For Pat Fitzgerald and Northwestern football “action is character.”
Like all football coaches, you hear the we-where-one-play-away-from-winning rhetoric incessantly, but you simply are what your record states it is. And the Wildcats look to make a bowl again after missing out last year for the first time since 2007. They’ll attempt to do it without their best player, Venric Mark who is suspended for the first two games.
Mark was selected as just one of four players to represent the NU offense at Media Day on Thursday, and then just 28 or 29 hours later, the school releases a statement that he’s suspended for an undisclosed reason. The announcement comes just one hour before Chicago is captivated by the first Bears game of the preseason. And of course, “bad news” or the real news comes out on a Friday night, right after everyone has left work.
Like F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, no one wants to read about business, unless it’s crooked business.
“Tender was Friday night,” but the narrative quickly shifted. Because the weekend meant a new focus on the program. Now came a feel good story about a 32-year old student and Navy Seal who is attempting to walk-on the NU football team. It’s an uplifting, heart-warming story, but when you consider the not just coincidental timing of it, some of the positivity is lost. But then again in “my lost city” (at least journalism wise) we’ve created a lost generation of reporters.
After 2013, and the type of season Fitzgerald had, the way in which preseason expectations were higher than they’ve ever been…only to manifest itself in close loss week after week after week in the most creatively written and heart-breaking of fashion…
It leaves this new 2014 team as “a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.”
However, there indeed truly are “second acts in American life.” (despite what the quote said)
Pat Fitzgerald is living proof of that- having been big man on campus in Evanston as a player, and now again as coach. He’s the biggest man of all in Wildcat Alley history…Maybe Otto Graham is up there too. And like the saying goes “a big man really has no time to do anything but sit and be big.”
Not the case with Fitzgerald, who is a tireless worker, a devoted recruiter, and a coach with a work ethic as strong as anyone else in the game.
But “Show me a hero, and I’ll write you a tragedy.” And that happened over and over last season as defeat was incessantly snatched from the jaws of victory. But 2014 brings a green light, an extraordinary capacity for hope and college football romantic readiness that I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.
It’s Camp Kenosha time. It’s preseason and Pat Fitzgerald, NU, and everyone else close to the program:
“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”
And as you’ve probably figured out by reading this, I’m busy and tired. I’ve done enough football media days and press conferences where people talk for hours but nothing of news-worthiness is ever said. But on “this side of paradise” the season, actual football is almost here. And with it the talking season concludes.
That’s my Middle West . . . the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark
Oh and since this is what doing instead of a run-of-the-mill, unoriginal NU season preview article, here’s my prediction: 7-5 (going bowling of course) 4-4 in conference.
Paul M. Banks owns The Sports Bank.net, an affiliate of Fox Sports and Yahoo! He’s been a guest on news talk shows all across the world. He’s also a special contributor to the Chicago Tribune RedEye edition. Banks has been featured in numerous media outlets including NFL.com, Forbes, Bleacher Report, Deadspin, ESPN, NBC, CBS, the History Channel and more. Follow him on Twitter (@paulmbanks)