Now and Then

Another Kind of Loneliness

by Frank Soos

It is dark outside. I’m alone in the ski hut, adding layer on layer to my ski clothes. Though some trails at the university are lighted, I will take the longer, darker path through the woods. The last thing I do is strap on my headlight, feeding the battery pack down my back under all my clothes so it will stay warm next to my skin.

This may be crazy, setting out alone when it is already 20 below. But I know these trails so well that when I cannot sleep one of my tricks to overcome insomnia is to ski them in my mind. Each hill, each turn, I travel behind the science buildings, the student apartments and married student housing, across the small lake, then seemingly deeper into the woods on the other side because I am never really that far from a road. It’s there I have sometimes met the great horned owl, heard it first and then spotted it. Once it spit down one of its compacted regurgitated pellets, sending it tumbling into the snow at the base of the big spruce where it roosted. A gift? A judgment?

In America it is almost a criminal offense to be lonely. At the very least it’s unhealthy. Crazy, as I’ve said. Roy Orbison (bleating): “Only the lonely know the way I feel tonight/Only the lonely know this feeling ain’t right….”

I need to be here alone in these woods.

For 30 years I made my living as a teacher, a reluctant public man. Teaching has its many pleasures. It also has its costs for a shy person. Somehow I knew I could teach in the way that equally shy people know they can go on stage and act. The two are not unrelated. Up there in front of a class, I was a performer with a clear role. Up there, I spent a good bit of energy keeping myself inflated. Students have a right to expect you to be pretty much the same person every day. I could do that; it was something I was good at. But to do it, I had to go away from people to get my self back.

I am a most moose-like man, tall, gangly, clumsy and slow, above all an animal given to loneliness. Moose, except for those moments when the urge to mate comes over them, would rather be alone. You might see them in any weather, nosing in the snow browsing for willow shoots, standing in lakes reaching to the bottom for weeds. You will rarely see them, male moose particularly, in the company of other moose. Moose are ruminants.

My wife Margot’s son has recently returned from Africa, from Ethiopia and Namibia. He went to India as a junior in college and has returned many times. I have no interest in these places. Rightly or wrongly, in my mind they stand for crowds of people. Here are places I imagine myself going to: the high desert of the American Southwest, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the open ocean. Having been to the Refuge once, I would go again, stay longer in a place where sometimes a person can go for hours without hearing another human sound, that of a passing airplane.

Having tried once unsuccessfully to take part in a Quaker meeting, I know I am no good at what the Buddhists call sitting. I cannot be still, cannot quiet my mind. Though I tried a time or two, I see now I have no interest in quieting my mind. That people can and do amazes and baffles me.

I am a ruminant, too.

Once on my skis, I step into the set tracks and begin. At first, I am inclined to move too fast, to rush through the glide that makes skiing skiing, not just running on boards. When I come to the first long flat, I double pole and kick double pole, then return to a stride and begin to find a rhythm I can relax into. I seem to myself to be going slower, but actually I am moving faster than the herky-jerky way I began.

Rather than a skier, I was made to be a basketball player. In my fashion I was. I could run the floor, jump high, block shots and rebound, even shoot a little on some nights. Basketball, though, is a social game, as socially complicated as any game I know. Each player is endowed, at least in principle, with all the same powers, to go anywhere on the court, to pass, to shoot from anywhere. Each player must share these powers with his teammates in complex proportions in accordance with his skills. The only hierarchy on a basketball floor is one imposed by the players themselves and their coach. Here is where I got into trouble. With every missed shot, every bad pass, I imagined my teammates passing judgment on me, and deservedly so. Some games, I got so I wouldn’t shoot the ball at all. Who was I to be taking another shot when I had just missed one two feet from the basket?

Every Sunday in season, I ski with a group of guys, the SCUM, Sugai’s Class of Uncoachable Men. Incrementally, Susan Sugai has made us better skiers. Along the way SCUMs have become a social institution as well. The old Birch Hill ski hut has become our defacto clubhouse. Sometimes we come together to clear trails, have a season-ending potluck, go on summer bike rides. These are good people, good friends. We kid around; we sometimes work out pretty hard; nobody blames me for skiing poorly or envies me in the unlikely event I ski well. But the SCUM probably stretch me to the limit of my sociability. In the jostling give and take, I find myself yearning to hit the trail, to ski away to quietude.

