Dolphins, Taylor give us gift with divorce
With all due respect to Comrade Judge, who tells us the Washington Redskins really did well to crowbar Jason Taylor from the Miami Tuna, allow me a countervailing opinion.
The people who did well with this deal are us, the American citizens. In fact, it might be our trade of the year.
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| Jason Taylor gets out of Miami, and we all win. (AP) |
Next stop: Brett Favre.
You see, the one thing about nearly every long national nightmare is that eventually, it ends. Even the people who benefit most from its being repeated ad nauseam (I mean, other than the Maalox people, of course) get tired of it eventually and just get it over with, whatever "over" happens to mean.
And with Taylor, it was Sunday.
We will leave the whys and hows of Taylor's new job to Comrade Judge, who pays far greater attention to such bits of bric a brac. We will concentrate instead on the merciful end of this tedious story, in which Taylor apparently elevated Dancing over paying homage to Parcells, who as we all know is big on homage and down on dancing.
Or, to spin it the other way, in which Taylor stopped doing his job for the new boss at a time when the new boss needed to make important evaluations in his quest to take the Dolphins from one win to four.
Either way, the story got deathly dull within days, made worse by the endless shots of Taylor flinging some woman about a hardwood floor to the sounds of Bolero (or Yellow Submarine, we're not really sure). Now we're not anti-dancing, but it is not a spectator sport no matter what the ratings say. You're either doing it yourself, or you're having a beer in the adjacent bar watching a game and arguing with the fellas.
Don't argue with me. That's the law.
And yet, day after day, there was Taylor, in an open-necked shirt, looking like an over-inflated and under-haired Desi Arnaz. We wept, or would have if we weren't entertained by the notion of Parcells' grinding teeth.
Which brings us to today's national torture, the Favre saga. We went from a full week of watching him look like a failed prospector while being interviewed by the ghost of Heath Ledger (well, Greta Van Susteren) and explaining over and over again how the Packers were screwing him, while Aaron Rodgers' role was to stand by and say, "I don't know, I heard this crash, I came running out of the restaurant and the car was through the show window and on fire."
Once again, TV's gift to us was to say and play the same things over and over, until America wished fervently for Favre to retire and Green Bay to be relegated to the Canadian Football League. Now we know about the cruelties of the 24/7 news cycle, but must it be the same B-roll over and over again too?
But there will be resolution here soon as well. It might be with Favre in Green Bay as the starter, or a clipboard-toting figure of anger and division, or as a Dolphin taking his new mates from one to four wins while getting his brains beaten in.
The Taylor story shows us, though, that it will happen if we only have patience and believe that eventually even a narcissist gets bored with the mirror (and you can take that to mean Favre or Packer general manager Ted Thompson, we don't care) and walks away from the sink.
So let us thank the Dolphins and Jason Taylor for reinforcing our belief in humanity's short attention span, for our need to see something new eventually, for our limited stomach for people in sequins tangoing energetically but clumsily. We can be free, at least in our minds if we want to be, to quote the old philosopher Sylvester Stewart, and Jason Taylor and Bill Parcells showed us how. God bless you, boys. Our minimal faith in humanity is temporarily restored.
Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.
