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I'm a Classicist, so I LOVED the bolded part, but beyond even that, he's always struck me as just a good, sincere kid.
http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/page...rt-griffin-iii-voice-generation-espn-magazine
Yes, he can ...
... be the most transformative athlete, role model and voice of a generation
By J.R. Moehringer | ESPN The Magazine
DEAR MR. PRESIDENT,
I'm writing to you on behalf of a young man who recently moved to your district. He's a 23-year-old native of Copperas Cove, Texas, a recent graduate of Baylor University, and it's my hope that you might offer him some guidance. It's my fear that you're the only person who can. His name is Robert Griffin III. You have a passing, public acquaintance with Mr. Griffin, of course, but I suspect you root for him privately, perhaps intensely, perhaps more than you realize, and how could you not? In many ways Mr. Griffin is you, and you are him.
I don't mean politically. As you know, Mr. Griffin is staunchly apolitical, won't declare himself Democrat or Republican, counts members of both parties among his close friends. One of his favorite professors at Baylor, a Molly Ivins type, says Griffin talked in class like an impassioned liberal, whereas Baylor's president, Judge Ken Starr, one of the most famous conservatives in recent years, speaks of Griffin like a son. No, the comparison between you and Griffin stems from things other than politics, things such as your origins, and the galvanizing effect you have on others, and the manner in which you both burst onto the scene.
Like you, Griffin started with an entrenched core of ardent believers, which grew and grew. In the past year, his popularity has exploded, radiated outward in ever widening circles, and recently the NFL announced that Griffin's jersey is the best-selling single-season jersey of all time.
Think of that, Mr. President. Think of the legends Griffin surpassed in reaching that milestone. Montana, Favre, Marino, Aikman -- this young man has outsold them all. As a purely factual matter, Griffin hasn't done enough in his short career to outsell Tiki Barber, but numbers don't lie; the public, like the heart, wants what it wants. So the question is, why do they want it? Yes, Griffin was Offensive Rookie of the Year. Yes, he completed 66 percent of his passes, threw 20 TDs against five picks. Nice. Fine. But Griffinmania can't be about stats, any more than "Obama Girl" was about your time as senator. Fans and nonfans, red states and blue, are rocking the burgandy-and-gold because they see in Griffin things that aren't quite there, at least not yet. They see Griffin as more than a football player, in the same way that your fans (and critics) see you as more than a president.
Of course one can't overlook the power of Faith. On a chain around his neck, with his fiancée's high school ring, Griffin wears a scripture-etched dog tag: For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. So maybe he's the second coming of Tebow, the savior for whom a vast flock has been waiting, religious and accurate. (In which case, may God have mercy on those secondaries.)
Also, one can't overlook race. It's worth noting that Griffin plays for the only team in the NFL named after pigmentation. Also, the Redskins were the last team, the very last, to desegregate. Against the backdrop of such fraught imagery and regrettable history, the Redskins chose Griffin with the second pick in last year's draft, and all at once the team's African-American fans found themselves in possession of an unexpected, delicious source of pride, a black quarterback who ranked among the best and brightest in his class, maybe his generation. Yes, there was Doug Williams, long ago. But this was different somehow. This was real change -- revolutionary change. As in 2008, there was much rejoicing on the Mall.
Like you, Mr. President, Griffin promises to transcend old rules, to smash ancient barriers. Like you, he challenges fixed ideas, especially the one about great promise versus consummate virtuosity. In the same dismissive way that people mention your oratory prowess -- implying it's innate, therefore not earned, not real -- they mention Griffin's speed. Flash, sans fire, that's the underlying dig. Promise, like beauty, is skin deep, and virtuosity, mastery, genuine excellence, is the only thing that counts; thus many predict that you and Griffin will fail. Thus, many need you to succeed.
For too long, African-American quarterbacks have been like Internet stocks. They bubble up, everyone gets excited, then the bubble bursts. Then everyone becomes doubly excited, and doubly fearful, about the next one. With so much at stake, or perceived to be at stake, it's natural that people get nervous and use big nonsensical words (postracial, transformational) in trying to describe Griffin, the same words they use to describe you. In Griffin's case, what they're often euphonically tiptoeing around is intelligence. Griffin -- A student, candidate for a master's degree -- offers hope to countless African-Americans that the gap between Randall Cunningham/Donovan McNabb/Warren Moon and Dan Fouts/Jim Kelly/Dan Marino, though illusory, can finally be closed.