In that quiet, what do I do? What do I think about out there, my headlight bobbing along in the dark? What should I do beyond putting one ski ahead of another? Sometimes, I am ashamed to say, I review perceived slights and recriminations, fresh quarrels: things somebody said or did that seemed hurtful to me somehow. I grind away at such an event over and over, review every detail of what was said and what I might have said or done in return. I grind it to dust, wear it out. I just can’t mess with it anymore. Somehow the hurt is made to go away. Is this what the psychologists mean by “working through” a problem?

If I truly am like a moose, it seems like I should have a tougher hide.

Maybe instead I should seek better to know myself. Samuel Beckett believed we could never come to know ourselves fully no matter how hard we tried. I think I believe that as well, but I think, perhaps like Beckett himself, a person still has to keep seeking to know. But where?  And how?

I could do like Montaigne and ceaselessly fork over every thought that goes through my head. Montaigne compared his own restless mind to a field left fallow and allowed to go to weeds or to “masses and shapeless lumps of flesh.” In other words, a mess-making machine.

What’s up there in my head is like a big balloon. Skiing along, I fill the balloon with words, images, things seen, things heard, things imagined. Many of these thoughts must be so private they can be shared with nobody else. Not because they are banal, sexual, or self-aggrandizing and therefore embarrassing, morally questionable, possibly crazy if exposed to the light of day, but because they are just so many shapeless lumps. Taken altogether, they make a landscape that exists in my head and my head only. In this way they are like the paintings of Yves Tanguy. What are some of those strange tuberous things? Those figures that could belong on cave walls, in kindergarten drawings, in art-as-therapy? Those shapes that look like jigsaw puzzle pieces, parsnips, amoebas, architecture from another planet? It would be wrong to call them misshapen because they rarely attempt to represent anything we know. Their titles, “Extinction of Useless Light,” “The Mood of Now,” say, are jokes against any viewers who might try too hard to make meaning when the paintings are meaning in themselves.

When I stand in the yard while the representative from Bigfoot Pumping and Thawing drains the septic, I want a full report on the state of my plumbing. Nothing serious, the guy assures me as he works his hose around, just a few solids.  That’s it, solids. I’m looking for solids. I think this matters. I’m looking for solids, lumpen shapes that will become somehow meaningful. I persist in the belief that the mind is capable again and again of taking itself by surprise, thinking new, fresh thoughts, at least new and fresh to me—and possible to others. Who can know?

When I was an undergraduate, I spent the better part of a summer reading Beckett’s great trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable in a Grove Black Cat edition with eye-burningly small print. Determined to soldier through, I only realized later, rereading in bits and pieces, that in many places these books were funny—funny in a special sort of way. Molloy shifts his sucking stones from certain pockets in his greatcoat to his mouth, back to certain pockets. Not exactly a Sisyphean labor, but in the ball park if you look at it in the right way, a kind of struggle with the question of how to be alone with yourself, with the question of how to fill your life in the face of the howling void.

One of my professors from graduate school days had a serious drinking problem. When he turned up for writers’ workshop drunk, he’d wail to us: “We all die alone.” One of the women in the class whose problem was pills, would wail back, “Why, John, why?” I don’t know why, either, but I do think we do die as we pretty much live, alone.

When I am in a running race or ski marathon, a century bike ride, despite being in the presence of others, I am essentially alone. Once here in Fairbanks, I found both my hamstring muscles cramping in the last 10 kilometers of the Sonot Kkaazoot, a 50-kilometer ski event. I could see my fellow SCUM Dave Bloom suffering in much the same way. But seeing his pain did nothing to alleviate mine, did nothing to make my own struggle to the finish any easier. I have never asked Dave whether my presence did anything to help him along. To do so would be out of character.

What do people think when they see a moose browsing along a road or trail on a cold day deep in winter? Do they think, say, that this animal is unhappy out there? That it is lonely? There is no getting around the fact the moose is alone, but it’s we people who think too often of being alone as a desolate state, that being alone is in itself an unhappy way to be, “So lonesome I could die,” as Hank Williams put it.

Recently, the famous socio-biologist E.O. Wilson was on the radio extolling the virtues of ants. Ants may be the most socially connected of all animal species, and, E.O. Wilson would say, one of the most successful. Why, he wondered, were there not more species behaving like ants?

I have had varieties of moose encounters on the trails. Like me, their habits are irregular; they prowl the trails by day and night. Once on the baseline trail, I passed a cow lounging in the snow; she hardly gave me a glance. Once I encountered one on the Beaver Slide; she turned toward me, laid her ears back, put her hackles up, and lowered her head making it clear I could not pass. I turned and went back the way I came. Moose don’t much like my headlight; it sometimes makes them bolt. Most of the time, though, moose go their way and I go mine, each of us alone with our thoughts.

