A Review of The Last Headbangers: NFL Football in the Rowdy, Reckless 70’s

September 23, 2012April 15, 2015 RilalyLeave a comment

Ken Stabler, Terry Bradshaw, “Mean” Joe Green, Steve Bartkowski, Jack Tatum, Jack Ham, Jack Lambert, Bob Griese, Larry Csonka, Franco Harris, Jim Otto, Roy Blount, George Atkinson, John Matuszak and Phil Villapiano gave birth to something in the 70’s that we call the NFL. They didn’t start the league, of course, but by most definitions it is the premier league it is today based on the sacrifices they, and the many others who played the game, made.

It was an age of sloppy, weather drenched, and poorly maintained fields. It was an age that involved “legalized” use of steroids, which involved some using horse testosterone that was equivalent in dosage to that which is given to a 1,200 lb. horse before a race. The result of this is the now well-known ‘roid rage’ that most certainly affected the hits involved in the game. Steroid usage was so prolific in the game, during these years, that some players admitted that they could tell who was on steroids and who wasn’t by the look in their eyes.

It was an era that not only allowed, but encouraged late hits, hitting receivers in a vulnerable position, and exacting head-to-head hits that caused massive migraines and concussions. It was an age of stick ‘um, touchdown dances, and toothless, sweaty linebackers that would cause a normal citizen to walk to the other side of the street to avoid them. It was a game that involved none of the genteel, poetic resonance attributed to the strategic nature of baseball. Yet, prior to the 70’s, professional football was baseball’s broad.

In the 70’s, Baseball had Reggie Jackson and the Yankees, The Red Machine, the A’s, The World Series, and a tradition so rich it achieved the moniker “The National Pastime”. The NFL players mentioned above, the Monday Night Football guys, Pete Rozell, Al Davis, Don Shula, and a number of others took professional football from a proverbial backyard sport to the heights of the national stage. They were so successful that the number two sport is now football’s dejected broad.

GEORGE CARLIN: “Football has hitting, clipping, spearing, blocking, piling on, late hitting, unnecessary roughness and personal fouls. Baseball has the sacrifice. Football is played in any kind of weather – rain, sleet, snow, hail, mud, can’t read the numbers on the field, can’t read the yard markers, can’t read the players’ numbers; the struggle will continue. In baseball, if it rains, we don’t come out to play.”

Baseball played well to the prolific sports writer that could artfully and poetically lift its magnificence with an analysis that called upon its rich history and place in American tradition. It has a subtle strategy that can be brought to life through careful and leaned analysis from a great play-by-play and color commentator team on radio. Newspapers also favor baseball in that they can provide a daily recap of each day’s games in a manner deemed almost inconsequential in other sports. Football, however, has a special, visual quality that no other sport can match throughout an entire game. Basketball may provide more visually tantalizing highlights, but the game of football has a more irresistible appeal from start to finish. “It is for this reason,” writes author Kevin Cook, “that the rise of football occurred in conjunction with the proliferation of television sets across the country.”

This was proven out by a risky move that the NFL and the ABC network agreed upon called Monday Night Football. What was once a rising sport, became “the” sport, the new national pastime, with dynamic personalities, such as Howard Cosell, selling it to millions. Monday Night Football also produced the first moment of “must see” TV for one enthusiastic, young football fanatic in a city of Nebraska: “Halftime Highlights”. Cook details, in his book, that Cosell’s initial “Halftime Highlights” were totally unscripted, and they were “by today’s standards” poorly produced. Yet, anyone who was privileged enough to watch those 70’s, Cosell highlights, knows the profound effect they had on the game and the national psyche. Some of us still run imaginary plays, calling them out in Cosell’s staccato.

Football also had one thing that baseball did not: scarcity. This aspect is not covered in Cook’s book, but I believe it was one of the determining factors in the battle between baseball and football. Baseball had 162 games, sprint training, the playoffs, and The World Series. If a team was successful, they could’ve played 176 games a year at that point in history, and that’s a lot of games for one to maintain acute focus. Baseball did have events; they had opening day; the All-Star game; a few weeks of pennant chase games for those involved; and The World Series, but for the most part baseball was/is basically a six-month marathon. Baseball is equivalent to NASCAR in one aspect, as my friend said: “In NASCAR, everyone pays attention to the first five laps, and the last five laps, but you talk and eat dinner in between.” One can forget about baseball for months at a time, in other words, but just about every football game means something. The NFL only played fourteen times a year for most of the 70’s, seventeen times if one counted the playoffs and The Superbowl. One game was played on television, on Sunday, between noon and three, fourteen times a year, and then there was Monday Night Football. We now have Monday Night, Thursday night, Sunday night football, and Saturday night football once the college season is over. But in the 70’s, the NFL only appeared on Sunday afternoons and Monday nights, and this provided a regular season NFL game an “event” status that baseball, basketball, and Hockey could only dream of attaining..

Author Kevin Cook expands: “It seems to me that things were accelerating so much, we were looking for something faster. The NFL was more the counterculture, more a rock ‘n’ roll kind of sport compared to sedate, old baseball. And I think that’s why it appealed to a generation that was looking for something newer and more exciting. And they found it in football, especially on TV.”{1}

Kevin Cook’s The Last Headbangers provides all of the details of the teams, and their games, that precipitated the rise: The Immaculate Reception; The Dolphins undefeated season, and the games involved in that season; and the instrumental battles between the Raiders, the Steelers, the Dolphins, and the Cowboys. He also talks about the end of that era with “The Catch” by Dwight Clark in the corner of the end zone against the Cowboys. The era began with a catch, the Immaculate Reception, and it ended with a catch “The Catch” in Kevin Cook’s narrative. He talks about how that 49ers offense called the “west coast” offense took advantage of the many rules changes that favored the passing game and changed the game from the sloppy, smash mouth, and run oriented offenses to the clean, crisp, and almost machine like precision that modern day NFL teams have copied, revamped, updated, and instituted in their offensive strategies.

