Simple Toughness Game’s Antidote To Culture Gone Soft

My heart is a wispy wad of Kleenex that disintegrates midway through any Hallmark commercial. I cover my eyes whenever an actress walks alone into a basement. I’m a sucker for fat babies and puppies. I bury my nose in the first roses of spring, nostalgic for backyards of my childhood.

And every year, as summer fades into autumn, I long for the familiar sounds of shoulder pads crunching against helmets, torsos thudding to the ground, grunts escaping from heaving lungs.

Like most women, I never played football as a youngster. Yet come autumn Sundays, I wake up happy, knowing my day is set. Football in the morning, football in the afternoon and, if I’m being indulgent, football in the evening.

I’ve tried to figure out how this deep and unlikely affection for football took root in my gauzy soul. A repressed proclivity for violence? Unspent anger? I don’t think so. (OK, maybe a little unspent anger.)

I’m drawn to the strategy, action, grace and tension of the game. But what hooks me Sunday after Sunday is the quality that, in sports, awes me more than talent or intelligence. Call it resilience, courage, steadfastness or simply toughness. It’s the quality that makes a person shake off pain, exhaustion and failure and keep going. It’s a quality we see all too little in other public figures and in our own pill-popping, job-hopping, excuse-laden lives.

I watch 49ers wide receiver Jerry Rice catch a pass, shudder in mid-air from the impact of another man crashing into his back, plummet to the ground, then pop up and jog back to the huddle, ready to endure another blow.

I see offensive linemen with their faces cut and bruised, their arms bleeding and their mouths gasping for air, line up play after play to absorb more punishment, never looking toward the sideline for escape.

Few sports display more graphically than football our capacity to soldier on. That trait, I would argue, is what we admire in athletes more than any other - and what we are least likely to forgive if it’s missing. An athlete can fumble, strike out, give up the game-winning home run, and he can redeem himself the next game.

But let him show he doesn’t have heart, and he will live with the taint forever.Listen to the criticisms of sports stars on the TV and radio shows. More likely than not, the jabs are directed at what the fans see as lack of heart, the unforgivable offense.

Deion Sanders sits out with a migraine. Rickey Henderson sits because he’s “mentally unavailable.”

If Peter McNeeley is remembered, it will be as the wimp who let his cornerman bail him out against Mike Tyson less than two minutes into the first round. Ask a fight fan about Roberto Duran’s most memorable moment, and you’ll likely hear about his “No mas” plea to Sugar Ray Leonard.

Ricky Watters knows as well as anyone the fans’ distaste for weak-hearted athletes. When asked why he wasn’t willing to take the hits in his debut with the Philadelphia Eagles last week, Watters uttered the now infamous words, “For who? For what?” They will stand as his epitaph. Philadelphia will never forget, no matter what Watters does from now on.

On the other side last weekend, Steffi Graf delivered exactly what we hope our athletes will. Grimacing from the pain in her foot and her back, drained from the emotional shock of seeing her father imprisoned, Graf fought back from an 0-6 trouncing in the second set to beat Monica Seles in the U.S. Open final. It might be the most inspiring single performance in sports this year, not for the level of tennis she played but for the grit it took to play it.

Of course, no one has personified perseverance more dramatically than Cal Ripken Jr. over the past 13 years. He happens to be a remarkable shortstop, but he is an American hero because he showed up every day, played hurt and never failed to find the resolve to tough it out another game.

That’s what I see every Sunday on the NFL football fields. In some ways, football is the antidote to a culture gone soft, in which every mistake is forgiven by some past abuse, in which schools don’t push students for fear of bruising their self-esteem, in which a roofer or a car mechanic can leave a job unfinished and figure it’s “good enough.”

Football won’t change any of that, of course. But it offers a welcome glimpse at simple, unadorned toughness and thus the capacity for toughness in all of us, even a sap like me.