If we are not knowable even to ourselves, my errands into the wilderness wherein I seek to know must only alienate me more from the rest of the group. Why, I wonder, can’t I be like an ant instead of a moose?

In our town, there is a man who lately can be seen trudging up and down Farmers’ Loop Road or University Avenue with four shopping carts. In each he has built a tall cardboard tower. Who can know what he has inside them? But one-by-one, or sometimes two-by-two, he pushes his carts along. I may see him sitting beside the four all neatly aligned; I may see him pushing one to meet the others as if he is continually making and remaking a train. Not so different from Malloy’s sucking stones in his greatcoat pockets.

In much the same way, each Beckett narrator from Malloy to Malone, to the Unnameable himself in his urn set on a bar is not always alone but is always alone. Each man is charged with the same chore we all have been given, to make a meaningful world out of what? Of the contents of our own heads?

Those are the lumps, misshapen only if we attempt to assign them given shapes. Stray thought is shapeless. If we invent names for what they are, haven’t we achieved a kind of freedom?

Some may believe in the talking cure, but I believe in the walking cure, or more specifically the skiing cure. Peace is best found through movement. Kick and glide, my pole snapping out of my hand and back again, the steady rhythm that scarcely alters at all except on the steepest hills. It is while striding that I find myself clipping off the kilometers, traveling stretches of trail with no later recollection of having passed over them at all. Surely I did; otherwise, how could I be here now?

In better times, I think bigger happier thoughts, thoughts that may carry me far away from myself and these ski trails. Some of these thoughts slip out, but they slip out the way air can be carefully released from a filled balloon. The rest evaporate, sublimate, dissolve. They are gone. Even those I’ve selected to save, trivial and profound, will be gone by the time I put my skis in my ski bag, climb in my truck and go home. And the rest, those I might commit to paper or a computer disk? When I am gone will they go with me? Just as lost?

I do think it is possible to use exercise to wrestle the mind to exhaustion from time to time. It is possible to stay out skiing long enough, to find myself far from the ski hut or my truck that I have to concentrate on every stride to get myself back, to concentrate on the downhills especially, since nothing is worse than falling at this point. Every bit of energy I have left will simply drain into the ground. When I do fall, I lie there on the snow thinking of nothing except how to untangle my skis and poles, shift myself around and get up. In this strange way, I have achieved a kind of tranquility, the mind finally at rest, empty.

There is some of this fear of losing everything meaningful in Beckett’s narrators, maybe in Beckett himself. Words are frail, words are nothing. But if anything can, words will save us from nothingness.

Montaigne’s essay “Of Idleness” ends with a little joke against his readers, and on reflection, himself: He says of his “chimeras and fantastic monsters, …in order to contemplate their ineptitude and strangeness at my pleasure, I have begun to put them in writing, hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of itself.”

That’s the trick, the joke both Beckett and Montaigne are in on. Thoughts find some sort of order once they are consigned to words on a page. No matter how baggy and rambly Montaigne’s thoughts may seem to be, no matter how desolate Beckett’s narrators’ stories may be, they represent the mediated word. As Montaigne would have it, if not a cultivated field, at least a carefully weeded one. No matter how disparate my own words seem when committed to the page, they have more order than my rambling night-ski thoughts. We’ve all picked; we’ve all chosen. While I can’t speak for Beckett or Montaigne, for me it may be a small victory, but it’s all I’ve got.

Frank Soos is author of two collections of short fiction, Early Yet and Unified Field Theory, the second of which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. In addition, he is the author of a book of essays, Bamboo Fly Rod Suite, featuring two essays that appeared initially in Sport Literate. His most recently completed manuscript, The Team We Got, is a meditation on basketball as played in the Southwest Virginia  coal fields in the 1960s built around his hometown team, the Pocahontas Indians, featuring the writer as admiring fan and mediocre player.

Powder

by Linda Keyes

It’s an old skier’s joke, “Which would you rather have, hot sex or a powder day?” Real ski lovers know which is harder to come by, and I am a powder girl.  I’m also a married, working mother of preschoolers, so frankly both are a rare treat these days. That’s why I put my daughter in ski school at our local resort on Tuesday mornings. I wanted, no I needed, a couple of hours of mid-week skiing with the mountain to myself.