In a broader sense, The Last Headbangers brought a “nothing new” approach to those avid NFL fans who have been inundated with the rich tradition that the 70’s and the early 80’s produced. ESPN, MNF, the NFL network, and others have all captured these elements hundreds of times before, but Kevin Cook does unearth some nuggets that we longtime fans didn’t know. Shula’s competition committee, for instance, narrowed the hash marks from the traditional, college width to one they hoped would open up the passing game, but it only allowed running backs more room lateral room, and the running game flourished for a time. Most football fanatics heard sketchy details about Larry Csonka leaving the NFL in his prime for the WFL, but when he was asked to summarize his tenure in the WFL, Csonka replied: “It was nice to make money playing football.”

On that note, Cook reports that most of the top NFL players of the early 70’s still had to have part-time jobs for their existence, as they only made between $18,000 and $22,000 a year on average. Number one draft pick Terry Bradshaw had to sell cars in the offseason, and Franco Harris had to hitchhike to games.

It was also fascinating to learn that what drove Bill Walsh to accomplish much of what he did in the early 80’s, as a result of being passed over for the Cincinnati Bengals job by Paul Brown when Brown retired from that position. Apparently, Brown had been damaging Walsh’s prospects throughout the league by calling every owner in the NFL to tell them that his assistant coach was inept and a trouble maker. Another thing that Brown informed NFL owners about, a fact we learned from the NFL Channel’s exposé on Bill Walsh, was that Brown believed Walsh was too mercurial to handle the rigors of coaching at an NFL level. His highs were too high, and his lows were too low. After seeing what Walsh would accomplish with the San Francisco 49ers, most of these owners probably wish they had never listened to Brown, but Brown’s characterization of Walsh would eventually bear out.

When Walsh was passed over for the Bengals’ head coaching job, and he found out that Brown had muddying the waters for Walsh and his career prospects in the NFL, he was crushed. Walsh would eventually exact his revenge, of course, by taking two Super Bowl trophies from his former mentor’s Bengals. The book, The Last Headbangers, also details that Walsh had something of a Noll/Bradshaw relationship with his quarterback Joe Montana that culminated in Montana saying: “(F-bomb) you, you white-haired (person who sucks on … roosters).”

In the promotional interview with NPR for the book, author Kevin Cook talks about the suffering that a lot of the players are now enduring for playing the game, “A friend of mine calls them sport’s greatest generation, because they had an inkling that they were risking their futures.” When we hear players, like former Rams DE Fred Dryer, say, “I would have to roll off the bed onto the ground in order to lessen the pain enough to be able to walk around for a day.” When we hear former Vikings running back Robert Smith say that he retired prematurely, after seeing the former Houston Oilers’ great Earl Campbell in a wheelchair, and when we read Cook document that some former NFL stars can’t drag a pocket comb through their hair, at the age of 45 or 50, we are forced to realize what these players foresaw and played through. It’s a point Cook elucidates when he points out the few players, like Franco Harris and Phil Villapiano, that were able to escape prolonged and debilitating injuries in their post-football careers.

The thing is, as Cook’s friend said, these players did “have an inkling” that they were doing long-term damage to their bodies every time they took the field, every time they woke up the morning after and heard a doorbell that didn’t ring, and every time they covered up an injury, because they “weren’t injured they were hurt,” as Don Shula was known to ask the players who groaned on the sidelines that they couldn’t go in for the next play. Very few twenty something males consider the long-term health consequences of their actions, so it’s debatable whether they considered this or not, but most of we naysayers haven’t put our bodies through a quarter of what they did.

Reliving the moments that made the NFL the premier game that it is today with Cook are thrilling. The man describes the players, and the plays, with a flair that one cannot help but notice comes from the perspective of a fan. This is the book’s great selling point for much of the book, but it is its downfall in others. As Cook warns: “This book isn’t meant to glorify the uglier aspects of NFL football in the 1970s and early ’80s. The drugs, the booze, the cheating and headhunting, the occasionally seamy sex, and the risks the game posed to players’ health.” As that statement entails, there is some discussion that will satisfy prurient interests, but there’s not enough. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying a book of this nature must delve into the seedier side of the game to satisfy me, but this book almost seems to respect the game too much. It doesn’t feel rounded out enough.

The book Sweetness by Jeff Pearlman explored the entirety of Walter Payton’s career. Some may say it was too negative and disrespectful, but that author complained that those who said such things simply haven’t read the entire book. The point is that a writer has a duty to report both sides of the story to his readers if he is going to produce a worthwhile book. We all hate to have our heroes diminished in any way, but a writer can do it in a responsible and journalistic manner to produce material that we didn’t already know, isn’t that why we purchase such books in the first place. One gets the feeling that Cook saw how the NFL brotherhood ganged up on Pearlman, and he didn’t want any part of that.

Kevin Cook does conclude The Last Headbangers with some reporting, but he does it in an ESPN-style “Where are they now” human interest type stories on Franco Harris and Phil Villapiano. As with all of those tedious, ESPN-style stories created to fill time, most readers don’t personally care that Franco’s son unsuccessfully ran for office and Phil’s son unsuccessfully trained to make a Division I football team, and we don’t care that Villapiano eventually gave Harris a noogie over the Immaculate Reception.

