He Fought for...Something

THE INSTANT I heard that former Arizona Cardinals safety Pat Tillman had been killed in action in Afghanistan, my heart sank. "There goes the first 20 minutes of tonight's Sportscenter broadcast," I thought sadly. Red Sox-Yankees highlights would have to wait, while Stuart Scott and Suzy Kolber performed their obligatory grim ablutions over ESPN's computer-generated, soft-piano rhythms.

There was never any question that the Pat Tillman story, once it broke, would get the maximum possible amount of coverage in the mainstream American press. Although it was a unique story of an unusual person who acted—uncharacteristically for an American—out of a strong sense of conviction and individual purpose, it was at the same time a story whose every contour fit with perfect snugness into the more moronic assumptions of mainstream American thought. A football hero, moved by the images of 9/11 to give up $3.6 million dollars to serve his country. A beautiful youth cut down in his prime for love of the flag. A sober reminder of the steep price of freedom, coming just a day before that cheerful annual orgy of silly sports escapism, the NFL draft.

As the perfect American media phenomenon, the Pat Tillman story scratched every itch in the national mainstream consciousness, relieving the natural tensions of a consumerist culture by upholding a hero with patriotism greater than his greed. The excess of coverage therefore had to match the usual excesses. Too much must be matched by too much.

To understand what was wrong with the Pat Tillman story, you must pay close attention to the phenomenon of American sports fanaticism, and the way the story of sports is sold to the public. There is a moment at which the media brilliantly confuses fantasy and reality by blurring the distinctions between sports fan and American, and it is at that moment that the darker side of patriotism is rammed down the public's throat. Pat Tillman died in the very center of that blur.

If you watch a lot of NFL football, as I do to an absolutely psychotic degree, you learn to accept certain subplots to the game. Since 9/11 there has been a heavy emphasis on side features involving NFL players and the military: Kevin Mawae and Zach Thomas watching the Super Bowl from a warship in the Persian Gulf, Eddie George visiting the troops, Air Force flyovers at the games. When the players are interviewed by ESPN and Fox and CBS about their reactions to their interactions with the soldiers, they almost always have the same answer. "It really puts things in perspective," the linebacker says. "I mean, we're just out there playing a game, while they're risking something more important to defend our freedom…"

Your typical Nation-reading lefty type groans at this sort of stuff, in particular when the players gush over President Bush, but that's because they don't understand football. A true football fan knows that the average NFL player does not—and probably should not—distinguish between the president, and, say, the owner of his team. He's going out there to take hits over the middle and give 110 percent for Tom Coughlin and Ernie Accorsi and Wellington Mara or Bob Kraft—and then somewhere, farther up the chain, sits the secretary of defense and the commander-in-chief. Against the backdrop of this brutal and violent gladiatorial competition, it's the only mindset that makes sense. The game is about passion and violence and obedience and sacrifice; you die for your coach, your fans, your owner, your country. A wandering mind is a liability in team sports. (I should know. I was a liability as an athlete.) You want the guy who does what he's told, the committed soldier, a "machine out there."

It's a flawless, beautiful, completely engrossing fascist fantasy. Within its own parameters it probably cannot be improved upon as escapist entertainment. The problem is, when it's asked to extend beyond its fantastic parameters, when its values are asked to serve as real values for the real world, it becomes completely incoherent and extremely dangerous propaganda. This was on display in the way the Pat Tillman story was handled.

One of the things about football is that there is always another team you have to defeat. War is permanent. This is the central fact of the game. You want a guy who always fights because you always have to fight. Who does he have to fight? The other guy, naturally—it doesn't matter exactly who.

But in life? When you're fighting with guns and bombs? Well, it kind of matters who you're fighting; one ought to know who the enemy is—at the very least. But does anyone know whom Pat Tillman was actually fighting when he was killed? Not according to the news reports. As far as I could tell from most of the breathless paeans that appeared last weekend, the former Arizona State star died protecting our freedom from…a bunch of unidentified guys.

The most specific of the news reports came from a New York Times story by Bill Pennington, Carlotta Gall and Carol Pogash. The article did not identify who killed Tillman. It guessed by implication, in the following paragraph:

Military officials in Kabul said yesterday that his unit was patrolling one of the most dangerous areas of Afghanistan, close to the Pakistani border, in a valley where Al Qaeda and Taliban forces are known to cross into Afghanistan from Pakistan. American forces have been on special alert in recent weeks, watching for Al Qaeda and other fighters escaping an operation by Pakistani forces on their side of the border.

The New York Times, the most in-depth paper of record in the country, could do no more than elliptically identify Tillman's killers as being either Al Qaeda, Taliban or "other fighters." But even in this, they outclassed virtually every other paper in the country, at least showing interest in the question. The Times story assumed that readers understood the context of the Afghanistan operation and had been following the last two years' developments—it was assumed, in other words, that readers could distinguish between fighting terrorists, fighting regional warlords, fighting new fanatical groups completely unrelated to al Qaeda and merely fighting to stave off complete anarchy in a collapsing nation-building effort.

No one else bothered to be that specific. The typical sentiment was echoed by NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue, who said at the draft: "Pat Tillman personified the best values of America and of the National Football League. Like other men and women protecting our freedom around the globe, he made the ultimate sacrifice and gave his life for his country.''

Tagliabue was flanked by five Marines when he made his statement. That is what the life of Pat Tillman was reduced to: a soldier's confusing, nightmare death converted into the simpler currency of mainstream sports values. You don't have to ask why, you don't have to ask where, you don't have to ask by whom. All you have to do is stand in a nest of Marines and read off the same old lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Because that's true enough for football. We're in a lot of trouble if that becomes enough for life, too.