My husband is envious, but his work schedule is less flexible than mine. We fell in love in the Colorado Mountains and learned to backcountry ski together. Before kids, our idea of a romantic weekend was snow camping. We were never cold in our down sleeping bags, zipped together inside our mountaineer’s tent, waiting for dawn and the next perfect powder run. The excitement of high country couloirs and windy ridges fueled our passion for each other. Now however, our typical ski days involve crowded bunny slopes, painful rope tows, and tearful girls with runny noses. Shared powder days are rare. You might say the thrill has gone.

Then one Tuesday I found myself alone on the backside of the mountain. I’d dropped my daughter at her ski lessons.  We’d had no new snow since the weekend and I thought I might find a place to make fresh tracks back where the slope angle scares away the masses. I zipped past the barrier with signs marked “Danger! Experts Only!” and “Don’t ski alone!” I figured if I stayed on the ridge and out of the trees, I’d have nothing to worry about.

Standing on the edge of the deserted and scraped-up slope, I gazed across the valley at the untracked backcountry lines and sighed. I heard the soft sound of skis slipping up from behind. Another skier glided past and stopped just beyond me where the rope marked the edge of the ski area boundary. He was too bundled up to make out his face. What I noticed were his skis, skinny old-time touring boards with three-pin bindings and leather boots. Skis of my youth, the kind of gear I had learned to telemark in with my husband. The kind of gear I had before kids and a job and responsibility.

I couldn’t help but remark, “Wow, those are some skinny skis!”

In a low voice he responded, “Wanna ski some powder?”

I was caught off guard.

“Umm. Okay. I dunno.” I paused and his goggles remained trained on my face, “OK, yes! But where?”

He gestured to the other side of the rope. From the top of the piste where we stood all I could see was a steep, windblown drop off with minimal snow cover, almost bare. I must have looked dubious.

“You cross this slope then drop down into those trees.  No avalanche danger. There’s an amazing untracked bowl below. From there we swing back around to join the resort. Easy skiing!”

If I leaned out far enough I could just make out a low angle slope of virgin snow scattered with young pines.

Reason took hold. “I can’t. My daughter is in ski school. I have no backcountry gear. I have to get to the front of the mountain before noon”.

“No worries. We’ll be back in 45 minutes. And you will have had the best run of the season. The best!”

I gave a skeptical look, probably lost to him under my helmet, goggles and neck warmer.

“It’ll be soooo fun.” Then in a lower, more conspiratorial tone, “You know you want to.”

His attitude should have put me off, but he was right. I did want to. A soft flutter of snowflakes blew across my face, tickling my cheeks and lips.

“Really 45 minutes? No avalanche danger?”

“Promise!”

He held out his gloved hand to introduce himself. “Ro-bear-toh.”  His voice, previously unaccented, rolled over the “R”. For a second I began to feel a little giddy.

We ducked under the line, ignoring placards that threatened fines and loss of lift tickets for crossing the barrier, and began to step our skis across the exposed rocks. A frigid gust of wind stung my nose. What was I thinking? No one knew where I was. No one knew where we were going. I had no beacon, no shovel, no probe. My daughter was expecting me in ski school down below and here I am taking off out-of-bounds with a complete stranger. My husband would kill me (if I didn’t die in an accident or avalanche). And he’d be jealous – jealous of the powder.

Halfway across the scree by now I yelled, “Roberto, I can’t do it. I have to go back.”

”Aw, come on, we’re almost there. It’s gonna be nice!”  Then, whispering, turning on the accent “Fresh tracks. Just a quick run. Nobody has to know.”

From where we stood now I could appreciate the full expanse of snow awaiting, shimmering seductively in the sun. Roberto beckoned with his pole. I glanced back over my shoulder but the yellow rope boundary was already out of sight. I pushed my hood off my helmet, leaned forward, and pushed off.

A couple of minutes later we were frolicking through the pine grove, Roberto making large arcs across the hill on his skinny skis while I bounced in tighter, neat turns around the treetops peeking through the snow.

“Yes!” I yelled as flew past my companion.

“Slow down!” He urged, “Savor it. Let’s stay together.”

I paused to let him catch me. Below us an untouched valley of pure white snow lay waiting, surrounded by rocky peaks jutting up into the cloudless sky.

“Just wait ‘til you see what comes next,” he said.

Gaining speed now we took a long traverse, cresting a small rise at the top of a deep and inviting bowl, the powder light and glittery in the cold air.

“You go first,” he insisted.

I took a deep breath, dropped into the fluffy abyss and floated into another world. I was young again. Husband, children, and job disappeared in one great crystalline whoosh. The turns were effortless. I floated across the slope, sparkles of snow flying up and around me. I coasted back and forth, feeling only joy, my knees pumping up and down in perfect rhythm with the mountain and the sky.