It is a well done book, and Cook has created a real page-turner for any avid fan of 70’s football, but you do finish the book with the feeling that there is something more to the story than we’re being told.

Would You Eat Someone Somebody Cared About?

September 17, 2012December 31, 2024 Rilaly1 Comment

Would you eat something someone cared about? Would you eat something someone whispered to sweetly?

On an episode of the brilliant, hidden camera show on TruTV called Impractical Jokers, the comedian Salvatore (Sal) Vulcano assumed the role of a worker at the counter of a bakery. In the course of his duties at the bakery, in an episode, titled “Who Arted?”, Sal spoke to one of the pastries a customer ordered before placing it in that customer’s take home pastry box. The implied joke, in this transaction, was that Sal developed a familiar bond with these pastries that went beyond the usual, professional association a baker has with his creations.

“I’m going to give you to this lady now, and she’s going to eat you,” he whispered to the pastry. In response to the confection’s purported plea, Sal Vulcano added: “I’m sorry, this is just the way things are.”

In reaction to this display, the customer on the other side of the counter, decided that she did not want that particular pastry. She didn’t reveal anything about her decision making process, but it was obvious that she was uncomfortable with the idea of eating that particular pastry. Without saying a word, Sal selected another pastry, and he proceeded to speak to that one too. The woman interrupted him saying:

“I don’t want one that you’ve spoken to.”

At the conclusion of the segment, all four comedians provided comment on the segment, and they admitted that they wouldn’t eat food that someone has spoken to either. Why, was my first question. I have no idea why, all things being similar, a person would prefer a pastry that hasn’t been involved in communication. We can only speculate why, because the show did not interview the woman after the segment, or if they did they did not air it, and the four comedians don’t say why they would reject the pastry either. My guess is that the four comedians wanted to let this woman off the hook.

In this space of philosophical confusion, I put the question to a friend. He said that his decision would be based on what the person said to the pastry.

“Okay, but what communication would you deem so unacceptable you wouldn’t eat it? It’s not something we see every day, I’ll grant you that. It might be weird, a little creepy, and I may join you in giving the man an odd look when he does it, but I would then sit and eat it without any uncomfortable feelings or guilt.”

The obvious answer is that Sal’s presentation animated the pastries in a manner that this customer found disconcerting. In her world, presumably, it had always been socially acceptable to eat pastries, and she wanted to return that world. She didn’t want the guilt associated with eating a product that had a friend, or that someone cared about, or at the very least she didn’t want to watch their interaction, or in any other way know about it. She was so uneasy with the association that she made a boldfaced demand that Sal give her another pastry, one that hasn’t been spoken to in any manner, and she did this without acknowledging the lunacy of such a demand.

Proper analysis of the segment is almost impossible, since we don’t know what was going on in this customer’s head, but it appears to be an excellent portrayal, albeit incidental, of an individual who over thinks matters. She appears to be an individual who cares about what others think of her. She appears to be the type who makes informed, compassionate decisions about her dietary preferences. When she watches documentaries on food preparation, we can guess that they affect her dietary choices

An author wrote a book that awarded “light counts” to each being. In this book, the author suggested that some animals are more aware of their existence than another, and that that awareness could be said to be a non-religious soul. Humans, he wrote, are the barometer, as they are the most aware of their existence. In the next tier of his “consciousness cone” he lists the dog, the cat, and various other animals that he considers more aware of their existence. The human is at the top, and the atom is at the bottom. The purpose of his piece, the reader soon learns, is to inform the reader what the author considers acceptable to eat. A plant-based diet is entirely acceptable, for instance, to eat plants, vegetables, and fruit, because they have very few light counts, and little to no soul.

Some have suggested that talking to cats and dogs animates them in a manner that improves their life. Others have suggested that talking to plants can improve their condition. Does this affect the way we care for them, is it all a myth, or are we, in essence, transferring some of our light count to them? What if a human decides to transfer some of their light count to a piece of pastry? Is that possible? Is it possible that this woman believes this on some tangential level, and she prefers to eat a pastry with no light counts attached to them?

If this woman knows about this multi-tiered philosophy, or thinks about it anyway, we can presume that prior to her interaction with Sal, she was always comfortable eating pastries, because she assumed they had no cognition or awareness of their own being. She is a woman who makes informed dietary choices based on similar compassionate bullet points. Thus, when Sal assigned the pastries such characteristics, it made her so uncomfortable that she asked him to give her one without communicating with it.

Who would eat something that someone cares so much about? A cad would. Someone who doesn’t care about a person, place, or thing would. They might even worry that doing so could reflect poorly on them if they eat the pastry without a second thought. You’re saying you would eat such a thing without guilt? What kind of person are you? How do we sell ourselves to our peers in the aftermath?

Would we eat a small child’s beloved dog? Most would say no, to quote Pulp Fiction’s Jules Winnfield, “A dog’s got personality. Personality goes a long way.” If we agree with that sentiment, what are our parameters? Would we have any problems eating a small child’s beloved turkey? What if we met that turkey, and that turkey displayed some personality? What if that turkey displayed a little spunk that we couldn’t help but appreciate? What if that turkey befriended another turkey in a manner we found it endearing? What if the bird displayed an act of kindness that left an impression on us? What if it allowed us to fondle its wattle? What if that turkey had a name? How could anyone we eat a living being with a name? What kind of people are we? Would we rather eat a turkey that we’ve never met, that some individual in a factory farm slaughtered and packaged for us? We are informed, compassionate beings who don’t want to see anyone, any animal, or anything suffer, and when an individual does something that suggests they’ve bonded with something we plan on eating, do we consider how much pain that food might go through when we gnash it with our teeth, do we want to avoid thinking about that, and does it challenge what we think we know about light counts, the soul, and overall cognition.

