I drove past Garfield Middle School on Saturday morning to drop off a casserole dish my wife had borrowed from a woman I have never met, and the parking lot was full. Not regular full. Event full. There was a guy in a vest directing traffic. I assumed somebody had died.
Nobody had died. The eighth grade football team was holding media day.
I want you to picture this with me. Thirteen-year-olds in full pads. A step-and-repeat banner — the kind they have at movie premieres, with the logos repeating down it so the photos look professional — set up against the chain-link by the dumpsters. A photographer with two cameras around his neck. A folding table with a sign that said TALENT CHECK-IN. Talent. These children have not yet been issued their adult teeth and somebody printed a sign calling them talent.
I sat in my truck for eleven minutes. I want that on the record. I had somewhere to be and I sat in my truck for eleven minutes watching a child named, I am guessing, Brayden, do three different poses against a banner while his mother held a ring light. A ring light. At a middle school. In August. For a child whose team went 2-and-6 last fall, a fact I know because my neighbor Ray Kowalczyk’s grandson is a guard on it and Ray calls me after every game to complain about the play-calling like I have any influence over the offensive coordinator of an eighth grade football team in a town I don’t live in.
Ray called me yesterday. Of course he did. “Duke,” he says, “they made the kids sign a media release.” A media release. So the school can post the photos on Instagram. So the eighth grade football team can build its brand. I asked Ray if the team has a brand. He said yes. He said it’s called THE PACK and there’s a wolf logo and the wolf is wearing sunglasses. The wolf is wearing sunglasses, folks. We are putting eyewear on a cartoon predator so that a 13-year-old who weighs ninety-four pounds soaking wet can have, and I quote Ray here, “a vibe.”
Coach DiMaggio used to take our team picture on the first day of practice with a Polaroid he kept in his glove compartment. He’d line us up on the bleachers, oldest to youngest, and he’d say “smile or don’t, I don’t care, I just need this for the program.” That was the media. That was the entire media operation. One Polaroid, taped to a piece of construction paper, mimeographed and folded into a program that the booster club sold for a dollar at the snack bar. If you wanted a vibe, you went and got hit by Petey Corrigan in a tackling drill until your vibe changed.
I’m not against pictures. I have pictures. I have a whole shoebox of pictures from 1974 of boys with bowl cuts squinting into a sun that has since killed half of them. Pictures are fine. What I’m against is the gravity. The seriousness. The idea that a JV-feeder program in a town with two stoplights needs the same pre-game promotional infrastructure as the SEC. We have skipped a step somewhere. We have decided that the experience of being thirteen is no longer sufficient on its own and now requires documentation, branding, a hashtag, and apparently a photographer who, Ray tells me, charges three hundred dollars and is the same guy who does weddings at the Knights of Columbus.
Here is the part where I admit something. The kids looked happy. Brayden, or whoever he was, looked like the king of the world standing in front of that banner with his helmet under his arm. I’m sure his grandmother is going to frame the picture and put it above the television and tell every guest about it for the next forty years and that is, in fact, exactly what grandmothers are for. So fine. Fine.
But when the wolf gets a sponsorship deal I’m writing a different column.
Denise is bringing chili tonight. She says she heard about it on a podcast called something like Hot Pot Hours. I’m going to eat it and not ask any follow-up questions.