This is our fight song, pretend it's alright song

Before we get to my first piece, welcome. Thanks for being here. I sincerely appreciate (and am eternally puzzled) when anyone gives my schlubby thoughts a few minutes of their time.

I won't pretend that I'm the first to wax on how reality affects sports and vice versa. There are plenty of fantastic writers and talkers out there making us eat our vegetables instead of just gorging on a big bowl of sugary sports. Dave Zirin has been at it for a minute. The Defector folks have admirably shown that employee-owned media both works and is good. Karim Zidan does great work on this beat, especially regarding two sports that I am not well versed in--soccer and MMA. There's my former colleague Julie DiCaro as well as Lindsey Gibbs and plenty of others that walk across these avenues.

And I hope to do an adequate job walking alongside them. Okay, on to #content.

When I hear "Los Angeles Wildfires" mentioned during a sporting event, it sounds like a team name in a pro parkour league. Having never even stepped foot in the city, I cannot fathom the horror its residents are dealing with right now, and the images certainly don’t do the lived experience much justice. At least two dozen are dead as of this posting in another climate event that is suddenly very real for a slice of America and very distant for the rest. The wheel of destruction periodically spins, usually without most of us thinking about it, and afterward we swear to remind ourselves to cross our fingers on the next terrible rotation.

Meanwhile, the NFL machine's gears never stop turning, and a Wild Card playoff game between the LA Rams and Minnesota Vikings had to be moved from L.A. to Arizona. It’s not the first time weather–a word that feels like a shoe on the wrong foot when referring to widespread fire–has delayed or moved a sporting event. A playoff game in America’s national religion is more of an exception, though, and when the announcement of the relocation went from assumed to official while thousands of Americans were figuring out where to go with the rest of their lives now fitting in a suitcase, the status of a game, regardless of magnitude, being pressing news felt a strange sort of sinful. 

But, let’s be honest, so has consuming football for a while now. And I’m as big of a sinner of that stripe as anyone. I live in Chicago. An awful Bears team dominates the news if they so much as fart in the offseason, let alone the actual games.

So I immediately started to think about how this is just going to continue. Wildfires, hurricanes, flash floods, what will eventually be excessive heat too dangerous to watch a game in at a stadium without a retractable roof, and some other flavor of calamity that climate change hasn’t yet wrought will cause our precious games to be disrupted and delayed (the next act of mass violence in an American sports city or college town, too, if it’s not convenient to the calendar). It will continue because, like other forms of fray in the fabric, we’ve collectively just thrown up our hands when it comes to the planet burning and drowning. Screens in our hands have diluted reality for years, and for most of the country east of the Rockies, the LA fires are heart-wrenching but in a cinematic way. The images are momentary tragedy porn on the timeline–"Oh, how sad," they mumble. "Glad I don’t live there," they don’t say aloud--before scrolling to different gruel. Maybe they make a donation (and you should if you can), but it’s always about helping after the fact, not demanding prevention before. There is not a sufficient pausing by enough scrollers to ask why fires like this are happening and with such frequency and intensity. That isn’t what media–social or otherwise–is for anymore to the average bloke. 

The answer to that "why" (or even "How is such a crazy wildfire happening in January during what’s supposed to be the rainy season in SoCal?") is, of course, incredibly simple and not worth me wasting your time donning a science cap. But it’s not emotionally simple. The realities of human-caused catastrophic changes to the planet don’t hit the especially smooth parts of brains that think a live report from the pancake breakfast for the local elderly is news. 

To understand the fires in the context of the sports world this weekend–particularly king NFL–is to see a lot of pursed lips and solemn nodding and thautzandprars and directing viewers to donate to the behemoth Red Cross that still gets top charity billing for every disaster despite its checkered history. You will not be getting any examination of that “why” on a broadcast, and I know it’s not exactly the lifting that a studio show or Tom Brady as he’s busy being a real broadcasting boy is expected to do. 

I was hoping for a random story to pop up from a beat writer asking Rams or Chargers players or coaches about the situation in a non-football context, not necessarily even going so far as to bring up the uncomfortable alliterative term that shall not be named. Just one teeny sign that someone in that world is looking beyond the surface moment, beyond the immediate aftermath to be washed from the national mind through our goldfish news cycle. But if a reporter did broach any semblance of that, I haven’t come across it. 2,100 words here about Rams players’ reactions to the game being moved, and no mention of anything causal beyond a fire that must have up and arbitrarily chose that spot this time around. Vikings lineman Harrison Phillips spoke of “optics” of potentially playing the game in L.A., but that’s about it from those involved in the games themselves from what I can tell. Shouting out firefighters (not specifically the incarcerated ones, though) is cool, but it would be cooler maybe to talk about how to start reducing the chances of firefighters having to be put in such dire situations. 

It’s not as though athletes’ and coaches’ opinions when America has found itself at a certain brink haven’t been sought before, and maybe nine out of ten responses to this issue would be deflections or boilerplate, but we sure won't get a Steve Kerr-esque discussion of the actual root of such a catastrophe (or even something akin to Jonathan Toews asking people to put forth the least mental effort) if it isn’t asked directly. Not feeling like anyone with access is eager to do that.

Just more soft piano over shots of people hugging. More mentions of how team owners and other bigwigs who have certainly donated gobs of money to climate denialist politicians and ones who want to hamstring aid to the victims have also cut a check to help those victims. The wispy pregame feature pieces are already in the hopper, people.

No moment solidified the real priorities of those not sifting through ash and Titanic deck feng shui than the Rams-Vikings pregame… festivities? The NFL has mastered gesturing vaguely at things that are actually killing people, and hoo boy did they cook up a pièce de résistance on Monday night. The league knows it can't outright ignore it when a raging cyst of societal breakdown reaches a head, but like hell it'll speak meaningfully on it.

So the best way to feign poignancy is (pokes head in some development office where six communications degrees are rearranging combos of a fridge magnet poetry set for a sign from above) pop sensation whose name everyone knows, Rachel Platten, performing “Fight Song,” which has for years been mocked and rightfully hated on to the point of people going on the IR with sprained eyes after rolling them too hard. IT IS A SONG LITERALLY GIGGLED AT BY ONE OF THE GAME’S ADVERTISERS. It was the musical equivalent of spray painting “It Takes All Of Us” in a much smaller font than the team name in an end zone. (The game did feature “LA TOGETHER” in difficult-to-read lettering in the back of the end zones.)

But that is so NFL. That is the best we’ll get from the shield when it comes to tragedy–the forced Doing Something to the point of farce. 

The country’s definitive pastime puffed out a microcosm of the collective approach to systemic societal failure. Sing a song from a distance, try to make those not directly involved feel sort of empowered without having to actually act on anything (or just confuse them, either is fine), don’t dare ask questions that PoLiTiCiZe tHe TrAgEdY, and wait for the next time we have to let sports mask reality. 

Maybe it’ll be in proximity to a stadium with a roof then.

You deserve better than a saccharine add-on to a football game going on without you, L.A. folks. You and future disaster victims deserve a real fight, not whistling a fight song past the graveyard.

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If you’d like to help those affected by the fires in the Los Angeles area, see a variety of options here.