Notes from Boston (2012 end-of-season edition)

So on the night of the Boston/Chicago semifinal, I went with Backseat Coach back to our hotel room after the game and proceeded to stay up until 3 am writing a long, cathartic, six-page single-spaced essay about everything that had happened in the Militia’s world in the last few weeks. And then the next morning I checked Facebook and saw this status update from one of the players:

Boston Militia all day – this L is based on politics. Charge it to the game.

And I thought, who the hell needs my 5,000-word Unabomber diatribe when she just summed it all up in two sentences? So I sat on this for a while. Then the WFA final got closer, and I wanted to post something about why Backseat Coach and I were not there (we had planned from the beginning of the season to go, regardless of who was playing). Part of it is that I’m utterly exhausted and have been really sick over the past two weeks (Dear whoever said the nausea ends after the first trimester: Excuse me, but your pants are on fire). But part of it absolutely is that I’m so angry and frustrated by the string of bizarre events that capped off the Militia’s 2012 season that I can’t bring myself to celebrate this league right now. I do not, at the moment, have any pride in the WFA. And I can’t bring myself to spend a thousand-plus dollars and get sick on an airplane while trying to hold a 15-month-old on my lap to get to something produced by an organization for whom I have nothing but contempt right now, for multiple reasons. I just can’t do it.

So I wanted to try to explain more about that, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to edit down the huge thing I wrote after the Chicago game. So here’s the majority of it (minus a few bits that really were superfluous). It’s long and it’s loud and it’s from my heart, because that’s really the only way I know how to write.

[Saturday, July 21st, 2012]

When Backseat Coach and I got to the field today, the first thing we did was walk up to the press box to see Jen Thompson, the Chicago Force media director. The three of us, in our own ways, bust our asses to promote not just our teams but the whole sport of women’s football, and I have genuine respect for anyone who does that ’cause it ain’t easy to do. So we went to say hi in person since we had the opportunity, and we got to talking about how different teams handle promotion and media and how sadly lacking those things are for many teams. Jen asked, given the volume of work that Backseat Coach and I do, why the Boston Militia don’t make us official media staff people for the team. My immediate answer was “Because I say ‘motherfucker’ on my blog”, and that’s probably decent shorthand for the real answer, but after today’s game I really understood why that’s not something I would want anyway.

When you’re a staff person for a team, you speak for the team. Even off the record, even on your own Facebook page or whatever, you’re still an official representative of the team.

I, however, am not.

In the past few weeks, I’ve held a lot back from this blog. It became obvious to me at the beginning of the playoffs that the WFA was either too busy or too inept to do things like update brackets on time and publicize ways that people could follow the games, so Backseat Coach and I – along with a handful of others across the country – took that on. And not just for the Militia; the playoff brackets and broadcast links I posted got literally hundreds and hundreds of hits, simply because people couldn’t find that info anywhere else. So even through the astounding drama of the Boston/DC game aftermath, I went out of my way to try to keep my posts relatively neutral and somewhat professional (well, for me, anyway) because I realized that this site was – for a short time, at least – kind of an ambassador for the sport. And ambassadors aren’t generally supposed to say “motherfucker.”

Well, guess what. The season’s over. I’m pretty sure the WFA can handle the promotion of the final game – and by that I mean hand the work off to Pittsburgh, who can actually do it – so I don’t have to do that anymore. This can be my site again, where I’m not representing anyone but myself and I don’t have to give a shit what people think of what I write.

So here we go.

Fun fact: my default negative emotional response isn’t sadness; it’s anger. Always has been. I like it better. (Can’t say as this has always served me well, but it is what it is.) So when tonight’s game ended with the score 35-34 Chicago, I didn’t cry. Not because of some emotional strength or resolve, but because I could finally let myself feel the incredible ripshit break-stuff Hulk-smash anger that I’ve been carrying since the moment that I looked across our home field two weeks ago and saw a DC player rip JP’s helmet off out of fucking nowhere and start punching her on the sidelines.

If all you’ve seen of what happened that night came from the news or from the stupid incomplete clip stupidly posted by someone on the Militia staff, you wouldn’t have seen that part, because there was no reason for the cameras to be on them then. Neither of them had the ball, and the game was over. We had won by three touchdowns and we were headed to the semi-finals on our way to Heinz Field. Who the fuck in their right mind on that winning team wants to be in a fucking fight after the clock runs out? Who in their right mind books their ass across the field to get involved if not to literally try to protect a teammate and friend from a physical assault that no officials were intervening in? What possible purpose would that serve?

On the other hand, if you’re on a team whose season just ended via a huge loss to your arch rivals and you just saw one of your own teammates get driven off the field after a horrendous injury, you might be in the mood to start something. What do you have to lose?

As it turns out, nothing. And here’s what you have to gain, thanks to the infinite wisdom of the WFA: you can make that your last chance to try to ruin your opposition’s playoff run.

Dear WFA: Do you think that by making the decision to suspend four Militia players for the Conference Championship game, you showed that you have control over the league? ‘Cause let me tell you something: you didn’t. What you did was give every team that’s pissed off about losing an important game the incentive to instigate a fight. That’s some stellar forward thinking, there. Congrats.

To be fair, I don’t know what penalties the WFA levied against the Divas. But unless it was permanent expulsion of half the team – or the entire team from the league – I really don’t give a shit. No suspensions or expulsions could affect DC this season, since their season was over when the clock hit 0:00. Given that, there is absolutely no reason that suspensions of Boston players could not have been postponed until next season, as DC’s had to be. Sitting out a regular season game against opponents you could beat in your sleep is not the same as sitting out a semifinal playoff game.

Additionally, as far as I know, the team had all of eight days’ notice that those players would be suspended. Eight days to rework an entire season’s playbook around the absence of certain players. Eight days to do this before the game that would decide who goes to the Superbowl.