Too quickly it was over, leaving the two of us panting from the exertion and exhilaration at the edge of the wood leading back the resort. I gazed back at the undulating s-curves carved in the bowl above us. My face was flushed and my heart still racing when Roberto said, “Ooh, that was good!”

Suddenly I felt uncomfortable. Embarrassed even. What would I tell my husband? Should I tell my husband? Is sharing the ecstasy of fresh powder with someone else cheating? I slipped back under the cord marking the ski area boundary and avoided eye contact with Roberto. On the return trail we didn’t speak, and the lift ride to the front side was awkward. As we waved good-by however, I felt a sudden tinge of disappointment. Would I ever have another powder run like that again?

That night after the kids were tucked in and the skis hung back up in the garage, I confessed to my husband. He would have read it on my face anyway. I couldn’t stop smiling for the rest of the week. I skied every Tuesday until the end of the season, but I never saw Roberto and his skinny skis again. My husband got wise however. Instead of date nights, he takes me into the backcountry, for our own tryst in the mountains, re-igniting our passion for each other with the rare and exquisite pleasure of powder snow.

Linda Keyes is a telemark skier and writer in Boulder, Colorado. She supports her snow and literary habits by working night shifts in the ER. In 2014, she won the American College of Emergency Physicians Medical Humanities writing award.

by Steve DiUbaldo

It’s Super Bowl week, which means the hype machines are “turnt up” and media members are putting their gloves on to fight for the knockout narrative. I eat and breathe sports news, but NFL stories seem to be alienating me more and more these days. Maybe it’s because I’m a diehard Dallas Cowboys fan and I’m feeling bitter, or maybe it’s easy right now because the NFL is a violent cesspool of moral bankruptcy. Maybe it’s because the NBA is objectively incredible in 2016 for its on-court product, the standard held by the majority of its superstars, and the league’s understanding of social responsibility.

When it comes to social responsibility, and issues of racism, sexism, abuse, and health, the NFL is about as graceful as racist Uncle Davey after tossing back a couple on Christmas Eve, right in front of the impressionable cousins. It would be comical, if it wasn’t so powerful.

There’s a strong tendency in American sport to compare black players with other black players and white players with other white players. Every good white forward over 6’6 in the NBA has gotten Larry Bird. Black quarterbacks who can run aren’t compared to Fran Tarkenton or Steve Young, but to Randall Cunningham and Michael Vick, regardless of the actual similarities.

I love Cam Newton. On the field, no player has ever played the quarterback position with the combination of athletic gifts he possesses. He’s a 6’6, 260 quarterback with a cannon for an arm and a 40 time faster than most running backs, capable of picking defenses apart through the air, on the ground, and with his intellect. He threw for 35 touchdowns with only 10 interceptions this season, and rushed for another 10 touchdowns. He’s an NCAA National Champion, a JuCo National Champion, a Heisman Trophy Winner, the most likely choice for this year’s NFL MVP, and has a shot at Super Bowl Champ. The man is a winner, the most important trait for any quarterback.

But what I love most about Cam is Cam being Cam. When asked if he was “the LeBron James of quarterbacks,” he replied, “Why can’t he be the Cam Newton of power forwards?” Aside from the fact that LeBron’s true position is small forward (c’mon Cam), the way Cam says what he says is honest, deservedly cocky, and fun. Cam Newton is having FUN playing football. But, is he incomparable?

Here’s what he said last week in a press conference after advancing the Carolina Panthers to the Super Bowl: “I said it since Day One: I’m an African-American quarterback. That may scare a lot of people because they haven’t seen nothing that they can compare me to.”

Russell Wilson is an African-American quarterback who, just two years ago, led his team to a Super Bowl victory, and made it to the game last year as an NFC Champ. But if you go back to his media weeks and even his rising celebrity post-win, little was said about Wilson being only the second black quarterback (dating back to Doug Williams in 1988) to win a Super Bowl. For some, that provided the hope that skin color wasn’t a factor in the evaluation of a quarterback, thus showing the progress of society through the microcosm that the NFL insists on being. My feeling, however, is that the way Wilson speaks and the way he worships the God he worships and how he carries himself is more acceptable to the broader (white) American audience. Go to a little football town in the middle of America, ask them to close their eyes and describe a quarterback — he’s probably white, and he probably sounds a lot like Russell Wilson. Aside from stealing Future’s woman, Russ is about as “safe” an All-American Football Star as it gets. “Safe” is not Cam Newton.

