NFL Heroes

As we all know, getting old sucks. You have to pay bills, everything randomly hurts, it takes longer both to get drunk and to recover from the previous night’s (or weekend’s) drunkenness, and you no longer have that wonderful naiveté that comes with youth. That sense of bright eyed wonder permeated every facet of childhood. Think back to whomever you idolized as a child. Parent, older brother, local member of Congress (HA!), Hulk Hogan, or probably for most DFOers, an NFL player or three. I have a hunch that you lionized this childhood hero to the point that you thought he or she was without flaw, and if any of your peers criticized your idol, then you defended his/her honor with the single-minded devotion that comes with being a young person incapable of seeing how anyone can be right about someone you know oh so well.

For me, that NFL hero was Dan Marino. “But wait, BFC,” an imaginary person reading this concurrently with me writing it might say, “aren’t you a die-hard Chicago Bears fan who grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, which is nowhere near Miami, Pittsburgh, or Sicily?”  Yes, but…I guess it’s DFO confession time.

My (fake) internet name is BrettFavresColonoscopy, and for my entire childhood, I was a sports bigamist. Despite rooting for the Bears, going to games in Chicago with my parents, even having an uncle who claimed he was poker buddies with Sid Luckman, despite all that, my favorite player growing up was Dan Marino. I practiced imitating his three step drop in the front yard of our suburban Chicago house. I had a Dan Marino jersey that I wore with pride.  At one point, my childhood bedroom looked like the opposite of Ray Finkle’s. I subscribed to Dolphin Digest. I had a little Dan Marino figurine that played audio of the call from the “clock play” game, and after the snippet from the broadcasters, Marino’s voice came on to explain that he signaled they were going to spike the ball, but then he didn’t, he threw it, surprised the Jets, and scored a ‘touched down.’ I was young and stupid enough to think this was a cool explanation from a cool dude, not a rote recitation from someone who didn’t give a shit about me and was just cashing a check.

Which brings us back to the naiveté. I memorized Dan Marino’s stats and watched any Dolphins games that happened to be on Chicago TV and/or highlights on the weird tapes that Sports Illustrated and the Sporting News used to “give away” with subscriptions. I knew how many yards he had thrown for (eventually 61,361), how many of his TD passes were caught by Mark Duper (55) and how many by Mark Clayton (79), and I had even convinced myself that Yatil Green was just the deep threat he needed to right the ship and get back to a Super Bowl with that defense starting to come around. (News flash: he was not). More importantly, I had convinced myself that this man with a cannon for an arm also had to be a good person, a person worth my time, energy, and adulation. So when some friends in junior high school told me that Dan Marino was, well, an asshole, I adamantly disagreed and argued until I was blue (aqua?) in the face insisting that there was NO WAY his teammates could be sick of him yelling at them all the time since he was such a great leader, and there was NO WAY he wasn’t exactly as awesome as he seemed in Ace Ventura (a movie I saw 11 times in theaters) even though he was literally acting, and there was NO WAY those rumors of him cheating on his wife were true because, hey, he won the NFL Man of the Year award in 1998, and they only give that thing out to players that are leaders on and off the field. I didn’t just argue these points, I believed them to my very core. And don’t get me started on the “he would have won XX Super Bowls if he had a defense/a running game/the West Coast offense/both achilles tendons/full contractual rights to his soul in the afterlife” argument. I made those points constantly, and again, believed them. I could have written this slobbering piece of typeset fellatio: http://www.thephinsider.com/2015/7/19/9000165/were-not-really-debating-whether-dan-marino-is-the-best-quarterback.

But then, like the rest of you, I grew up and a couple of things changed. First of all, I went to college, and a connection with a team my favorite player retired from seemed, well, stupid, giving me a little bit of dispassionate distance. More importantly, I was able to grasp that we can look up to and respect people and still recognize their flaws as humans. We don’t necessarily need to worship them as heroes. This was a tough enough lesson to learn with my parents, and their shortcomings were front and center on a daily basis. And in the case of Marino, I used the internet for a lot more than crazy flash videos and porn and found things like this, this, this, the rumors that he was handsy and pushy with waitresses at Hooters, the smarminess that makes this seem plausible, and of course, the fact that he had a secret lovechild with one of the many women he slept with that are not named Claire Marino. Way to make me look like an asshole, Dan!

This evolution from adoration to “I still think he’s the greatest quarterback of all time, but he’s probably a douchebag” was more painful than it should have been. Seeing Marino get irritated on the CBS pregame show (even if the Amazon Super Bowl ad was supposed to show that he’s in on the joke) was another reminder that I had bought the good guy marketing plan and there were no refunds or exchanges when the shine came off. It also made me examine/realize that if my hero was a dick, who else was a dick? Was anyone genuine? Would Charles Barkley’s point extend well beyond athletes to everyone else I admired? If Marino wasn’t what he appeared, was I a failure for picking such a shitty hero? (The answer to the last one is obviously no; I’m a failure for so many other reasons).

In all honesty, even if I had idolized someone that wasn’t rumored to be a jerk, I’m sure I would have gone through a similar process. Our sports heroes are superhuman to us growing up, and then at some point we find out that they’re just human. It’s inevitable and normal and unfair to begin with, but it’s still more than a little disappointing to have the bloom come off the rose. In a way, this player worship is a microcosm of what we have all struggled with the last two seasons, loving football and hating what the NFL has become all at the same time. At some point we have to accept the flaws or quit rooting altogether.

To turn from the maudlin to the interactive, what about you, [DFO]ers? Who was your NFL hero growing up, and what did he do to disappoint you? Do you want to talk about it?