So perhaps I misspoke. Perhaps it is all about politics, because if race is the football, politics is the laces. Perhaps that's why Griffin, like you, has energized a hungry, cynical constituency. (Few are hungrier than Skins fans, or have more cause to be cynical.) Hence those faux Shepard Fairey posters all over town. Surely you've seen them. That word, HOPE, emblazoned beneath Griffin's 10-yard-wide smile. Never mind that the poster makes Griffin look exactly like Eddie Murphy, circa 48 Hours; it rises above parody, achieves a certain poignancy, because it makes clear that, beyond rooting, people truly are hoping. They're hoping for something more than wins, more than titles, something that touches on intangibles like legitimacy and dignity and respect.
I had occasion to meet Griffin the other day. We talked about you. "Cool, calm, collected guy," he said when I asked his impression. You were together, he says, at the National Prayer Breakfast and had a few moments to compare notes on your highly scrutinized, highly symbolic lives. "He's not a normal person," Griffin says. "I'm not a normal person. It's fun when two abnormal people can be normal."
Meaning, you talked sports. Specifically, Griffin says you talked about the quarterback of the Redskins enjoying a place near the capstone of the power pyramid that is DC, which is sick in the head for football and always has been, going back to when President Nixon drew up plays and sent them to Coach Allen. "A lot of people have said DC's my town, it's not Obama's town," Griffin says. "Obama's the second most popular person in the city. I don't look at it that way. But I can see what they're saying."
I wish I'd been at that breakfast. I'd have pointed out how many other things you two have in common besides abnormal lives. Indeed, the next time you and Griffin meet, you should take full stock of your many parallels, big and small. For instance, Griffin, like you, was born in the middle of the Pacific (Okinawa -- both his parents were U.S. Army sergeants). Griffin, like you, is the only son of an iron-willed mother (Jackie -- she's said to attend Redskins practices, and she sat in on film sessions at Baylor). Griffin, like you, is faulted for always running, for not knowing when to stop running. Critics blame this on rigidity, a refusal to compromise. They say you don't listen to opponents; they say Griffin doesn't listen to his body, which isn't so much his opponent as his frenemy. He doesn't bend to its will, doesn't accept its limits.
He disputes all this, of course. He insists that as last season wore on, he became more -- you should forgive the word -- conservative. Take Week 14, he says. He was leveled, laid out, by Baltimore's Haloti Ngata, a behemoth descended from the Kingdom of Tonga who, that day, descended from the sky. The hit caused Griffin's leg to fly straight up in the air, then whipsaw from side to side, like the needle on a lie detector. To which Alex Rodriguez is attached.
"You'll never see anyone get injured like that again," Griffin says. "All 350 pounds of Ngata, all the massiveness that is Haloti Ngata, running at you full speed, and as I'm getting down he hits my leg." Just a "freak" thing, he adds. He was trying to stop running, trying to slide. What more do people want? Everyone harasses Griffin to change his game, he says, "but what everyone doesn't realize is -- I did change my game."
Four weeks later, playing Seattle in the first round of the playoffs, Griffin was favoring his Ngata-fied leg, limping noticeably, when the leg finally gave way. Its fundamental ligaments shredded or snapped or did whatever ligaments do when they commit suicide. He had to be carried off the field.
Fans in DC, you'll recall, came together in one righteous wave of rage. Rage is the fast twitch of fans after any big loss, but this was different. This was frothy, inchoate, bottomless, alarming rage, and it wasn't about the loss of the game, it was about the loss of Griffin, and it always seemed to crescendo with the same baleful lament: Didn't they realize what was at stake? So much hope, fans said, so much possibility, dashed. It was Kierkegaard, Mr. President, who said that too much "possibility" leads to madness. (An aside: Kierkegaard also talked about "the audacity of despair." I'm not sure what he meant -- no one knows what Kierkegaard meant, not even Kierkegaard -- but I thought it was worth mentioning.) The rage set off by Griffin's injury, to my mind, mirrored the hysteria set off by your defeat in the first debate against Mitt Romney. It was that same spluttering apoplexy -- Didn't he realize what was at stake?