How about Colin Kaepernick? He led the 49ers to the Super Bowl three years ago. His soft-spoken nature makes him incomparable with Cam, though there was some criticism to his heavily tattooed body. As David Whitley of AOL Funhouse put it, Kaepernick “looks like he just got paroled.” And, “Approximately 98.7 percent of the inmates at California’s state prison have tattoos.” And, “I’m also pretty sure less than 1.3 percent of NFL quarterbacks have tattoos. There’s a reason for that.” YIKES. I would leave you the link to the article, but it has since been removed. A couple years later, he was criticized by Bills beat writer Sal Maiorana for WEARING HIS HAT BACKWARDS (Google image search any white quarterback in the league, and you’ll find them in a backwards hat). Kaepernick has stated publicly that “stereotypes, prejudice” are the primary source of these criticisms. But Cam has no tattoos and he wears all sorts of hats. As well as jackets, scarves, and the infamous zebra pants, in all different styles and directions. So again, no comparison there.

Before that, Donovan McNabb brought the Eagles to the Super Bowl. But my hatred for Donovan McNabb and his negative attitude and his flabby body (like I’m one to talk) and that ugly Eagles green make me biased. In attempting to be completely objective, I’ll say this: he ain’t in Cam’s league as a player or as a man. Fair, right?

Steve McNair brought the Titans to the Super Bowl in one of the greatest games we’ve ever seen, falling a yard short of being the second African-American quarterback to win a title pre-Wilson. He was once named NFL Man of the Year. Air McNair was a baller. But, coming out of high school, McNair couldn’t get a major D-1 scholarship to play quarterback. Florida offered him a scholarship to play running back, which was pretty par for the course. So he attended Division 1-AA, historically black Alcorn State, where he was accepted as a quarterback. A man from McNair’s south central Mississippi town told Sports Illustrated, “The key is that McNair wanted to play quarterback, and to do that around here, a black kid has to go to a black school.” There’s a good chance that if Cam Newton came up in Steve McNair’s era, we’d be talking about him as one of the great tight ends in NFL history. For that, we cannot compare, but say thank God.

This brings us to the first black quarterback to reach and win the Super Bowl. Washington’s Doug Williams. On media day in 1988, the story goes that Williams misheard a reporter, who asked, “Doug, obviously you’ve been a black quarterback your whole life. When did race begin to matter to people?”

He responded, “How long have I been a black quarterback? I’ve been a quarterback since high school. I’ve always been black.” And added, “I don’t think the football cares.” Williams maintains that he was asked how long he’s been a black quarterback, but the story varies among present members of the media. However it was worded, pure ignorance was inquiring.

Williams left the NFL after five successful seasons as a starting quarterback because he was the lowest paid starter in the league, despite success. He went to the USFL until it folded in ’86, and Joe Gibbs of Washington signed him as a backup. He became the starter in ’87 and won the Super Bowl in ’88. He was out of the league due to injuries by 1990. He received constant hate mail. He grew up in the Civil Rights era. He paved the way for players like Warren Moon and Randall Cunningham, who became Pro Bowl quarterbacks after Williams’ Super Bowl victory, and continued to shift perception in America’s most popular and God-infused sport, at its most worshipped position. In 2013, when Kaepernick and the 49ers were in the Super Bowl, Williams said, “You don’t read about Seattle’s quarterback, you don’t read about the Washington Redskins’ quarterback, the Tampa quarterback being black. They just happen to be their quarterback, and I think that’s the way it should be. Hopefully, that’s the way it will be from here through eternity.”

And then we have Cam Newton.

“I said it since Day One: I’m an African-American quarterback. That may scare a lot of people because they haven’t seen nothing that they can compare me to.”

Doug Williams’ sentiment comes in comparison to his own era, but the coverage of black quarterbacks and black players in general (see Richard Sherman) hasn’t changed to non-prejudice reporting, but reporting with comments buried in subtext that do their best not to blatantly say: “This is my idea of a black man and he is upholding that idea, or challenging that idea, and that is making me uncomfortable.”

Cam is not quiet. He’s willing to be subversive. He brought race into a conversation that was largely already about race, just by calling himself an African-American quarterback during a press conference, making it all right to talk about in that context, and probably pissing off a lot of living room pundits along the way. So what does it mean when the media or swaths of fans are critical of Cam Newton because he’s bombastic and outspoken and wears crazy stuff and likes to celebrate his touchdowns by dancing?