The different between a quality baker and a top-notch one is the care they put into it. Some top-notch state that they put love into the confections they create. They care about their creations in the manner any other artist might. Sal’s joke might have been a spoof on the love and care some bakers put into their creations, and he did not expect the reaction this woman gave.

Once that reaction was out there, however, I would’ve been obsessed with drilling down to the woman’s philosophy behind rejecting the pastries to which Sal spoke. I would ask her if Sal redefined her philosophical stance on eating pastries in all the ways described above. If she said yes in any way, I would ask her why she considered another pastry acceptable. If he redefined it for her, wouldn’t that definition apply to all pastries? If she said no to this preposterous notion, I would ask her if she thought Sal transferred some of his soul, some of his light count to the particular pastry that she rejected. What’s the difference? Where is the line? It’s a pastry you say, and a pastry does not have the recognition of its own life in the manner a turkey does.

If a person has difficulty eating a pastry that someone spoke to lovingly, they may be a little too obsessed with their presentation. They may be as susceptible to commercialization and suggestion as those people they claim to hate. They may take the line, you are what you eat, a little too literally. They may consult websites that contain modern intellectuals who detail who we are by what we eat. They might refrain from eating a pasty, because of what it says about them if they do. They might be so afraid of what is says about them that they cannot sleep at night after taking a bite out of something that Sal appeared to love. Do they think too much, do they have too much time on your hands, and are they a result of the problem or part of it. If this woman was a spectator of the joke, as opposed to the subject of it, would she think less of the person who could eat such a confection without guilt?

How do we make our decisions on what not to eat? Does a vegetarian, or a vegan, make their dietary choices based entirely on a love of animals? Some of the vegetarians and vegans I’ve encountered initially say something along the lines of, “I don’t care for the texture of meat.” Or, they tell a story regarding the moment they made their decision and how they experienced a moment that shaped that decision in some way. Some others will detail for us the health related benefits they’ve explored. All but the very few will openly address anything political about their decision, and even fewer will state that they did it to achieve some level of cultural superiority by becoming a vegetarian or vegan. The minute we deign to put a piece of meat before our mouth, we will learn about their politics on the issue. We will also learn of their feelings of superiority over meat eaters before we learn their last name. If neither of these are the case, or if my experiences could be called anecdotal, why would a seemingly reasonable woman reject a pastry based solely on the fact that a Sal whispered sweet nothings to it before placing it in a pastry box?

If Sal had a Snickers bar perform the Can Can to animate that candy bar in a realistic, non-comedic manner would that woman, a vegan, or a vegetarian, be able to then eat that Snickers bar without regret or guilt? I realize that Snickers bars and pastries are relatively inanimate, but with proper, serious characterization would it be possible to animate them in such a fashion that a person, with susceptibilities to messaging, could be made to feel guilty about eating them? If that was successful, could an enterprising young documentarian launch a well-funded campaign, steeped in political pressure, to lead a segment of the population into avoiding eating Snickers candy bars based on videos about the inhumane manufacturing process involved in the creation and packaging of Snickers bars? With the proper documentarian displaying the inhumane process through which the peanuts and caramel are adjoined with the nougat in a final process that involves what could be called a suffocation technique employed by the layer of chocolate placed over the top, would it be possible to substantiate this cause to a point where a person would not only stop eating Snickers but denigrate those that do and anyone who supports Big Candy to be in line with evil? It’s not only possible, in my humble opinion, the seeds of it were on display in the inadvertent brilliance of this comic sketch on this episode of Impractical Jokers.

… And Then There’s Todd

September 7, 2012October 16, 2025 Rilaly2 Comments

I knew Todd was different the moment I met him, but I had no idea how unusual he was until his mom let it be known, moments after I met her, that we would be able to have relations if I so desired. She wasn’t shy, or coy, but she avoided giving me extra looks when she knew her son was looking. Those penetrating looks informed me that all she needed was a thumbs-up to start the proceedings. If Todd’s mom had admirable or attractive qualities, my humility wouldn’t permit me to write such a thing, but there were reasons that a 40-something female made it clear that her intentions with her son’s 20-year-old friend were less than honorable, and most of them had more to do with her marketability than mine.

Her frayed, yellow T-shirt said something crude on it. Her hairdo led observers to believe she spent quite a bit of money on oils, and a considerable amount of time curling. I wasn’t able to determine if either of these enhancements were natural or not, but judging by her overall appearance, my educated guess was that the woman hadn’t darkened the door of a beauty salon since Mikhail Gorbachev stepped down as general secretary. She also wore a what-are-you-looking-at? expression that led me to think an apology might be necessary, until it could be determined that this was her natural facial expression.

Todd’s mom was the first parent I met who didn’t have puritanical notions about underage drinking, smoking pot, and premarital sex. She was a proverbial free spirit, open in her disregard for the conventions of our constrained society. In other words, Todd’s mom was the first cool parent I ever met, so cool that she offered to drink and smoke with us as soon as she was off work.

After she extended that invitation, and Todd gauged my reaction to it, Todd’s mom shot me another extra look, over Todd’s shoulder that said, “If we do this, those pants of yours will be coming off!” No full-grown woman had been that attracted to me at that point in my life, so her extra looks were quite a turn-on, even though there were things going on with her that my young mind could not yet process.

