“I’m feeling good. I just don’t want to be doing — somehow sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful Resolute Desk, the great Resolute Desk, I think wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens, I don’t know, somehow I don’t see it for myself. I just don’t. Maybe I’ll change my mind.” – The 2020 LOSER.
The guy down the street died.
He was 80 and vaccinated and believed in masks.
His son was 50 and did not get vaccinated.
The son did not believe in masks.
He loved his father and visited often.
The son, he’s dead.
The sister is displeased.
Not happy.
She loved her father, too.
I have trouble absorbing horrific information
with headsets playing the cowboy drama
“Lonesome Dove” by Larry McMurtry into one ear of my head.
But I know for a fact, a third family member –
likely a middle-aged middle-class white male –
Yeah, he died.
Three dead.
Down the street.
Meanwhile the football stadia are full
and I can only hope the human race
is half as resilient as McKenzie Milton at Florida State
where we still do the Tomahawk Chop.
Most of what follows is from Sports Illustrated. By Pat Forde.
THE MIRACLE AT DOAK, AND OVERREACTING TO BRIAN KELLY
Never has a lost helmet triggered as much as it did Sunday night. When Jordan Travis’s lid popped off in the fourth quarter of the Notre Dame-Florida State game, an incredible comeback was culminated and a hero was reborn. McKenzie Milton entered a football game for the first time in nearly three years.
For the moment, it didn’t matter who won the game—whether the Fighting Irish could hold off the charging Seminoles. What mattered was Milton’s triumph of spirit. What mattered was his comeback from a devastating, career-threatening, limb-threatening injury on the day after Thanksgiving 2018, when Milton was the quarterback of undefeated UCF. His right leg was mangled on a running play, and anyone who saw that leg anytime in the next year had to believe Milton was in denial in his quest to ever play again.
Then he did play, some two years and nine months later, and did so in an emergency situation against a top-10 opponent. And he played incredibly well.
His first play was a 22-yard pass to Ja’Khi Douglas, and there were more than a few suddenly wet eyes in Doak Campbell Stadium and in living rooms around the nation. Then coach Mike Norvell did a remarkable thing, leaving Milton in the game—and the guy responded by keeping the Seminoles going until they reached the end zone for a touchdown that made it a three-point game. Travis, to his eternal credit, was overjoyed for Milton—who came back out for the next series and led another scoring drive, forcing overtime.
If this were the sole province of script writers and not subject to being constrained by real life, Milton would have led the Seminoles to victory in OT. It did not happen, for a variety of reasons, but don’t for a minute let it diminish one of the great comeback stories we’ve seen. Now we’ll see how far the story goes.
Norvell played it coy all preseason about who his starter would be, but it was clear that Travis was his guy. He may need to reconsider. Milton’s small sample size—10 FSU points in three possessions, 5-for-7 passing for 48 yards, three rushes for six yards—grades out better than Travis’s night.
But we don’t know if Milton has the mobility to play a full game, especially behind an offensive line that is still being rebuilt after years of ineptitude.
Norvell was noncommittal about his quarterback position after the game. Meanwhile, his coaching counterpart, Brian Kelly, rhetorically wandered into a classic Twitter overreaction.
Kelly botched an attempt to re-air the old joke associated with John McKay when he was the coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the 1970s. As the story goes, McKay’s response to a question about his team’s execution was, “I’m in favor of it.” In a postgame interview with ESPN’s Katie George, Kelly attempted to be both his own set-up man and the delivery man, and his own execution was lacking.
That prompted an online fuming that you could see coming as Kelly tried to tell the joke. The Dash’s takeaway: if you’re offended, you’re trying too hard. Find something else to be mad about, because a poorly recycled 45-year-old quip ain’t it.
Meanwhile,
in the middle of the fourth surge
killing more Floridians than ever,
Dick Vitale is screaming
in the sports pages
because only 9,000 spittle-spewing fans
attended a Rays’ baseball game.
You make me want to
punch somebody.
In Florida,
we lose
a 9/11’s worth of American citizens
every couple of weeks.
More dead
every couple of weeks.
And there is no comeback.