Sometimes the truth…
Our story begins with NFL player Chris Kluwe hanging out on Twitter, spending some of the abundant time he had on his hands due to the (only now ended) NFL lockout in a leisurely fashion. “Sigh,” he writes, “and once again greed is the operative byword. Congrats Brees, Manning, Mankins, and Jackson for being ‘that guy’.#douchebags.” Now this sure gets some attention from former NFL player Nate Jackson, who really thinks a guy like Kluwe should quiet down and has no qualms about telling him as much. He takes his action over to a popular news/fictonews website called Deadspin (and I admit that I’m an avid reader of Deadspin). Kluwe heads over to Deadspin to talk more with Jackson.

Let me explain. Chris Kluwe’s original remarks on Twitter (quoted above) come in a moment of probable frustration, during late stages of labor negotiations between the NFL players’ association and the NFL team owners. As talk increased about the likelihood of an agreement coming soon, Kluwe feared that actions by a select group of financially elite players were going to derail progress in order to save some of their own earning potential. Kluwe’s frustration was focused on the notion that the players he called out on Twitter seemed unconcerned about a deal, and specifically an outcome to the labour disruption, that was going to be good for the vast majority of players involved (and definitely not concerned about fans). Jackson, however, seemed to consider Kluwe’s comments as a rupture in the united stand of the players, and a ploy for attention. He then goes on to detail, in his piece posted on Deadspin, a list of reasons why Kluwe has no business saying anything at all. Not the least of the reasons noted by Jackson is his point that, as a punter (the position Klume plays for the Minnesota Vikings), Kluwe deserves the least say of anyone about matters pertaining to a football team.

Sort of a strange amount of effort seems to have gone into Jackson’s diatribe against Chris Kluwe, and Kluwe points this out when he responds. Aside from addressing specific criticisms Jackson makes (as well as Jackson’s segregative dislike of punters) Kluwe also mentions how, as a couple of well-spoken football players, both fairly good writers, they’d have probably enjoyed having a drink together in a bar, if they’d ever met in real life instead of in cyberspace. They could have enjoyed that drink together, except that Kluwe demonstrates exactly how Jackson’s weird diatribe makes him every bit as guilty of making a self-serving attention-seeking gesture at the expense of anyone nearby as Jackson had accused Kluwe of being. With that, he has Jackson pretty much dismantled. The whole thing gets wrapped up as a story about the NFL that helped pass the time until the lockout was over, and the business of football can be discussed again.

But no! A strange twist adds a kind of ecstatic quality to this story. After Kluwe’s response to Jackson was posted, the first comment left is actually a very short work of fiction. The comment section of Deadspin is a unique entity anyway. You have to be invited to be a commenter either by the staff at Deadspin or by someone who is already a commenter. Frequently the comment section (especially because many of the articles Deadspin posts are purposefully pointless) is a forum for dry-witted comedy that doesn’t even have to relate to the article being commented on. This is an interesting aspect of the Deadspin community; it’s oddly democratic about where attention gets paid or focused. The text that appears in the comment section, credited to ‘Brando,’ is a take-off on detective fiction, in which Chris Kluwe’s help is solicited by the wife of a prominent NFL quarterback. The case at hand is to finally reveal the QB’s true douchebag nature.

The story is successfully funny, joking both about football and detective story clichs. And the entire rest of the comment section is devoted to liking Brando’s original comment. It’s not that the story actually backs up or reiterates the points Kluwe was making in response to Jackson, but it does seem to justify Kluwe as a worthy figure and personality in the NFL. And refutes Jackson’s original point by doing so. Chris Kluwe himself even appears in the comment section to applaud the fan fiction and the commentary it makes. It might be the first instance I can think of in which sports-based fan fiction has been offered as a somewhat practical tool to an athlete.

Is made that much stranger by fiction
And yet Deadspin provides yet a further possible example within the matrix of story lines that is the NFL (although notice what’s really going on in the comments below). Do you remember those Buffalo Bills teams of the 1990s? (In Toronto we have a certain interest in the fate of the Bills because of proximity, and since we do rent them out from time to time). Four consecutive times they appeared in, but ultimately lost, the Superbowl. Now the head coach of the Bills from those days, Marv Levy, has written a work of fiction of his own. It’s a novel called Between the Lies. It’s about the Superbowl being rigged, and what the repercussions of that being exposed would be for the league and for the sport if it were ever uncovered. Specifically, do you remember all of the conspiracy theories that began when kicker Scott Norwood missed the game-winning field goal in 1991 to start the series of unsuccessful Superbowls? I even remember a joke being made about it on the X-Files, when the conspiratorial and powerful Smoking Man mentions that he never wants to see Buffalo win the Superbowl.

Levy claims his book is pure fiction. The speculative implications are rampant.