Wichita Lineman Was A Song I Once Heard

So, it was midweek in early April and I found myself perusing Netflix looking for something I could half watch while eating dinner. This was my first attempt since stupidly watching the Jeffrey Dahmer series. It turns out watching a morose, voyeuristic dramatization of a man luring men to his flat, killing them, then storing their bits in barrels isn’t the ideal thing to have on while eating your tea on a Tuesday evening. No wonder the lad ended up a bit off when his father had him dissecting beaver brains as a kid.

This time I played it safe and went with a sports movie that looked very bland – Draft Day, which stars Kevin Costner playing, as per usual, Kevin Costner. This time, instead of Kevin Costner using violence to prevent big-city capitalist cunts sabotaging his bit of Yellowstone Park, attempting to convict someone for assassinating JFK, befriending Sioux Indians or building a baseball diamond for long dead baseball players, he’s the under pressure General Manager of an NFL team trying his darndest to placate everyone, in a professional and personal sense, on Draft Day.

Draft Day is formulaic fluff and features some truly dreadful acting cameos (shout out to the now cancelled P Diddy), some by real people playing themselves, but I appreciated it for not trying to be Citizen Kane. It did prompt more questions than it should, namely, did this bit of PR for the NFL work on me? Do I have a life? On the latter, certainly not. Because a couple of weeks later the real NFL Draft was taking place, and it had occurred to me that, having watched Draft Day, I had never watched a real NFL Draft, what was the real thing truly like?

The Draft coverage started somewhat ominously with an hour-long buildup of agonizing cliches and montages soundtracked by autotuned trap (get it tae fuck). This was so unbearable that a preponderance of breaks with cheesy adverts for car insurance, health insurance, home insurance and fast food felt like a reprieve. There was a worryingly high number of grownups wearing face paint and fancy dress in the crowd. Eminem appeared, looking good for his age it must be said, and got the Detroit crowd fired up for a bit. We had a horde of immaculately groomed men in suits overpopulating the presenting panel, with analysts and reporters, who either looked like dentists, plastic surgeons or Brexit gammon, and some impressively coiffed women, all frantically shouting ever progressively louder and rushing their analysis or reporting.

This bloated mess made me pine for Draft Day’s truncation of the process. It’s here that I’ll come clean and admit my existing bias. I’ve previously bashed the NFL for being an industry that exploits many of its employees (especially the players), acts as vector for neo-conservatist mores and readily promotes the kind of skin-crawling, flag waving patriotism that you only see adopted by boot lickers. I wanted the Draft to be more of the same. But, to its credit, the tone focused on the immense accomplishment of making one of the most glamorised threshers on earth, and that in most cases these young blokes are gaining financial prosperity for the first time in their lives. You can’t and shouldn’t knock this.

Mercifully, as it was now just after one in the morning GMT, the first pick was announced, someone named Caleb Williams – which sounds like the kind of name the Archbishop of Canterbury should have. Williams is billed as “a generational talent”, “a stud” (what, like John Holmes?), “who can do it all, like Patrick Mahomes” and “who changes your franchise”. Gridiron (me labeling it so is payback for Yanks calling football “soccer”) is a team sport, but the narrative that one player can change a team’s fortunes so drastically is surely hyperbole conjured by simpletons for pondlife. At best it’s marketing for the NFL’s obsession with gaining eyeballs (even Swifties are welcome, it seems) and expanding the league’s already enormous revenue streams. How many more with a passing interest can be enticed with a redemption arc for the “beleaguered” and “desperate” fanbase of the Chicago Bears? To paraphrase, someone once said it’s the hope that ropes you in and then kills you. It wasn’t quite that dire for me, but hoping that something interesting might happen watching an NFL Draft was waning, quickly.

But wait Chicago! It isn’t all peaches and cream. You aren’t saved, yet! Perhaps Caleb Williams isn’t the second coming of Jesus, Viagra and Krispy Kreme glazed donuts combined? Some reading up on the dude reveals he may need to “mature” to “be a leader”, though it wasn’t stated how he would achieve this. Then came some shocking revelations that prompted this concern; he paints his nails, has or had a pink cover on his phone and cried in his mum’s arms after losing a game. The implication here is that such unmanliness won’t go over well with the Trumpers and Blue Collar get off my lawn sexagenarians and septuagenarians who were real men by time they were fourteen. And here was me thinking that Chicago, who drafted him, was a centre of secularism and sophistication in the States. I suspect I’m right about that and the tabloid-esque devil’s advocacy about Caleb Williams’ immaturity is complete shite. If he’s as good as advertised, no Bears fans will care about his quirks, just as long as they fall well short of Jimmy Saville or R Kelly like deviancies.

Then the second pick, “where the draft really starts”, wish they’d told me that an hour ago. I gleaned from this that Williams being the first pick was a fait accompli. Nobody knows who Washington, a team who until recently had an abrasively and brazenly racist nickname, will pick.

Which brings us to the NFL Draft’s biggest problem – waiting roughly ten minutes at a time is too long to justify an outcome that truly isn’t one. It takes years before anyone knows whether the players selected will pan out. But I think I understand the allure of the Draft for dedicated fans of the sport. If I could compare the NFL Draft to anything it’s the summer transfer window in “soccer”. This is the time where fan optimism is at its zenith. All changes made to the team during a period with no games can be viewed through a lens of absolute positivity, with theoretical and perceived improvements retaining their promise of success with no way of means testing them. However, eventually the games begin again, and reality invariably emphatically routs most wishful projections.

Eventually tiredness took hold and I retired to bed after only six picks, with more than two dozen picks of the first round left to go. But I wouldn’t designate my experience of the NFL Draft as a wasted endeavor, at least I learned Draft Day is a movie you can half watch while eating your tea. The pious declaration “you only get drafted once” is repeated many times in Draft Day, and when it comes to the NFL Draft this was prescient, as watching six picks was enough to last me a lifetime.