Chiefs Game Tomorrow - Maybe

This is without question the worst season the Kansas City Chiefs have ever endured. It has already earned that notoriety by far, but what happened today puts it light-years up there at number one. It'd be the number one worst season ever and you wouldn't even need to consider a single thing done on the field for it to be so. In fact, you could even easily make a case for this being the worst season by any NFL team in all of the history of professional football, because the tragedy that happened today has never happened before.

This morning linebacker Jovan Belcher took the life of his girlfriend in their home, and a bit later right after speaking with Scott Pioli and Romeo Crennel in the parking lot of the Chiefs training facility at Arrowhead, took his own life.

There isn't really a whole lot I'm going to write in this blog because of the numbness. I can't deny that I wondered about this football thing or that football thing, most of it related to how this abjectly miserable season could have contributed to Belcher's actions. I really believe it is a lot less than we think, but ya know? I really just don't think it helped any. I think of Donnie Moore, the major league baseball player who was a pretty studly pitcher for the Angels in 1986 when he simply could not get that last single strike to put his team in the World Series. Sometime later he was so despondent he killed himself.

I feel somewhat ashamed about how much I myself use "the Chiefs are trying to kill me" language in my blog. Yeah, I could cut myself a break because all blogging fans of their teams use the exact same twisted metaphorical hyperbole in their expressions of zeal. But right now? The whole thing is just unfathomable.

Some of the football thinking has to do with something I have thought about long and hard for years upon years. How important is this stuff? We take this game -- a game for cryin' out loud -- and watch it and hash it and obsess over it and rant about it like it is everything. And to the credit of just being the human beings we are, it is natural to want to compete and strive and struggle and take on the challenge to show we can do something great.

Holding up a Super Bowl trophy? That's something great? In the vast metaphysical nature of things probably not, but it does represent something pretty important, the use of industry and determination and ambition to merely gratify that very natural need to accomplish things, things that we must accomplish in order to thrive as families, communities, and nations.

Yes, just that Jovan did what he did is bad enough simply because his was beloved by so many, but hey, even if the Chiefs were 1-10 he got to be in there doing that. We certainly weren't going to hoist a Super Bowl trophy this year, but at least there was a game tomorrow, just tomorrow, and maybe you could win it and demonstrate just that day that you'd done something great. And if not there are going to be more splendid accomplishing opportunities the next day.

It is tough because sometimes it just doesn't seem like those days will come, and Jovan surely thought that so intensely in whatever way he did this morning that he did what he did.

Yeah, for a nanosecond I'd thought who's going to fill his spot, what's going to happen with the Chiefs, how's it going to be tomorrow and all that. That's just the more base nature of my humanness, and I do cut myself a break because we all do that.

For right now there is just the wondering, the grief, the despair -- there is the thinking about Scott Pioli and Romeo Crennel who were watching this, and of course Jovan's teammates, his family, his friends, his girlfriend's family and friends, wow, the guy had an infant daughter -- the whole thing is just crushing.

We, the Chiefs fans? I guess we're in the mix too. I don't think I'm anything compared to all the others who are impacted. But I am impacted. I rooted for Jovan and cheered him on every single game, so I know Jovan in that sense. But...

Well, what else to say. Just riffing here in a post to grieve some.
_