Matt Cassel, Eric Winston, and 9/11: a brief guide to maintaining your humanity while watching large mammals collide violently

Matt Cassel, Eric Winston, and 9/11: a brief guide to maintaining your humanity while watching large mammals collide violently

Posted on October 10th, 2012 by Ian Micir

On Sunday, Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Matt Cassel was injured on a play. Matt Cassel is a pretty shitty NFL quarterback. According to offensive tackle Eric Winston, while Cassel was down and injured, a decent portion of the crowd was cheering because it meant Matt Cassel would be unable to return to the game and, therefore, would also be unable to continue playing quarterback for the Chiefs, shittily. After the game, Winston described hearing the home fans cheering for an injury as “one hundred percent sickening.”

Bravo, Eric Winston. Gold sticker for that one, bud. If they were cheering the injury, you are one hundred percent right.

Sports are often said to serve as a sort of escape from everyday life — a reason to take a break from it all and get together with friends, eat and drink unhealthily, and cheer like madmen for something that really, in the end, doesn’t matter at all. It’s a fantasy, in almost every possible sense of the term. So it’s with a certain sense of irony that we use the word “fantasy” to separate real football from fantasy football, considering real football is, for the most part, fantastical to fans anyway. But there are certain moments when the fourth wall is broken and reality comes bursting through the TV, when someone goes from hurt to injured, when football goes from a game to real life, when players become people. I don’t personally care about Matt Cassel. He’s not my friend. I don’t know his middle name or his favorite color or a single one of his food allergies. “But,” as Winston said in his interview, perfectly and simply, “he’s a person.”

And that’s really all that has to be said in this situation. I’m an Eagles fan. Therefore, I love the Eagles and hate the Giants and their fans. But those are playful words. I don’t actually hate the Giants. I don’t hate the Giants’ fans. I remember learning that pretty quickly after 9/11 — that none of this actually matters. Everyone was a Giants and Jets fan that week/month/season. Know who the Giants played first after 9/11? The Chiefs. Know who won? The Giants. Know who cheered? The Chiefs fans — standing ovation, actually. People were killed, people were hurt, real life was affected, and Kansas City got the memo.

Retroactive bravo, Chiefs fans. Gold sticker for that one.

Now, yes, 9/11 is the large-scale example of this idea, but the principle is the same: there’s supposed to be a distinct line between fantasy and reality that once crossed, has a very sobering effect on everyone. For a brief time in Kansas City, they apparently forgot that.

Boo, Chiefs fans. Stormy cloud sticker for that one.

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Ian Micir

Ian Micir is associate editor of When Falls the Coliseum. He graduated from Drexel University with a BA in English in June of 2012. During his time at Drexel, he won ten awards for writing, including five in his final year. Micir’s work has appeared in The 33rd – An Anthology and The Classical.