Free The Throwback Special by Chris Bachelder Page B

the first selection. Gary was one of them. George. Wesley, strangely enough. Carl. Steven. These men wanted a full board, a large menu. They knew what they liked, and they were not frightened of options. And then there were other men who desperately did not want to choose first, who were at this moment, this and every year, filled with a sense of dread that their initials were on the ball in the commissioner’s hand. The prayer that they silently prayed was the same one they chanted as children beneath beds or behind woodpiles: Please, let me not be found . From the hallway came the sound of ice spilling violently into a bucket. Randy was one of these men. And Tommy. Robert, for whom choice was oppressive. Myron, like all Myrons. Bald Michael, who became paralyzed in the well-stocked aisles of supermarkets or home improvement stores. And perhaps especially for Derek, whose anxiety about the lottery, this and every year, was unique and complicated. Derek was concerned—nearly to the point of nausea, in fact—about the thorny psycho-
racial thicket into which he, a mixed-race man, would be plunged if the commissioner called his name. He could, with the first pick, just choose Lawrence Taylor . Throughout the years, most men had chosen Taylor with the first pick, either because they genuinely wanted to be Taylor, the prime mover of the drama, or, in one or two cases, because they worried what the other men would think if they did not choose Taylor. (In those years the reenactment had been marred by a mincing and tentative antihero.) ButDerek had always been vaguely troubled by the portrayal of Taylor as villain—or, more accurately, as monster, a kind of soulless, inexorable beast who laid waste to Caucasian linemen on his way to the wavy-haired former Notre Dame quarterback who was dating Cathy Lee Crosby. Who leaped almost supernaturally onto Theismann’s back—who jumped him, basically—surprising Theismann at home at night in the safety of his pocket. Not content merely to sack Theismann, but intent on destroying him, snapping his bones, ending his career. Taylor as black devil, as bogeyman. A noble savage, at best. For the men, Derek thought, Taylor offered the opportunity not only to sublimate their roiling, middle-class aggression, but also to take a transgressive racial thrill ride. Not an emphatic immersion but a ritualized, sanctioned projection of fear and disgust. In a helmet, in a jersey, their volatile subconscious had an outlet that seemed both safe and dangerous. Was Derek making this all up? Of course Taylor had truly been a ferocious and relentless player who scared the daylights out of offensive players and coaches, but Derek could not help but feel a twinge of distaste about the way that some of the men played Taylor, with a kind of wild-eyed, watch-your-daughters primitivism, licensed both by Taylor’s revolutionary abilities and, unfortunately, by his considerable off-the-field troubles. Granted, you could not portray Taylor with the workaday, gap-toothed brutality of the archetypical white linebacker (Butkus, Nitschke, Lambert, Ham, Urlacher), but one needn’t venture into minstrelsy, either. So Derek, were he to choosefirst, could choose to choose Taylor, seizing the role for himself, rejecting caricature and adding nuance. He could modify, adapt, and deepen the portrayal, providing a model for those who followed. He could play Taylor with ferocity, but also with dignity and humanity and intelligence, and in this way he could perhaps subtly instruct his peers. But seriously, even if he could somehow see his way toward some authentic vision of Taylor, both distinctive and emblematic, did he really believe that he, a lone man with a righteous cause, could enact change? What kind of fantasy was that? Derek noticed for the first time that George had cut off his ponytail. And if he were thinking in terms of exemplum or emblem, wasn’t he already far, far away from an authentic and idiosyncratic