Grizzly Truth

I spent part of my New Years Eve watching the very excellent Werner Herzog documentary "Grizzly Man", which tells you all you really need to know about how we party at Shooter HQ. Anyway, the film concerns the life and times of one Timothy Treadwell, an environmental activist and grizzly bear enthusiast who lived amongst the grizzlies in the Alaskan peninsula for 13 summers before, rather predictably, a bear decided to make him and his girlfriend lunch. He also shot hundreds of hours of footage, most of which show him in ridiculously close contact with animals that could have ripped him apart, had they thought he was anything but a retarded monkey who smelled funny, and probably wouldn't have been good to eat.

Anyway, here's the trailer, and Werner Herzog (the director) is an old favorite of mine and a genius. Definitely worth a rental.



Now, what this has to do with sports: there's a moment in the film in which one of Treadwell's friends, talking about the hate mail that Treadwell got (which, to be fair, seemed way over the top for the point of being irritated by a messed up guy who was a mild celebrity at best), says that he thinks that hunting is just aggression against animals, and that anyone who stands up against hunting gets that aggression doubled.

Now, I don't know about that. I've got scads of relatives who hunt (it's kind of a religion in Pennsylvania), and they don't seem any more or less aggressive than anyone else. I eat meat but don't hunt, have fired a gun but don't own one, and don't really feel all that moved by any of the politics involved here. If you're going to get rid of wolves and other natural predators for prey animals, you're going to have to do something to keep the balance right, so a managed hunt seems perfectly reasonable to me. Just don't ask me to sit out in the cold and do it myself, because I've got sports to watch, a blog to fill, kids to raise, books to write, etc., etc. Anyway...

What got me thinking is that redirected aggression idea, and how it relates to the fact -- not theory, fact -- that many sports will basically shorten and/or lessen the quality of life for the individual athlete. Specifically, boxing and football. (Yes, NASCAR fan is waving his hand in the air now too, but he doesn't come 'round this blog here much, and so long as the driver does his job right, he's not going to limp at age 50. The NFL player, not so much.)

Part of the implicit bargain in watching sports is that the relatedness that we will have to the athlete is limited; they are extraordinarily different from you and me, and aren't usually an object of sympathy. But when you consider a player like, say, Eagles RB Correll Buckhalter -- who has come back through ridiculously knee injuries to be productive and more or less unknown outside of the team's fans, who don't hold him in any great amount of esteem, since he's a pretty limited player who's just going to get hurt again any minute now, really...

Well, Buck's a man, he's well-paid and all, he gets to play a game for a living. But as I watch the movie and realize that a line's being crossed that will be paid for in blood... well, there's a reason that, way back in the subconscious, you might have a pang of conscience for patronizing football so much.

And, of course, that one should fully expect the double-strength hate mail for daring to point out this possibility. Game on.