She also said snarky, bitter things that slipped beyond the definition of cool to a dreaded arena few can escape of trying too hard. I’m sure that cynical bitterness did not lead her to name her only-begotten son Todd, and I do not believe that his mom’s near palpable hatred of men had anything to do with her sentencing her son to a life of misery with the moniker. I’m sure she just liked the sound of the name.

My already skewed impressions of Todd were altered after I met his mom, as I knew that a parent’s influence over a child is profound. Our outlooks on life are structured by our parents of course, and I knew Todd was no different.

Parents teach us how to interact in the world, our outlook on the world, and for most of our first eighteen years they are our world. Parents can even affect our world by choosing our name. Most people don’t consider it plausible that a name can curse a child. Even a person with an odd, one-syllable sound attached to their identity is not cursed, they might say. A child can go onto achieve great things as an adult, in spite of their name. The illustrious career of Aldous Huxley is but one example. They can gain acceptance among their peers, they can be happy, and they can escape anything put before them. A name is a trivial concern in the grand scheme of things. Even the most vocal contrarians would have to admit that some names might cripple a child, such as those that rhyme with embarrassing body functions, but seldom will a parent intentionally set out to hinder their offspring in such a manner.

And then there’s Todd. Naming a child Todd might not seem cruel, on the surface, as it’s a rather common name in American society today that dates back to medieval England. It means “fox”, as in “clever or cunning”. Chances are everyone knows at least one Todd, and most don’t presume that the name boxes the recipient of such a name into any sort of predestination. They might consider the notion irrational, but most of those who say such things aren’t named Todd.

✽✽✽

Long before I met Todd’s mother, I thought he was an idiot. That assessment was unfair, of course, because I based it on the sound of his name. When I learned that Todd couldn’t tie his own shoes, however, I considered that a bit of a stretch beyond that initial assessment.

This revelation occurred soon after Todd asked his girlfriend, my girlfriend’s best friend Tracy, to tie his shoes. I joked that I considered this an excellent domination technique that I might explore the next time I was around my girlfriend. I intended that joke to be over the top humor, but they didn’t see it that way. If Todd considered it funny, he didn’t show it. He feared Tracy in the manner a lamb fears a border collie, and Tracy wasn’t even smiling politely. I started telling them that I was merely joining in on a joke that Todd started by asking Tracy to tie his shoes, but Tracy had a “don’t-go-there!” glare on. My initial thought was that her glare had more to do with the domination theme of my jest, and I felt some remorse for saying that, considering that my girlfriend was Tracy’s best friend.

That remorse ended for me when I convinced them I was joking, but the cloud continued to loom over us. I soon realized that that glare had less to do with my joke and more to do with a storm that gathered in the silence that followed. I began to feel trapped, as if I’d tripped a tripwire that would reveal domination techniques, or some sort of sexual peccadillo I didn’t care to explore with them. Their pregnant silence, combined with the looks they shared, suggested they were ready to share if I was ready to hear it, but I feared I might have placed them in the uncomfortable position of having to reveal a whole bunch of unusual details about their relationship. The glare and the weighted silence were such that I was considering the idea that they could lead to some sort of physical altercation between Todd and I, until he finally broke down and told me the reason he asked Tracy to tie his shoes. He never learned how to tie them.

“Come on!” I said, “You’re 19!” I was a naïve 20-year-old, and I was not difficult to fool. I didn’t know the extent of it at the time, of course, but I sensed a certain susceptibility that I was always trying to defeat. Even with that acknowledgement, I thought the idea they were trying to sell me that Todd didn’t know how to tie his own shoes was a ridiculous effort on their part.

Todd did not willingly reveal his story. I had to prompt the revelation, after I tired of the confusing, silent tension.

“So, if you don’t know how to tie your shoes,” I said, believing the shoes were symbolic of a Pandora’s Box that I would regret ever opening, “why would you buy tennis shoes that have laces?”

The answer to this question involved a “funny story”. It involved a loving mother purchasing Velcro and slip-on shoes for her son throughout his youth. The funny story occurred when Todd entered his first shoe store all by himself, seeking to break the shackles of a mother’s hold with the first paycheck he earned. The shoe store attendant tied Todd’s shoes for him, in the store, and Todd walked around the store saying, “I’ll take them” with the pride so many young people experience with their first, individual purchase. “I was so proud of myself that I wore those shoes out of the store,” Todd continued. “The clerk said that was just fine, as he would be able to use the UPC symbol on the box to complete the purchase. I wore them for so long that day that when I went home and got ready for bed, I began to take them off as a matter of routine. That’s when I realized that once I untied the shoes, I would never be able to wear them again without assistance. And since I knew I couldn’t get my jeans over my shoes, I wound up sleeping with my jeans and shoes on.”

I was the only one in the room not laughing.

“It was sort of like buying a sweater with a stain on it,” Todd said to expound on the funny story, “but you don’t see the stain until you get home.”

Call it a defense mechanism, or societal conditioning, but I was always on the lookout for juicy tidbits to use when the going got rough. There are some juicy tidbits that you just can’t use. The idea that a grown man cannot tie his own shoes automatically goes into the I-cant-wait-to-use-this, comedic gold file. I write the word automatically, because when you’ve been fighting in the jungles of Teenageboyistan as long as I had to that point, you have an internal macros system that already knows how to file such information. Some juicy tidbits, however, go beyond the typical malleable information one can tease into mockery and ridicule. If it were just about Todd’s inability to tie his own shoes, my automated system already knew how to file such information, but the idea that his mom’s neglect enabled him to continue drove a spike in what I considered comedy gold.

