Eulogy

The sky was mostly dark, aside from the flashbulbs and the lingering smoke and the giant lights that stood there as if they were comets that had come soaring past and decided to stop and watch it all with everyone else. The seats were still as full as they’d been since probably a little before two, and no one sitting in them had much to say. They didn’t chant, they didn’t sing; more just a gentle roar, synchronized screams of relief. Michigan hadn’t won a National Championship in 50 years; I guess you could say they’d been waiting a while for this.

An old man with glasses and a white suit jacket said a few words to Lynn Swann, then leaned toward the Rose Bowl trophy and helped Lloyd lift it up. The two of them stood there for a few awkward seconds, each of them unsure when to put it down. Then Lloyd looked across at the old man. “Do I have to say anything?” He pretended to laugh and then answered his own question. “I don’t need to.” After a few seconds passed he did say something, not that any of it mattered, though. The 1997 Michigan Wolverines had already explained plenty. Lloyd could have just stood there if he wanted.

And then, a few minutes later, there was superhero Charles Woodson, with a National Champions hat tilted comfortably to the right – as if he was so sure he’d get a chance to wear it that he decided to try it on before the game to see how it fit. How in a brief moment of mortality, he put away the grimace and the swagger, and looked down at the ground and couldn’t stop smiling.

Two days later, I sat on my dad’s bed and listened to the release of the AP Poll on the radio. I was 11 years old, and I loved Michigan more than snow days; ice cream; my bike, the girl I slow danced with three times at winter formal; and if you had asked me on a day when she made me go to bed early, I’d probably tell you I loved them more than mom, too. It was January 1^st, 1998, and it was getting late. But really, it had all just begun.

I will never forget when Lloyd talked to Jim Brandstatter after he won his 100^th game. The two of them had just watched a video of him walking through the pink visitor’s locker room at Iowa as the entire team kept screaming his name. He walked in and patted them on the shoulder pads, then someone knocked his hat off to rub his head. Chad was near the entrance and bounced up and down when Lloyd walked past him. Mike and Leon Hall danced side to side at the front of the room. No matter how bad the team looked in 2005, Lloyd was a legend that day – and, you know, if you ask any of them, they’ll tell you that’s what he’s been on all the other ones, too. When he got to the center of the room, he stood on a stool and waved his arms for them to quiet down. None of them did.

The video cut off and the camera showed him sitting there. His face didn’t move; he just kept staring at the screen. Brandstatter knew he’d have to speak first. “Lloyd Carr, one hundred victories, in a pink locker room!” There was nothing Lloyd tried to hide, or knew how to hide if he wanted to, he was vulnerable, his soul exposed under the bright studio lights. So he stalled, he repeated Brandstatter and said “pink locker room.” He stopped and nodded his head slightly, knowing if he blinked too soon he’d have a tear down his cheek while he said his last words. “That was…fun”. It was fun. He didn't know anything else to say anyway.

I will always remember the time someone asked Lloyd after last year’s Ohio State game how difficult the last 24 hours had been, and he spent a whole minute talking about the previous Sunday – six days earlier – just so he could work up the strength to talk about what it felt like when Bo died.

“Throughout the course of the week, we talked about all the distractions that are a part of a week like this,” he said. “I told them on Wednesday that nothing was going to distract us from this game, because I didn’t know what would happen once we got down here. And, you know, it’s all part of the rivalry, and you have to be able to deal with whatever comes. But, um…”

And that was when he stopped, when everything went silent and the cameras stopped clicking in the background, when he realized what he had to say next. He grunted once and tried with all his might to continue. “And, um, I told the team on Friday…” He exhaled deeply, almost started to cry, and then his voice began to stagger like he’d been hit in the stomach with a tire iron. “I tried to tell ‘em that he, he would not have wanted to be a distraction. I told our team we weren’t gonna use Bo and his passing away as a motivational deal.”

I’ll always remember how often he walked with his hands in his back pockets, and how when he chased a referee down the sidelines, no matter how fast he ran, he always did it carefully, cautiously, like he was running across the dry wooden planks of a rope bridge suspended over a canyon. How he always wore a hat when he coached; how he seemed like he had the same amount of hair his entire life. I’ll always remember how numbingly bland he seemed, and yet in rare and perfectly timed moments of self-consciousness, he would acknowledge that it was all just a part of his act. And how he would laugh and shake his head when you both realized that he was never going to change.

The people who matter to him know he's much more than that, though. He’s a man who reads Churchill and quoted Kipling at Bo’s memorial; who wore a Halloween mask to a team meeting one October; who makes his players recite the definition of a word from the dictionary before they can enter his office. It’s not that a real man doesn’t exist, it’s just not important enough to him that we know otherwise. He doesn't care whether you're proud of what he's become.