Is that culture? Well, it’s fashion. It’s lifestyle. It’s a public figure, who was quoted as saying “I see myself not only as a football player, but as entertainer and icon.” Yes, that is culture. Is it black culture? No. But is he black? Yes. And cozy little narratives unaccustomed to being challenged, which live inside American heads, are being disturbed.

So is it race? When people are confused what to make of a successful young black quarterback on the national stage, without tattoos, wearing skin tight zebra pants, celebrating his love for himself but also his teammates, and football? Brave fans on message boards call him a THUG at a time where the thuggiest thug playing quarterback goes by the name “Johnny Manziel,” but doesn’t get that exact label — not that word. Confusion drives a Tennessee mother to write a letter to Cam, complaining about his “arrogant struts” and what that says to her 9 year-old daughter. To some, that’s called swag. To others, like Rosemary Plorin of Nashville, it’s a bad example. It’s not like violence is constantly encouraged, or gay players in 2016 still don’t feel safe to come out of the closet, or the players aren’t hitting each other and themselves and sometimes their wives and girlfriends stupid. But Cam’s arrogant strut is an absolute travesty. Do you think that Rosemary Plorin was black? Yeah, me neither (and she’s not).

It seems to me that Cam’s individuality is what people find difficult to comprehend, but that same individuality is what makes so many people love Cam Newton. This is what legends are made of in American sport. I believe what he means, about there being nobody to compare him to, is that he doesn’t fit into white culture/media’s preconceived notions about what it means to be black, or a quarterback, or to be a black quarterback. He’s different as a player, a figure, and a man. He’s a unique person who has been a winner at every level of the game. It means nothing that he’s black, and it means everything that he’s black, because he doesn’t subscribe to a definition, but definition is constantly being placed upon him. He is proud of who he is.

As Cam puts it, “I think we all are guilty of it at times. I’ve come to this point in my life where I’ve been faced with so much from good, bad or indifferent that I try to check myself if I’m trying to judge somebody. I think we are all guilty of it at times. If we look in the mirror, or look in our own closet, we see that we’re not perfect.”

He doesn’t fit in a box. Just enjoy the incomparable Cam Newton, quarterback of the Carolina Panthers. He’s a winner in zebra pants, and that’s the first time that’s ever been written about an NFL quarterback.

Steve DiUbaldo is a writer of plays for stage and screen, essays, and poetry based in New York City. His plays have appeared in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. Recently, he was the recipient of the Clifford Odets Ensemble Play Commission at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute. His play “Exposure,” which examines the dark side of AAU basketball, is a 2016 semi-finalist for the Eugene O’Neil National Playwrights Conference. He was awarded “The Rita and Burton Goldberg Playwright Foundation Fellowship” and the “Excellence in Playwriting” Award at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where he received his MFA. He is currently a coach for an undefeated middle school girls’ basketball team in Manhattan, and teaches creative writing around the city. He has been to the NCAA Tournament as a player and to the Grammy’s as a Beyonce dancer. You can follow him on Instagram @freelefty.

by William Meiners

The Golden State Warriors made news a couple weeks ago. Just by losing in Denver, and then again soon after in Detroit. That long haul, the forecasters said, the 82 game marathon would squash any attempt to match the mighty Chicago Bulls of two decades ago. But then they reel off seven straight victories, with dominant showings over the Cavaliers, Bulls, Pacers, and Knicks, as well as a surprising squeaker in Philadelphia. Back west they drubbed the Spurs and Mavericks by 30 and 20, respectively.

The Dorothy in me, the dreamer, ever optimistic about the future of history, hopes Warriors will trump Bulls by bettering their 72-10 regular season record. The Judy Garland in me, the cynic, usually pretty drugged up, doesn’t much care. Of course the shrieking heads care, arguing ad nauseam about who would win between the bygone Bulls and today’s Warriors. A conversation about as useful as who might kill Adolph Hitler given a gun and a time-travel ticket. For what it’s worth, I think the Bulls would have defeated the Nazis. Both in basketball and World War II. I witnessed their greatness.

I lived in Chicago 20 years ago. In fact, I was just about 20 years younger (if math serves me), then turning 30 as the Bulls began heating up in 1995-96 campaign. A grad student who never did write the great American novel, I took up less physical space and had more hair. Fer Pete’s sake (Chicago accent), I may have even fashioned my mullet into a ponytail. I wasn’t a Bulls fan, still cheering for my hometown Indiana Pacers, but I couldn’t help but watch and appreciate Michael Jordan and friends then starting their second three-peat. I’d often drop into Gunther Murphy’s on Belmont, have a replacement meal of Guinness (then six or seven more) and watch the Bulls take on and beat anyone unfortunate enough to have next. My dog, Jack Kerouac, somewhat less socially retarded than myself, was a good companion and conversation starter. Lots of real off-the-boat Irish folks (and maybe they took planes by then) would buy Jack a pint and howl delightedly as his snout strained to drain the glass. I really felt like his wingman.