Even when Todd later participated in a round-of-insults against me, I couldn’t say, “What are you talking about? You can’t even tie your own shoes.” As painful as it was to withhold, it just felt too easy and too insulting. Once I learned the backstory that just sapped it of all the fun. Plus, what would I say when Todd sat silent, staggering on the ropes, with everyone waiting for me to deliver that haymaker? “Yeah, his mom continued to purchase slip-ons and Velcro for her boy, in spite of his teachers’ instructions.” Yeah, no, a joke like that turns those expectant smiles upside down and upends all good-natured attempts to beclown.

In the moment, though, while Tracy tied his shoes, I found myself trapped between not wanting to pursue the matter and demanding an answer to a question that I did not want to ask.

“How did you get out of the first grade without tying your shoes at least once?” I asked. “Don’t Kindergarten teachers have to check that box on a report card before they advance you to the next grade?”

The number one rule trial lawyers learn is never ask a question when you don’t know the answer. Implied in that rule is the idea that there are certain questions you don’t want answered. While immersed in all the tales of Todd’s mom protecting her son, and thus preventing him from learning was my realization that I should’ve paid far more attention to Tracy’s don’t-go-there glare. Thus, for a time, I flipped the switch of my curiosity into the off position, and I kept that switch off for much of my friendship with Todd. I even defended him against the ridicule from those who train themselves to go after weakest member of the herd, until I later learned of Todd’s lifelong fear of cotton.

“Oh, c’mon!” I said. I was naïve as I stated, and I had some difficulty coming to grips with certain characteristics I learned about the various Todds I’d met in life, but I now had to deal with the idea that one of them was afraid of cotton. Cotton! It was the second such hurdle our friendship would have to traverse, and Todd and I had to work through the fundamentals of his fear. We established the fact that Todd had no fear of towels, for example, and he wasn’t afraid of the 50 percent of my shirt that wasn’t polyester. It was cotton balls that he feared, cotton balls, like the ones aspirin companies use to keep the pills in place that terrified him.

“It’s what they call an inexplicable fears,” Todd explained, as if that was a suitable explanation. “The type of fears that cannot be explained,” he added, as if I needed the definition.

The fear was also, I would soon learn, a type of fear that called for a strong woman to step in and defend. “Who has inexplicable fears?” Tracy asked rhetorically. “I’ll say it, everyone!” she answered. “That’s what most fears are, an irrational, emotional reaction. Can you explain your irrational fears?”

“Yes!” I said. “Yes, I believe I can! I have an irrational fear of heights, but I fear falling more than I fear being high up. Whether it’s a learned behavior or primal instinct, I’ve learned that hitting the ground at a high rate of speed hurts and it could damage something that I enjoy using. I’m not just talking about reproductive organs here either. I’m talking about arms, legs, and brain matter, and if you have a problem with that, you’ll have to take it up with my brain, because my brain is the epicenter of self-preservation, and that brain has learned over the years and through the many mistakes I’ve made to use the emotion of fear to prevent me from harming myself. And I think my brain has been doing a damn fine job thus far, so thanks brain.”

The silence that followed that, and the faces of my opponents, suggested that I weakened them with body blows, and all I had to do now was deliver my haymaker.

“I can accept the premise that most fears are irrational, and they provoke emotions that can be inexplicable, or as you say, difficult to explain, but if you are arguing that my fear of falling and Todd’s fear of cotton should be placed on equal ground, someone is going to have to explain to me how a brain I can only assume is equipped with all the same tools as mine, and is as undamaged as mine is, can convince a grown man that a ball of cotton presents a danger equivalent to falling from a great height.”

I wasn’t sure if the silence that followed was because they didn’t know what to say, but I decided I didn’t have to pound the point home with another haymaker I planned to use that described my numerous experiences with paraplegics who ended up that way as a result of falling. I didn’t need to recount the number of fatalities that resulted from falls, and I didn’t need to compare those grim statistics to the statistics that listed the number of people maimed or killed as a result of an incident with a cotton ball. I had no need to go into that, because I made my point. I wasn’t the type to engage in verbal touchdown dances anyway, because I knew that doing so would only make Todd look bad in front of his girlfriend. Thus, I was fully prepared to allow the matter to die at that moment, no harm no foul, until I remembered that I had an aspirin bottle in my bathroom cabinet.

I was old enough to know that I should refrain from making a man look bad in front of his girlfriend, if I wanted to remain friends with that man, but I was still young enough to follow my impulses.

I hoped that I hadn’t fallen prey to my typical routine of throwing the cotton ball out the minute I opened an aspirin bottle, and I was excited when I saw I hadn’t. I smiled anxiously at the billowy white ball when I saw it. I knew it was bound to be an obnoxious moment, and I knew Todd’s feelings would be hurt, but at 20-years-old, those considerations take a back seat to the prospect of having a moment that could prove hilarious to the point of being historic.

I was so anxious to get that cotton ball out of the bottle that I spilled the bottle and scattered aspirin all over my bathroom counter. I didn’t even bother to pick them up. I thought timing was of the essence, and I knew that I could always pick the tablets up later.

I raced toward Todd and Tracy with the cotton ball dangling from my fingertips. “Ooga booga!” I said. Ooga booga were not words I typically used to strike fear into the subjects of my cruelty, but I felt they captured the perfect hybrid of comedy and horror. I would later attach all sorts of brilliant thoughts to my decision to use those words. I would tell people about the decisions I made to accompany this moment with the perfect ooga booga face, and I would walk my listeners through my moment frame by frame to capture my thoughts in the moment. In reality, the choices I made at the time were all impulsive.