“First of all, I have a choice that I can do what I want to do with my life,” he said. “So that's where I begin. I'm going to do what I want to do. The hell with anybody else, what they think. So that's where it all begins with me. I love the game. I love the competition. I love the relationship with the players and the ability to have some kind of positive impact as they try to pursue a degree and play this game.”

Most of us have spent the last six years negotiating with the universe to get Lloyd out of here. Only now, with one game left to coach, there is no rejoicing, there’s no relief, nor is there any immense sadness. In our heads, we know it is time for him to walk away. The heir to Bo’s throne is an old man now. But this game has never existed in places of reason; in our chest, none of this feels right.

Tomorrow, it is over for them all, it is over for this era, this dynasty, however plagued by the ability to let us down it might have been. The dynasty that won our hearts and little else, it is over for them.

It is over for Chad, the quarterback who told us this didn’t feel like the same team from last year, and then came back from a torn knee ligament to remind us what it looked like. The one who separated his shoulder against Illinois, left for a half, then came back a little later and won the game for us. And afterward, he described his shoulder constantly clicking in and out, with an ambivalent face and tone of voice, as if it were a canker sore his front teeth kept accidentally rubbing up against, and not every reason we know he exists. We had never felt the pain he felt, we knew only that it was more than we could handle, and that it was best left to be endured by men like him.

The man who tripped over a goal post after defeating Michigan State (when he went 10-13, and threw for 129 yards and 2TD in his final two drives), and consciously fell flat on his face because he knew his shoulder had to be saved for answering our prayers. It is over for that man.

It is over for Mario, the cold blooded phantom who knows only of expectations which he has already exceeded. The man who once said “I don't rah, rah, rah and all that, but when we get out here everybody knows I'm going to get my yards,” and now has someone escort him off the field so he doesn’t have to waste his time pretending he cares at all what we think. The man who has no desire to talk, because he’s already spent his Saturday afternoons telling us everything we need to know. He is simply the assassin blowing the silver smoke away from his pistol at the end of some dark alley.

The game has always been entirely instinctual to him; it is a way of life, what he was born to do. He is the man who, after scoring his first touchdown against Notre Dame last year, put his finger to his mouth and told the fans to be quiet. Then he caught another and fell into the Michigan band and waved his hands for them to play louder. He is the man who did the worm after Mallett took a knee for the final time against Notre Dame this year. And after he caught the game winner against Michigan State two weeks ago, he pointed to his wrist, where he has the names of his brother and sister are tattooed. It is over for him.

It is over for Jake Long, the man who throws defensive ends and linebackers around like he was King Kong snapping the antennas off of tall buildings. The man who hasn’t been called for a single penalty all season, and gave up being the first offensive lineman taken in last year’s draft because he didn’t want to leave Michigan behind yet. It is over for him.

And it is over for Mike. The man who walked up and down the sidelines against Illinois wearing a sweat suit, sneakers, and the same face I’ve had on the last 10 years of my life. Like no matter how much you love something, no matter how hard you clenched your fists or closed your eyes and whispered to yourself, you couldn’t change the the way a game was going to end. The man who might as well tell every linebacker he sees to bring another defender when they see him in their nightmares, because one will never stop him alone. It is over for him.

He is the man who pounded the ball on the ground after scoring a touchdown against Purdue, only to go put his arm around the referee afterward, when he realized he was above all celebrations no matter how discrete. The man who was asked in August if there was any extra pressure on him as the only proven running back, and replied “Not at all…I carry the load anyway.” The man whose position coach once said, “To keep him off the field you almost have to shoot him,” tomorrow, it is over.

There is a bowl game still, but what does it mean? No victory could compensate for a loss to Ohio State, and no bowl loss could take away from making Lloyd a winner in his last game against the team he was raised by Bo to defeat.

So then, you realize, there remains one game to define them all. There is no need for momentum, no future chance at redemption. There is only tomorrow, a game – one game – to salvage everything that was once wrong and must be made right. So I will wait, for the moment tomorrow when Mike limps to the podium, a single rose in his hand, and sits down with nothing left to do but speak. "I am here, you are safe, now close your eyes and listen to the sound of my voice." It is all over; I know of no way else.

Worship

Operate On Me

He stood there on a Monday two weeks ago and looked like he just wanted to close his eyes and go lay down somewhere quiet. Lloyd moved a cough drop back and forth in his mouth and tucked it against his lip when he had to answer their questions. His voice croaked in and out like John Wayne’s in Rio Bravo but without the faint exuberance, or anything you might call hope. Lloyd was sick, his tie looked like the one lying at the bottom of my closet underneath an old almanac and a broken alarm clock, and two days earlier he needed the one good knee of his quarterback to rescue him from Northwestern. It all looked quite familiar.

