Baffoe: Clandestine Bears Camp Is Fan-Condoned
By Tim Baffoe--
(CBS) Training camp is painful in more ways than one.
For the players, it involves muscle memory recall after months of not being in repeated voluntary car accidents. For the coaches, it's losing hair over the growing pains of rookies and revamped rosters. And for the semi-aware observer from a distance, the hoopla is irrational.
"Literally every spectacle in professional sports — a touchback in a St. Louis Rams game in Week 4, say, or an eggplant-shaped pitching coach waddling to the mound in the sixth inning to kill time for the bullpen to warm up — is more exciting than NFL training camp. Players stand around, hot and bored, hydrating themselves and periodically doing skeleton drills. There might be music, or there might not. If you crane your neck just right, you might be able to watch the offensive coordinator chew gum with no expression on his face. It's a football practice."
But the human brain feels no pain. So for fans in attendance, it's a gleeful lobotomy of watching a relatively insignificant practice in uncomfortable temperatures because sort-of-football is better than no football.
Practice is, of course, necessary, but successfully treating it as an attraction shows just how deep the NFL has its parasitic proboscis burrowed into the brains of so many fans. Look upon this sadness of fans of a team that just got bent over by its league.
The Washington NFL team actually defines training camp on its website's FAQ as "an annual ritual in the NFL." As though lying to yourself that the hour drive you made to sweat out your lunch from the White Castle at the last exit and fight off bees swarming your $5 Gatorade to take grainy phone pics was totally worth this symbolic religious circumcision.
I don't understand the appeal, and I assume if your attention span has gotten you this far into the column, you don't understand it either. But we're on the outside of the large group of 19th century folk who come out of their shanties to see the medicine show come through town.
Which is why — while I understand Chicago media's frustrations with the Bears new policies restricting media access and reporting of the goings on at this year's camp — the Orwellian vibe of it all doesn't shock me. The NFL and its teams want nothing more (besides wheelbarrows of money and a sustenance of human souls) than nobody looking behind the curtain at the great and powerful Oz, but when you're the monolith the league is, that's easier said than done. That's where willful ignorance shows up and stretches its hammies for a jog around Dementia Lane.
The media's plight? Fans for the most part don't care, not in any sense that it will deter them from consuming the football drug they're addicted to. It's like hiking the price of cigarettes up from $Kidney to $Firstborn — smokers will gripe, but almost none will stop puffing that sweet, sweet pigskin. Ask Philadelphia Eagles fans if their media's throats being stepped on affected them last year. And then the Bears easily skirt any freedom of the press drum banging.
Fans like to tout how the Bears represent the city, and they do in that they have long been a greasy politician. The Ray McDonald garbage is just the most recent example of how the weird McCaskeys in the spooky mansion on the hill operate. But weren't there plenty of Bears fans bending over backward to give the large tackling man a benefit of doubt they wouldn't extend to any other stranger? Didn't the voices ring out that we need to stick to sports and not domestic violence? Those are the supposed adults in pit-stained orange Devin Aromashodu jerseys jockeying for David Bass's autograph.
Now the organization is perhaps afraid the media will reveal how bad the team is — and the Bears do suck, and this season is going to be a death march from the first step. But your average counterfeit Ditka jersey-wearer doesn't want to know that right now. They want to convince themselves that "Alshon Jeffries" will catch enough touchdowns (hopefully from Jimmy Clausen) to make Aaron Rodgers' ACL tear itself in awe. So please, don't videotape the defensive backs getting repeatedly smoked, CBS 2.
No, instead let the thousands of budding social media stars cameraphone the inevitable fight between two linemen that actual reporters can't tape or tweet about. Let Steve Easterneuropeanlastname's Facebook page get all the "likes" with his video of a Jay Cutler interception or an assistant coaching dog-cussing players or just breaking down and crying at his lot in life. No actual media gives the illusion of power granted to the proles with Vine accounts.
In a league that double-speaks for a living and has a marketing campaign founded on giving fans the illusion that its product is wonderful and moral and breast-cancer-and-healthy-brain-pink, the willingly blind fan does a lot of the work for the NFL. He and she don't weep for a Brad Biggs and his oppressed keyboard any more than they did for, say, a Keith Olbermann losing his job probably for speaking truth to football power. And then just that much more information and critical thinking gets consolidated by the NFL away from the public.
Because the beat writers and columnists bring painful news of the reality of a bad football team like the Bears in a dirty league trying to make us ignore its whacked medical, social and disciplinary issues.
But human brains don't feel pain. And the ones flocking to or reading about training camp certainly don't want to start doing so.
Tim Baffoe is a columnist for CBSChicago.com. Follow Tim on Twitter @TimBaffoe. The views expressed on this page are those of the author, not CBS Local Chicago or our affiliated television and radio stations.