“Dude! Dude, don’t! For the love of God don’t!” Todd said leaning back against Tracy, clutching her in a position that approached fetal.

Todd was the first “Dude!” I ever met. Todd spread the word across the spectrum of grammar. He could use it as a noun, verb and transitory verb, adjective, in an introductory declaration, and as ending punctuation in an interrogatory sentence. I would meet many “Dudes!” later, and I would call them “dudes” in a derogatory fashion, but Todd was the first.

In the brief moments preceding “Ooga booga!” I thought about Todd’s vulnerable confession that he had an inexplicable fear of cotton, and in my real-world concepts that was B.S. My reaction to it was equivalent to my first time I heard someone say they feared clowns. Over time, these coulrophobics convinced me that their fear of clowns was a bona fide and documented terror that would not go away. They also, eventually, convinced me that it was not just a means of garnering attention or sympathy. I doubted that this sidonglobophobic, those who fear cotton balls, could win me over as easily.

My first experience with a coulrophobic involved her saying, “I don’t know why I fear clowns. I just do. They’re creepy.” That didn’t do it for me, especially since such confessions seemed to conveniently follow Cosmo Kramer’s hilarious portrayal of coulrophobia in the series Seinfeld.

I remained skeptical, until another coulrophobic added, “They are creepy, but there is something familiar to their creepy vibe, something that reminds me of a time when I was a little girl, and I thought they were a different species who lived in carnivals. I enjoyed their antics onstage when I was a very young girl, but I’m not sure if that laughter was based on the idea that they weren’t near me, or if I was relieved to learn that they were supposed to be funny and not evil, or as evil as I imagined. Whatever the case, I was just as afraid of them the next time they were near me, as a little girl. People who dress as clowns all say they’re all about the fun, but they have to know that part of their allure involves the fear children have of them. I think this subtle distinction between the imagined horror children experience when they encounter a person with a painted face. A painted face doesn’t make sense to a kid. We have expectations of the face. Nose, eyes, mouth. They are all congruent and make sense in size when compared to the rest of the face, but when someone exaggerates the size of all the above, voluntarily, it doesn’t make sense. “Why?” is the question we ask, and our parents tell us that it’s supposed to be funny. “Ok, it’s not funny, so what else do you have?” Then you feel trapped, and further confused when you see all your friends and everyone your age laughing. I realized that I was the only one who didn’t get it, at some point, but I was still so confused and scared by the confusion over why someone would exaggerate the size of their facial features, and their feet, for humor. When I see them now, it brings all that creepy familiarity back, to this day.”

That explanation provided me more insight into the mind of a coulrophobic, but I wasn’t convinced on the spot. Those words familiar creepiness stuck with me, however, and the idea of familiar fears touched a core. I had familiar fears, we all do, but we might not ever know we have them until something effectively taps into them.

The movie The Blair Witch Project, for example, effectively tapped one of my familiar/creepy nerves. The reactions to that movie divided were evenly among the people I knew, and that fact confused me. I didn’t understand how the naysayers missed the horror I experienced. They thought I was being silly, in the same manner I initially thought those who feared clowns were either silly or faking it. The Blair Witch Project recalled moments in my childhood when I camped out in a forest, however, when I would imagine what populated the trees around me. Those dark scenes in the movie were so real to me that I could almost smell the burning wood in the theater. Those moments on the screen carried me back to a time in my life when I considered the unimaginable real.

When I posed that all of these theories to another coulrophobic I met, she said, “Like a cancer sufferer, I think my fear of clowns was in remission for much of my life. I feared them as a kid. As I grew older, I kept those fears at bay with the notion that they were nothing more than irrational childish fears, but as with your experience with The Blair Witch Project, I never experienced a trigger, until I saw the movie for Stephen King’s It. That movie triggered that old fear in a way I have not been able to shake since. I didn’t like clowns in the intervening years, as they’ve always unnerved me a little, but I didn’t go out of my way to avoid them in the manner I do now. The movie It, and more specifically its character Pennywise, caused a recurrence of that fear that I believe was exacerbated by my otherwise rational, adult mind.”

Even with my newfound understanding of coulrophobia, I didn’t draw any correlations between it and Todd’s case of sidonglobophobia. I didn’t bother looking into this with any depth in other words. I didn’t consider the notion that Todd might have had some traumatic experience he associated with cotton balls, and I didn’t consider sidonglobophobia a real thing. I just decided Todd’s fear of cotton balls was a little freaky, and I considered it my comedic obligation to put that freakishness on display for all to enjoy.

My “ooga booga!” moment revealed the exact opposite of what I expected. Todd’s fear of cotton balls was as real, and as freakishly familiar to him as the fears others had of clowns, and as I had a camping out in the dark woods. For him it was a vein-straightening fear and a terror so deep and real that it caused him to clutch his girlfriend as if his life depended on it. If I furthered my joke and moved to put it on his skin, I sensed that he might shriek.

Even after Todd’s humiliating reaction, I maintained that I was just trying to be funny, and that made it all right with me. That immediate reaction did subside somewhat when I considered the idea that I might be assigning my mindset to his actions and reactions. Yet, those who met Todd’s mother knew that his upbringing had to be, at the very least, unusual, and his unusual fears might have resulted from those unusual circumstances that altered what might have otherwise been normal thought patterns. I realized that this moment I so enjoyed might have opened some dark caverns in Todd’s soul, freeing up archived fears that he might spent the next twenty-five years recounting on psychiatrist’s couch.