He didn’t say more than he had to; nothing strictly on impulse or really worth saying at all – maybe it hurt too much to talk. But the second someone questioned Chad’s “fire” –simply wondered enough about it to ask – Lloyd didn’t bother saving his voice anymore. He leaned his neck back a bit and squinted, as if to verify that a person this audacious actually stood before him

“He's always got fire. If you know him – and that's the problem, a lot of people are judging him that don't know him, and those perceptions, it's easy to understand because you think you see something, you think you know something, and you really don't. But you know, he’s alwa—Hey look, you don't come in here and do what he's done and not have a fire.”

Lloyd never talked fast enough to finish each of his thoughts before wandering into the next one.

“I mean, the guy, first of all, he started 39 consecutive games. He's played hurt down through his career that nobody ever knew. He came back from this injury a lot faster than you would expect. Why? Because he was in that training room all day and all night. His will to play, his will to compete is unquestioned.”

The room was silent. His eyes shifted from side to side behind his glasses, beneath the four lines that might as well have been cut into his forehead with an axe. Someone asked about Michigan Stadium turning 80. Lloyd looked straight at him and barely moved to breathe. I like to think he was still thinking about Chad.

In so many ways, this was a microcosm of everything this program has become. Every reason Lloyd needs to leave interspersed with every reason he needs to stay. A team bound together by a few beleaguered heroes so conscious of the chaos and disarray: Chad playing with torn ligaments in his knee; Jake leaping face first to knock pass rushers off the edge because he knows that; Mike playing with leg pads the size of VCRs because he’s had a deep thigh bruise and a season on his shoulders since week one; Adrian waking up at 6 a.m. every morning for 60 days to run up and down stairs because he wanted to come back for this.

Maybe you think at this point these players are playing for no one but themselves. “This is no army; just a bunch of soldiers with guns,” you might say. But you would be wrong. A team still stands.

“When he comes back, he's gonna be ready,” Mike said about Chad after Penn State. “I’m gonna be happy when he does…A lot of people don't know how good he really is and the things he does for this team.”

And after Chad was 14-21 for 145 yards and two touchdowns in the second half against Northwestern, Jake said this: It just felt good to hear him back out there.”

They defended him when no one else would. They knew better. They knew why defending him mattered. In Mallett, Chad had watched a boy walk from the woods and sit in his throne. He clapped when Mallett threw for a touchdown, but he knew it was supposed to be him out there; he clapped because he had to. It was like watching the guy who stole your girlfriend cure cancer – Mallett didn’t even have the decency to give Chad a reason to hate him. So while Chad limped somewhere, alone, with his hat backwards and the crutches he didn’t like using, the reporters, the students – all of you – laughed at Mallett’s bad jokes and didn’t seem to care if Chad ever came back.

That night I pictured Chad walking freely through a mass of kids. In the vision, none of them asked him for anything; they stood on their toes and looked around him for someone else. As he stepped on the bus a hand tugged on his shirt sleeve. He sighed and smiled as much as he knew how; someone had recognized him, even now, after all this. But when he turned around, it was just a boy who asked him if he could borrow a pen. He needed Mallett to sign something.

“After the second half, there's no doubt I should be playing quarterback, there's no doubt I should be playing (as a full-time starter) the rest of the season,” Chad said afterward. “Ryan is a great person, and I have a lot of respect for him, but it's my team, it's my senior year. I'm going to go out and play my best football these next couple of games.”

He has seven games left to prove us wrong, and after that he’s gone. His legacy can only be salvaged now, not raised to some distant height; no one will ever let him. All of the traitors who booed him even though he came back to give them what they wanted, they’ll never let him. You want to tell me he's selfish? I'll tell you I'm proud that he is.

“Only people who don't know much about quarterback play question him, Lloyd said. “Because the people who know him know what he is.”

On the outside, we see everything that has gone wrong. That Lloyd has managed to lose complete control. That the star wide receiver that spent most of last season turning cornerback’s knees into wet spaghetti hasn’t looked right since November. That the defense against the spread might as well be trying to tackle a rabbit. That Ohio State flexes its muscles while Michigan picks the scabs off its elbows.

This season has given us so little of what we’ve asked. Mike Hart and just enough brief moments of immorality to remind us what we’ve been missing all along. There is no use left in waiting for last year’s team to arrive; it left with Steve Breaston. Winning the next six games however they have to will do just fine.