It might take a hypnotist and whole team of psychologists to retrieve my thoughts from those days. Though I do recall an incredible Chicago comeback on a Sunday night in Denver. Okay, I Googled some of those details, but it looks like the Bulls, down 25 at halftime, came within two of the Nuggets going into the fourth. Alas, the frantic third quarter pace, the high altitude, or Jordan suddenly feeling more like John or Bob Denver resulted in a rare loss that still somehow characterized their unquenchable thirst for Gatorade (potential Google ad). I mean winning.

But this particular naval-gazing essay isn’t about me. Not entirely. I sought out two of the most Chicago guys I know to cull their memories on the Bulls. Not exactly Dembrowski types, but a lifelong city guy, Steve Mend, and our very own Sport Literate mouthpiece, Glenn Guth.

For Mend, the championship Bulls 2.0 may not have happened without a reconciliation with an old hated Piston. “All the bad blood that Detroit and Dennis Rodman represented was meaningless if this guy could get them back to the finals,” Mend said. “And it seemed like dozens of NBA players couldn’t stand to be on the same court with him. Alonzo Mourning was reduced to seven feet of whines and whimpers whenever Rodman grazed his flesh.”

Plus, Phil Jackson, maybe the world’s tallest Buddhist, preached a “live-and-let’s-win” philosophy to a potentially mismatched bunch of Bulls. “Chicago may be the most unfashionable of all American cities,” Mend said. “If this Dennis in a wedding dress wants to lace his body with surgical steel and turn his head into a leopard’s pelt, that’s fine. Winning, Billy boy! Getting back to the top was the only thing that mattered.”

Guth isn’t above Googling an aging memory. He noted that Jordan led the team in scoring 68 times in 82 games. Talk about not taking a night off. With wingman Scottie Pippen, another Bull on the NBA’s greatest 50 list, Jordan had a great supporting cast that included Toni Kukoc, Ron Harper and Steve Kerr, to name a few. Even if he had to muster up the hate of an evicted tenant just to beat them in practice.

A longtime season ticketholder, Guth saw six championships and two All Star games throughout the Jordan era. The times were changing even then, as the Bulls moved from the historic Chicago Stadium to the United Center, an airportish haven in both name and design. “The old Chicago Stadium got so loud you couldn’t hear the person sitting next to you,” Guth said.

“What’s that, Glenn?”

“I said the old Chicago Stadium… The ‘Madhouse on Madison’ offered more of a home court advantage than in the ‘bigger box’ venue, making that second three-peat tougher,” Guth said.

Plenty of games stood out for Guth. In one, Jordan dropped in 35 while Tim Hardaway, a Chicago son playing with the Miami Heat, scored 30. “It was also fun watching the development of Kukoc, one of the first really good Europeans in the league,” he says. “He could fill it in from the arc even though he was six feet 10.”

And even though the Bulls won three championships in the early 1990s, the ’95-’96 Bulls were all about vengeance. Air Jordan was off the AA baseball bus — out of spikes, into Nikes (potential Google ad) and reunited with jersey number 23 down from the rafters. “Unlicensed street vendors sold ‘Fuck NY’ shirts in the conference semifinals,” said a normally not-foul-mouthed Guth. “Of course I bought one.”

Fuckin’ A. Maybe that home team dominance can put some mustard on anyone’s dog, a kick in any pedestrian’s step. And we didn’t murder each other so much back then. Guth enjoyed the Bull sessions with his three kids, especially seeing games in person. Mend said those teams helped drain his bank account. Me, I was draining bank either way.

As for this year’s Warriors with a Golden Gate logo that’s near and dear to my heart (another story), I really hope they can run with those Bulls of record. I think their particular style of basketball of ball movement and swishes is absolutely beautiful. Why wouldn’t it border on perfection? Or at least within 10 games of it.  I suppose Kerr, at last trading hospital slippers for coaching shoes, wouldn’t mind making history twice.

William Meiners, the editor-in-chief of Sport Literate, teaches creative writing at the Saginaw Chippewa Tribal College in Mount Pleasant, Michigan.