Regardless the amount of reflection I would put into this moment, or the ultimate effect it had on Todd, I had to deal with the fact that my ooga booga moment brought my party to a crashing halt. Most in attendance were now staring, with sympathy, at Todd, and they were staring at me in scorn with the same intensity. Some of the females said some awful things to me, and then they insisted that their boyfriends take them away. I ruined my own party, but I also ruined Todd in the eyes of those who were there, or so I thought. I had my moment, the moment I sought when I remembered I had a cotton ball in my medicine cabinet, but the partygoers obviously didn’t appreciate the moment in the manner I thought they would.

The partygoers probably thought I was trying to ruin Todd, but Todd and I were good friends. We established a healthy bond with one another, and anytime I developed a strong bond with a fella, I tried to ruin him, and he tried to ruin me right back. It was my definition, based on cultural and societal conditioning, of a healthy male friendship. Todd was my friend, and the worst charge one could make against me was that I used a good friend as a comedic foil.

If my moment did consist of my effort to ruin Todd, I was woefully unsuccessful. For the girls who loved Todd before ooga booga, appeared to love him even more after it. Years later, the only explanation I can come up with is that he displayed a quality young girls find most endearing, vulnerability.

He also had those eyes, the crystal-blue kind that made women swoon. “Could one call them dreamy?” I asked.

“Dreamy?” one woman asked. “I don’t know if I’d use the term dreamy, but they definitely make him more attractive.”

Todd also had that hair, the same oiled and curled hair his mother had, only more natural blonde. It was a little dirty and somewhat unkempt, but he fit the mold of one who could get away with such a look. That look even seemed to work to his advantage with some women, in the sense that it might have added to this endearing element of vulnerability he had.

Todd’s most glaring vulnerability was that he was not very bright, and even though most self-respecting women won’t admit it, they love the not-very-bright. They might not want to settle down with the not-very-bright, since the ones we choose to marry are such a deep reflection on us. When it comes to befriending or defending someone, though, their compassionate instincts kick in. In our little shared space of the world, something happened to shake all of my little theories up. I don’t know if it was the fallout from “Ooga Booga” or what, but Todd began to experience inexplicable success in the dating world.

I don’t know if his subsequent girlfriends wanted to convince Todd that everyone was wrong about him, or if they sought the opposite, but they began spending so much time defending and befriending him that they eventually became attracted to him in a way that we found inexplicable.

“That is all so ridiculous!” one of them said when I posed all of my theories about why she, and all her friends, wanted to date him. That reaction was so ubiquitous among our female co-workers, that it requires notation, but the time I spent around Todd informed me that if a guy has all the ingredients listed above, the eyes, the hair, and an air of vulnerability about him, and he has a way of making a woman feel smarter on top of all that, he’s bound to land permanent residence on “hotty” isle. As long as that guy doesn’t say or do anything to tarnish his presentation, and Todd never did anything to diminish his presentation.

One measure of a man is how many women he is able to attract. If that were the lone measure, most men would list Todd as a man among boys. I don’t know many men who would want to follow Todd’s blueprint for landing women, but when such discussions arise among young men looking to become players, I inform them that I’ve witnessed one successful formula firsthand. I’m as in the dark on this topic as they are, I tell them, but I’ve witnessed a real-life asterisk in the equation for them to consider. I tell them about how Todd could work a room of women without effort. I tell them how I saw the man move from one woman to another without leaving any of them upset in the aftermath. He had one-night stands with a woman who was not his girlfriend, and I saw those two girls begin yelling at one another, screaming insults and threats over a breakroom table, without considering the role the Todd –the man who sat between them– played in the situation. When these fights would erupt between the scorned women, Todd would play peacemaker, and he would do everything a man could do to prevent them from harming one another. Then, when the smoke cleared, he would begin hoping, with all sincerity, that they could all be friends again. The most annoying aspect of my Todd testimonial arrives when I attempt to convey the idea that Todd did all this without considering the true import of his actions.

Most people who hear Todd’s tale believe he had a carefully orchestrated plan for achieving success. I’ve tried to explain the anomaly Todd was to these people, and they naturally assume that he was smarter and craftier than I suspect. There was no plan, I tell them, for he did not accentuate certain aspects of his personality to appeal to women, and he did not work on his faults. As far as I know, he did not develop schemes and plot paths to take that would attract more women. At one point in the arguments I’ve had with people on this matter, we reach a bottom line. “Bottom line, you’re jealous,” they all say in numerous ways, “if he had as much success with women as you suggest, he obviously had more success than you, and he must’ve been craftier and smarter than you.”

“He did have as much success as I detailed, it was far greater than mine, and I was jealous,” I tell them, “but he wasn’t craftier or smarter, he was just Todd.”

No research, I know of, concludes that giving a child a relatively normal name like Todd, Gil, or Ned affects them in any way. There is no sociological evidence to suggest that the Todds, Gils, or Neds, of the world, live different from anyone else. If you’ve ever known one of these unfortunate, possibly cursed individuals, however, you know there is a fundamental difference about them that they will spend most of their lives trying to overcome. Something about those odd, one-syllable sound of their name affects their identity so much that it affects their existence. They don’t all become square pegs in a round-hole world of more pleasing sounding names, some of them are exceptions to the rule, some of them are just Todd, but the preconceived notions most of us have of such sounds grease their slide to the outer layer.