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Memo to John Lukacs, ESPN.com, Kellen Winslow, and anybody else who is similarly divorced from reality...

12/8/2007

...the Heisman Trophy isn't comparable to the Medal of Honor, and football is not war.

From a Lukacs column on the history and mystique of the Heisman trophy comes this little nugget (emphasis added):
the Heisman is now equal parts Oscar, Nobel Prize, Lombardi and Congressional Medal of Honor cast into one transcendent, iconic -- not to mention heavy -- 25-pound hunk of bronze.
With all due respect to Kellen "I'm a soldier!" Winslow and to an author who really should know better, it's time for folks who say such ridiculous and insulting things as this to be beaten about the head, neck, chest, shoulders and arms with the Reality Stick.

In short: Football is not war. Nobody loses their life or their limbs; at the end of the day, everybody leaves the gridiron and goes back to their comfortable home; and no grieving mother or father is left, after a football game, with only a posthumous award and a story or two from their son's comrades about how he, in going down fighting, saved all of their lives so that they could see their families again.

I understand what Lukacs was going for in his article, but the fact that he could even mention our nation's highest award for combat bravery -- one which is far more often than not awarded posthumously -- in the same sentence as an award for a College football player -- LET ALONE so dishonor the former as to say that it is not only not equal, but only worth a part of the trophy given out for playing a game -- shows that he is so horribly out of touch with the the world beyond college football that he can't even grasp reality any longer.

You'll have to look far and wide to find a bigger college football fan than me -- but this is beyond crossing the line, and it is representative of a common mindset in today's America: that of people who are so comfortable, so safe, and with so few cares, that they can not only completely tune out the harsh realities of the real world (even when it is a real world that is being experienced by hundreds of thousands of their countrymen on a daily basis outside of the US right now), and can elevate a game and its insignificant, ephemeral awards to a place in the pantheon of honors above those earned by the people who actually die to save their real teammates -- as well as to make such a pathetically comfortable, superficial existence as that experienced by Winslow, Lukacs, and so many others, possible.


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