That is wrong. That is just so damn wrong.

Why did the Chicago Force win tonight? Allow me to answer that semi-rhetorical question with an anecdote. Years ago I was watching an interview with a basketball player whose name I’ve long since forgotten. The interviewer asked him why his team had lost the game he had just finished playing in. The player was silent for a moment, and then said, “You know how, when birds fly in a V, one side of the V is always longer than the other side? You know why that is?” The interviewer said he did not. “There’s more birds on that side,” said the player, and then just looked at the interviewer, waiting for him to figure it out. We lost because the other team scored more points, is the answer.

OR IS IT? The Boston Militia played the best second half of a football game that I can ever remember seeing. Not the best Militia game, or the best women’s football game, but the best fucking football itself. I can’t even imagine what it takes to go into a storage-shed-turned-locker-room down 35-14 at the half, come back out and score three touchdowns while holding your opponents utterly scoreless. Who DOES that? Why, the Boston Militia, apparently. And they did that down by four players, in spite of a series of remarkably bad and one-sided calls in some truly crucial moments, on the road, frustrated, angry, tired and hot.

THAT is fucking impressive. And I don’t believe that the one point that Chicago won by (after watching their 21-point lead slip away in two quarters) makes them a better team or more deserving of a championship. Yes, they were undefeated headed into this game but so were the other three teams who made it to this round. The structure of the WFA, largely for reasons of geography and economics, is such that many good teams go their whole regular season without once facing an opponent who’s really a challenge for them. Many make it to the playoffs with hundreds of points scored and only dozens of points against. This, combined with the single-elimination structure of football playoffs, means that making those playoff games as fair as humanly possible is utterly vital. And this game simply was not.

Case in point: if you make a call, and then find out that what you called a penalty on is, in fact, perfectly legal in the league that’s playing, you withdraw the penalty. You don’t change the call to something else in order to keep the play from counting. As such: if you call face guarding, and are then told that people are totally allowed to face guard, you don’t then get to change the call to pass interference. If it was pass interference, you should have called pass interference in the first place. But you didn’t. Know why? ‘Cause it wasn’t pass interference and you know it. Even the Chicago announcers doing the commentary for the game online remarked on how differently the calls were going in this game than they had in Chicago’s regular season.

Let’s get something straight here: I’m not pissed at the Chicago Force team. I liked them. I thought they played well and weren’t jerks and I will be rooting for them in the WFA final. I like the Force organization and its ability to promote itself and its general professionalism. What I don’t like is how many utterly absurd and blatantly inappropriate calls were made by the Chicago officials during game-changing plays with no recourse or ability for those calls to be reviewed. It was disgracefully unprofessional and infuriating to watch.

I was saying some jumbled up version of all of this to Backseat Coach as we walked to the car. He cut me off at one point with this: “This sense of justice that you look for in pretty much everything doesn’t exist in football.” And he might be right; maybe this is what happens when you’re a misanthropic data analyst with a degree in social work who only came to know and love football as an adult. Maybe that’s not how football works. But as far as I’m concerned, that doesn’t mean it’s ok – and as I said before, this is my blog so it’s my views that will be presented. Don’t like it? Start your own blog. It’s free.

In no particular order, here is what else I have to say:

Today I sustained my first football-related injury, and by that I mean that I scraped one of my knuckles open shaking a metal cowbell on and off for two hours. I don’t expect to be out for next season because of it, though, so no worries there.

***

After the game I was on the field checking in with some of my friends on the team. We said some things that had to be said, and then descended into increasingly ridiculous territory as we realized that the last two losses that the Boston Militia have sustained have come when I attended away games while pregnant. Correlation/causation be damned – this was clearly my fault! Well, not really mine so much as Backseat Coach’s (ifyaknowwhaddimean). So that particular avenue of conversation was explored in the markedly tasteless fashion in which one converses with good friends in private when you really need a laugh. Except apparently the whole damn thing was captured on videotape by the New Boss Media Boss people, or whatever their name is. Hi, Ma! I’m just as classy as ever.

***

And then finally, there’s this: just because I get angry doesn’t mean I don’t also get sad. Of course I’m sad. I’m sad for my friends who worked so unbelievably hard for this, and I’m sad because I don’t believe it’s their fault that it didn’t happen. And I’m sad because I believe that THEY might believe it’s their fault, and I hate that. And I’m sad because I wanted to bring Tiny Coach to Pittsburgh and take pictures of him on an NFL field with all my amazing Militia friends, and I won’t get to do that this year. And that sucks.

But here’s the thing: I have Tiny Coach. I wasn’t always sure I would; TC was born prematurely via emergency induction under some pretty scary circumstances. But he showed up tiny and awesome, and the first day that we could have visitors, Conway (#74/OL) showed up in our hospital room with a giant posterboard card signed by all of the Boston Militia players with TC’s name, birthdate and the message “Welcome to the team!” I fucking loved it. I have a very clear memory of lying in my hospital bed hooked up to three different IVs and Lord knows how many monitors, trying to get the nurses who were taking care of me to go over to the nearest computer and look up the Militia highlights video so they could understand how cool that gift was.

But what the Boston Militia really gave us was not just that awesome card; it would turn out to be a way for me to comprehend how I might possibly start to teach my son about gender and power and oppression and strength and a lot of things that seem really overwhelming when someone hands you a bitty little baby boy and you have no idea how not to accidentally fuck him up or let him turn into an asshole. And don’t get me wrong, I’m sure I’ll screw him up somehow, more so than I already have, but I will have this – not just for Tiny Coach but for little baby Scout when he shows up later this year. And that’s so much bigger than a football field in any city. It is for me, anyway. And as I may have mentioned before: this is my blog. (Motherfucker.)