Philadelphia Eagles fans hold up a sign for wide receiver A.J. Brown (11) and Inner Excellence, the book he was seen reading on the sidelines, during the NFL divisional playoff football game against the Los Angeles Rams on Jan. 19 in Philadelphia.Chris Szagola/The Associated Press
When you’re looking for an explanation about how we got to this point in history, you could do worse than the case of A.J. Brown, renaissance man.
Brown is a very good wide receiver for the Philadelphia Eagles. He has the famous-person curse of having a difficult-to-remember name. Until last week, he was another wideout in a mess of NFL Browns, Hills, Evanses and Jeffersons.
But then Brown did something to set himself apart – he read.
Not at home, where most of us now pretend to do so, but out in public where you could prove it was occurring. Cameras caught Brown mid-game with a self-help book, Inner Excellence, open in his hands.
American outlets rushed in to cover this story like a natural disaster. ESPN titled its segment, ‘The Infamous Book,’ which suggests the network should probably read a little more itself. Maybe start with a dictionary.
The beginning of the narration on that piece – “It was the fourth quarter in the Eagles’ wild card game against the Packers when a national television audience saw something it’s never seen before – a player reading a book on the bench.”
That last bit was said with the wonder one might bring to, “ … a bear flying a spaceship around the moon.”
Brown has been all over the place talking about his unusual ability. The angle of these features is uniform – ‘Get a load of this weirdo.’
Though a delightful person, Brown has not helped matters by talking about reading like it is something to be done in the garage between 2 and 4 a.m.
“I’m not changing who I am just because the world may say, ‘This is strange. This is unorthodox.’ I’m not afraid to push myself in areas or pick up a book because we’re playing this masculine football game,” Brown told ESPN. “Best believe, I’m the first one who’s going to try to smash somebody’s face in.”
As he said it, the piano soundtrack rose to a crescendo. Something inspiring had just happened, though it was hard to say what. That Brown had overcome the enemies of literacy? That he’s masculine, but not, you know, too masculine?
I get that reading isn’t cool any more, and that buying books is the new collecting china. But it had not occurred to me how bizarre a behaviour it now seems to most people until Brown’s story made headlines, and then kept making them for days and days.
The initial reaction online was rage and confusion – How could he be reading right now? What sort of a layabout reads at work??
The secondary reaction was worse – mild amusement tinged with scorn. Reading is now something done by the sort of people who pop the collars on their polos. Showoffs, poseurs and other vaguely effete types.
There have always been meatheads who fear literature, but until recently they knew to be ashamed of it. Now they are in the ascendance.
Not 20 years ago, Toronto Blue Jay Roy Halladay would bring a copy of The Mental ABC’s of Pitching everywhere with him. Sometimes, you’d catch him sitting facing into his locker, staring at it and rocking Talmudically.
The story was endlessly repeated as evidence that Halladay was operating on a higher level than everyone else. Reading made Halladay seem special, where it has now made Brown seem suspect.
It is not a coincidence that the golden ages of American literature and sports were simultaneous. One fed the other in an inspired loop. If you want to talk about the artifacts, say, baseball has produced, I would put The Natural above any home-run record.
Great novelists once took sports as their subject because people wanted to consume and discuss ideas that happened to be most easily explicated through games. Sports was the artistic means, not the end.
You think of a piece like Gay Talese’s The Loser and you realize that not only is it not being done any more, but that it couldn’t be. There is no outlet regularly writing that way, and no club or manager that would allow them the access if there were.
Athletes want to tell their own stories now – understandable – but they’re not good at it. Not much better than the writers would be playing the games.
As a result, most sportswriting has become a roughage of stats and cliches, the stories told about athletes are news releases and the people who like sports no longer get why anyone who’s made the pros would bother reading a book.
That’s part of what success has become – never again feeling you must read anything.
It would amaze me to hear that any of our leaders today, in any industry, of any political persuasion, read fiction. Or not the good kind, at least. The stuff that isn’t purpose-designed to make you feel better about your choices.
If they did, they wouldn’t be so dull-minded. Go back and read anything – anything at all – written by Abraham Lincoln. It will make you weep at the poverty of modern discourse.
After years of absorbing what now passes for discussion, you get one mildly thoughtful person breaking cover in a space reserved for face smashing and his audience’s reaction is ‘Burn the witch.’
And I’m okay with that. In a world where no one reads, the few who do have an advantage. They already know what’s happening and where it’s headed because it was in a book they read. Nothing people say or do amazes or unsettles them. They’ve heard about much worse.
Why are people so anxious today? Everyone’s got their pet theory so here’s mine – they don’t read.
If they did, they wouldn’t feel so adrift in history. If they had regular access to the deepest feelings of others, they wouldn’t be so captive to their own.
Strangely, it is the non-readers who now operate in the realm of fantasy. Everything that happens surprises them. Current events are their magic. They keep using words like ‘unprecedented’ for things that are not that. But they were precedented in books, so …
This post was originally published on here
