The Daily Hat Trick has remained dormant for six years. If it appears the following creative inspiration is random and spontaneous, it is because it is random and spontaneous. I hope you enjoy it.
The Weight of the Game is an original work of fiction, conceived and directed by me, developed in collaboration with a writing partner. It is a unique perspective, a hypothetical discussion between legendary football personas, living and deceased. The words are invented. The themes are intentional. I hope that the humanity is real.
In John Facenda's style. In John Facenda's voice. As only John Facenda could deliver it.
The lights of the room fade slowly, the way autumn fades, not all at once, but by degrees, the gold giving way to something older and darker and more honest. Music rises underneath. Sam Spence's strings, measured and vast. And then...that voice. That impossible, magnificent, sepulchral baritone. The voice that made a third-down conversion sound like an historic legend. The voice that turned a football into a myth and a myth into an America.
JOHN FACENDA:
They came from the flatlands and the river towns, from the hard clay of Mississippi and the broken corridors of foster care, from the golden campuses of great universities and the cold geometry of prison cells. They came with their numbers, their touchdowns and their yards, their consecutive starts and their single-season records, their Pro Bowl selections and their championship rings, numbers that will live in the ledger of the American game long after the men who made them have turned to silence.
They were the chosen ones. The fleet of foot and the strong of hand. The ones the autumn Sundays were made for. The ones the crowds rose to greet like congregations rising for a hymn, seventy thousand voices lifting as one, calling their names into the October sky as if the names themselves were prayers.
And they were great. Let that be said clearly and without apology, here at the end of things. They were genuinely, historically, breathtakingly great at the game they played. The game that America loved above all other games. The game of collision and strategy and controlled fury. The game that asked for everything a man had and then asked again.
But greatness, as any honest accountant of the human ledger will tell you, is a statement about capacity, not character. Capacity and character are different rooms in the same house, and the house of a man's life is only as sound as the room he least frequently visits.
These men visited their greatness every Sunday, in stadiums that gleamed with the particular light of American ambition. They rarely visited the other room. The room where the women they hurt were waiting. The room where the children, their own and hose of others, were growing up in the shadow of what their fathers were capable of doing. The room where the poor of Mississippi went without, because a famous name took what was theirs. The room where a young man heard that who he loved was a sin, from the mouth of a man he revered.
The game gave them everything: speed, strength, wealth, fame, the roar of the crowd, the warmth of the spotlight, and the comfort of a system designed to protect its investments. The game gave them everything except the one thing the game is not equipped to give: the capacity to be, in the silence after the final whistle, fully and responsibly human.
There is no shame in what they did on the field. There is no asterisk sufficient to contain what some of them did off it. Both things are true. The yards are real. The harm is real. The Canton busts stand. The victims stand also, in their own way, in a gallery the Hall of Fame will never build.
What makes a man? Not the thing he does in the light, with thousands watching and a scoreboard keeping honest count. Any man can be measured in the light. The measurement that matters, the one that outlasts the highlight reel and the bronze bust and the ring ceremony, is what a man does in the dark, in the private hours. When the crowd has gone home and the jersey is in the hamper and the man remains...just the man...just the choices.
In a room that exists somewhere between memory and reckoning, between the end of the game and the beginning of the real accounting, seven men sat together and said the true things. Not all of them...not perfectly...not without the residue of self-protection that clings to men even in their most honest moments. But enough...enough to constitute something rarer than a touchdown and harder to achieve than a perfect season.
They told the truth, in the dark, without the scoreboard.
And if the game, the beautiful, brutal, magnificent, deeply American game, if the game has a conscience, it was in that room: sitting in folding chairs, wearing no jersey, carrying no number.
Just men....
Finally....
Just men....
[Music swells, then fades, then nothing. The particular silence of a stadium after everyone has gone home. The field still bearing the marks of what was played there. The grass pressed down where the great ones ran. And then, from somewhere, perhaps from habit, perhaps from the Philadelphia newsroom of another era, from the desk of a man who ended every broadcast the same way for thirty years, the voice returns one final time: Quiet now...personal...almost a whisper.]
JOHN FACENDA:
Have a good night tonight. And a better day tomorrow.
Goodnight, all.
A note on authorship: The Weight of the Game was conceived, directed, and shaped by me, including the premise, the participants, the thematic architecture, the dramatic turns, and the decision to treat these men as full human beings rather than symbols. The dialogue was developed collaboratively, in the long tradition of writers who work with creative partners whose names don't always appear on the final page. I've reviewed, edited, and taken responsibility for the content. Any factual inaccuracies in statistics or public record are mine to correct. What you're reading is fiction. Please treat it as such. With that said, I hope it makes you feel something true.
1) Video from youtube.com
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