an athletic young Iraqi in our newsroom, to stop by my office and watch some of the game. (As the Baghdad bureau chief for The Times, I run a compound of about 120 Iraqi translators, reporters, guards, drivers and other staff.) Mudhafer was at first distracted, because Sunday was the day an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at President Bush, and our Western correspondents were continuously calling Mudhafer?s cellphone to ask what it all meant.

When his telephone had stopped ringing, Mudhafer said with classic Iraqi bluntness, ?I never liked this game.? He looked blankly at the screen as Favre faked a handoff and threw deep to David Clowney, who made an astonishing one-handed catch. A few plays later, Favre made one of his wild heaves downfield and was intercepted. Unmoved, Mudhafer said, ?I like soccer and I can understand it.?

But the truth is, Mudhafer is a sports fan in the transcendent sense. I explained the rules and what was happening as the game went along, and by the time J. P. Losman fumbled and Shaun Ellis scored ? looking like a large man stumbling dangerously down a hill ? Mudhafer was jumping and yelling with me.

?I like this game now, because it holds your breath!? he said.

Ignoring the broadcasters, Mudhafer also recognized immediately that the cameras were framing the game with Favre?s expressions: hands-on-hips chagrin when he threw the interception; lowered eyes on the sideline as Buffalo seemed close to running out the clock; and the leprechaun hops when Ellis lurched into the end zone.

That was another lesson of the Lombardi years, when his nervous pacing, plumes of agitated breath, Jovian scowls and big grin told you where the game stood. Stars on that scale could win you games, and they did, but they also gave you the characters you needed for your personal narrative of the contest. Those narratives, not the newspaper stories or the play by play, turn a team logo into an institution with a history and a right to belong in a certain time and place.

The distance from Mesopotamia to the Meadowlands, about 6,000 miles, brings with it a certain perspective. After Mudhafer left, the crawler at the bottom of the TV screen gave the last in a dismal progression of scores for the Packers-Jaguars game: a 20-16 Green Bay loss.

I know that for the analytical minds of my profession, a final judgment on the Favre trade must wait for a range of subtleties involving the impending showdown with Chad Pennington and the Dolphins; the relative passer ratings of Favre and Aaron Rodgers, who is now under center for the Packers; and a million other factors. But in the Book of Titletown, the only thing that could possibly have justified forcing someone of Favre?s stature to leave for New York is an immediate and obvious swing in wins or some other stirring improvement.

The Packers, who went to the National Football Conference title game last year, are 5-9 and out of the playoffs. The Jets, who had four wins last year, are 9-5 and still in the hunt. This tells me that the football bureaucrats who let Favre go, and whose names I cannot keep straight over here, will see the wrath of the Packers? gods ? Lombardi presiding ? come down on their helmetless heads. Soon.
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NDmick · Dec 17, 2008

that is some cool stuff.... I've always believed that if one understands a sport, they begin to love it. Thats why I want to learn about soccer more. Its the last of the big sports to enjoy.

greenwhite&nogold · Dec 17, 2008

good article...

TommyGreen · Dec 17, 2008

NDmick, not to sound like a drag, but your avatar is EXTREMELY offensive.

slimjasi · Dec 17, 2008

TommyGreen said: ↑

NDmick, not to sound like a drag, but your avatar is EXTREMELY offensive.
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elaborate please.

TurkJetFan · Dec 17, 2008

i always felt that way about hockey...i dont get it and therefore cant stand it...but i feel like if i began to understand it i would enjoy it

Jetzz · Dec 17, 2008

slimjasi said: ↑

elaborate please.
Click to expand...

mmmmm.... blasphemy?

TurkJetFan · Dec 17, 2008

Jetzz said: ↑

mmmmm.... blasphemy?
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im not even of that faith...but i can say this whole revis christ stuff is going a little to far...

JMO

MikeSLTJ23 · Dec 17, 2008

TurkJetFan said: ↑

i always felt that way about hockey...i dont get it and therefore cant stand it...but i feel like if i began to understand it i would enjoy it
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when i want to enjoy a new sport (well, new to me), i start doing fantasy for that sport haha. i decided to get into hockey this year, and it has turned me into a pretty good fan. i mean i still watch football, baseball, and bball more, but i'm gettin there.

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