January 1, 2023
I remember watching football games with my father on New Year’s Day back in the late 1950s when there were only a total of eight bowl games, and only half of them were played on January 1st: the Cotton; the Orange; Rose; and the Sugar Bowl. The names of the Bowl games were like a kind of bucolic mantra in those chin-to-chin days of the Cold War. (The other four games were the Tangerine Bowl; the Bluegrass; the Sun; and the Gator bowl.)
After moving to Los Angeles, there were a half-dozen occasions when I could have attended the Rose Bowl in person and watched my alma mater, UCLA, take on the Big Ten champion. I was always too busy, however, with various artistic projects to give priority to watching an athletic contest that had very little allure other than as some kind of perverse nostalgia.
Nevertheless, when January 1st arrives, I still yearn to see a TV screen fill with images of young men reiterating the elegiac benediction of James Wright’s poems about Martin’s Ferry, Ohio. It’s hard to explain this craving, which unlike my desire for nicotine (which only took two years to flush out of my system) somehow still quietly seethes in my social imaginary.
This year, though, because New Years Day is on a Sunday, there is no Rose Parade on Jan. 1st nor a football game in the Rose Bowl. They might as well cancel the whole thing, as far as I’m concerned, and just chalk it up to the bad karma of the pandemic and radical political turmoil. Our attention, after all, should be focused on the second anniversary of an insurrection that came all too close to pulling off its audacious goal of cancelling the legitimate election of Joseph Biden as president of the United States. January 6gh, 2021 was the ultimate bowl game of American democracy. The field goal that preserved our flawed but still somewhat viable political system was kicked at the last moment, even as the other team jumped off-sides.
It was amazing to watch a ball hang in the air that long, before it veered through the goal posts, far enough for the winning score even as gun shots went off at the very entrance to the stadium.
I still haven’t fully exhaled.
About Bill Mohr