So cherish the way Mike makes every run feel like you’ve been driving with the windows down and haven’t seen a stop sign since sunset. Or when they ask him, after he has just carried the ball 44 times, “Do you think it was Penn State’s goal to wear you out?” and he replies “I hope not, ‘cause that’s not gonna happen, I could have had 52 carries, 55 carries.” Hold on to times like those. Watch how he hits a hole like he’s running through a tornado, dodging tacklers like they were the tops of mailboxes and pieces of broken barn doors.

This is the commencement. This is all we have left.

Survival in the city

merchant of dreams

Where were you three weeks ago when I finished my burger and handed the waitress a $20 as I left the bar? (Because when you realize your year’s over four months early, it doesn’t make much sense asking for change.) Where were you two weeks ago when I started to do my laundry during commercials and wished there wasn’t a game to watch when I came back?

Maybe you’re still gone. But 38-0 will keep me from looking for you for a couple more days.

For a few hours on Saturday, I forgot about everything else. Everything that went wrong, everything that might still be wrong, everything that we thought disappeared last year but still grins and wags its mangled finger at us. There is still no championship to speak of, nothing significant worth proclaiming. But for a day, for one afternoon, not a single thing went wrong. If they are to salvage anything, if they are to turn this apocalypse into a kingdom of rubble, they’ve certainly given us a worthy beginning.

I watched Brandon Graham destroy an offensive line like a bully smashing a kindergartner’s Lego castle to pieces. I watched as Shawn Crable taught us to never stop holding out hope for vindication, and listened to him talk about preserving shutouts afterwards. I watched Johnny Thompson tackle like a shopkeeper throwing the broom down in front of his deli and tackling a thief trying to make a run for it with an old lady’s purse. Both passion and desperation at the same time. I saw the coach we wished we still had any reasons left to defend stand at the podium with a movie star he’d smoke cigars with later that night. And for a third straight week, Mike had not only transcended the pantheon of great men, but he didn’t even acknowledge that he had. He still had work to do. It was simply his job to save us.

After he lost to Oregon he said this:

“I wouldn’t rather be a part of any other team right now. I wouldn’t want to be on a USC national championship team. I wouldn’t want to be on a West Virginia national championship team. I’d rather be on this team right now that’s 0-2.” WHY? “Because I’ve never been a part of something like this. In my life. It’s gonna test me, it’s gonna test the seniors on this team…it’s gonna make me a better person. And I know we can turn this around….I don’t regret anything at all. I’m glad I’m on this team. This is my team. I’m the leader of this team. It’s something …I’m honestly glad I’m here right now. It’s crazy to say, but deep down, the whole time at the end of that game, I was thinking to myself I wouldn’t rather be on any other team right now. I wouldn’t rather be getting paid. I wanna be here. HAS THE NFL THING CROSSED YOUR MIND? Not at all. It’s crazy, like, not at all. I’m glad to be here. This my team. I wanna lead team to victory. At the end of year when everyone says ‘wow, they really turned that around,’ it’s gonna be my team. Just like it’s my team now.”

And yet again we saw someone who didn’t just play for us, but someone who thought like us. This was his mess – our mess. And in some absurd, freakishly soothing way, we both held onto it tighter even as it gave us so many reasons to let go. Right now this team belongs to no one but those it matters most to. A hundred reasons to hate it, and yet we don’t. Sometimes, if you can manage to get beneath the pain, it feels pretty incredible to realize you love something that much.

Sometime during the game on Saturday they showed an interview with Mike that ABC filmed a couple days earlier. They asked him what his biggest flaw was, and he told them that maybe he talks too much. It was the first time I had ever heard him say that – at least, as if it were a shameful character flaw, rather than as a harmless, almost endearing act of self-aggrandizement. He looked sad and exhausted, and he had just questioned who he was, even though “who he is” has made us question for the last four years everything we know to be true about the game.

But after the game was over, he smiled the same way he always did. More restrained, no sweat on his forehead, a t-shirt instead of a suit and tie, but a smile all the same. I recognized that man.

“I was just telling the team, I lost the taste of winning for a while. We got that victory, I got that taste back in my mouth, and we wanna keep winning.”

There was focus, there was composure, there was relief. For the first time, there was a season.

Monument Park

THIS FEELS FAMILIAR






Maybe he's hurt, maybe he's scarred, maybe he's lost a thing or two he came back for. But if your eyes look in his eyes, turn your head and walk away. You haven't earned the right to.


"Especially with Chad going down, it was more on my shoulders. I accept it, I love it. And I’m going to keep doing what I have to do to help this team win."

I WISH IT WOULD RAIN