More parallels between BHO and RG3. You've spoken of your veneration for Abe Lincoln; Griffin was born on Lincoln's birthday. You're a lawyer; Griffin plans to attend law school. Your theme song: "Hail to the Chief." His: "Hail to the Redskins." (He also wears a chief on his hat.) Even your differences have a certain symmetry. You needed to collect key endorsements in order to reach the Promised Land; Griffin collected his after. (And how. He has more endorsement riches than any other rookie in NFL history.)
Above all, Mr. President, as you and Griffin both enter your second terms, you both, unhappily, have decided to greatly restrict access. (Example: For this piece, Griffin's parents, sisters, fiancée, head coach, offensive coordinator, general manager, team owner, public relations staff and doctors were off-limits.) What this means for the 44th president of the United States, historians will decide; what it means for the 56th starting quarterback of the Washington Redskins seems more readily apparent. He risks becoming a product rather than a person. If he lets his story be told only in canned, staged, micro and micromanaged platforms, his image might go wider, but his relationship with The People will narrow.
Certainly your predecessors (both yours and Griffin's) were prone to concealment. But many of them were doing us a favor with their silence, whereas you and Griffin are interesting. So I beseech you, Mr. President, talk to Griffin, tell him about the evils of sequester. Tell him that sequester, whether forced on you by political foes or self-imposed, is a very bad thing. Being sequestered is good only when you're the jury in a Mafia murder trial.
I anticipate what you might say, Mr President: It's a new world. If Griffin feels the urge to connect with fans, he can speak to them directly, through Twitter, or one of his many commercials. You too prefer social media, videos, speeches, etc., something you joked about last month during (ironically) the Gridiron Dinner. But you -- an author, a memoirist, a beautiful speechwriter -- also appreciate the power of old-fashioned storytelling, and you must concede that even if an athlete can reach fans through Twitter, he can't connect with them, really connect, except through story. And one cannot tell a story 140 characters or 30 seconds at a time.
Griffin's fans know some of his story, but when you talk to them, you can feel it: They want more, more, more. They want to know everything about, say, Copperas Cove, a city of 32,000 in the shadow of Fort Hood. That's where Griffin grew up, and it's kind of rough. Parts of the historic downtown look like the set of a movie in which Tom Cruise or Will Smith is the lone survivor of a holocaust or plague. Griffin, however, didn't feel the full brunt of his surroundings, the full wrack and pain of poverty, thanks to his dad. "He would not eat to get me a new pair of shoes," Griffin says. "If I needed basketball shoes, they were there."
http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/page...rt-griffin-iii-voice-generation-espn-magazine
Yes, he can ...
... be the most transformative athlete, role model and voice of a generation
By J.R. Moehringer | ESPN The Magazine
DEAR MR. PRESIDENT,
I'm writing to you on behalf of a young man who recently moved to your district. He's a 23-year-old native of Copperas Cove, Texas, a recent graduate of Baylor University, and it's my hope that you might offer him some guidance. It's my fear that you're the only person who can. His name is Robert Griffin III. You have a passing, public acquaintance with Mr. Griffin, of course, but I suspect you root for him privately, perhaps intensely, perhaps more than you realize, and how could you not? In many ways Mr. Griffin is you, and you are him.
I don't mean politically. As you know, Mr. Griffin is staunchly apolitical, won't declare himself Democrat or Republican, counts members of both parties among his close friends. One of his favorite professors at Baylor, a Molly Ivins type, says Griffin talked in class like an impassioned liberal, whereas Baylor's president, Judge Ken Starr, one of the most famous conservatives in recent years, speaks of Griffin like a son. No, the comparison between you and Griffin stems from things other than politics, things such as your origins, and the galvanizing effect you have on others, and the manner in which you both burst onto the scene.
Like you, Griffin started with an entrenched core of ardent believers, which grew and grew. In the past year, his popularity has exploded, radiated outward in ever widening circles, and recently the NFL announced that Griffin's jersey is the best-selling single-season jersey of all time.
Think of that, Mr. President. Think of the legends Griffin surpassed in reaching that milestone. Montana, Favre, Marino, Aikman -- this young man has outsold them all. As a purely factual matter, Griffin hasn't done enough in his short career to outsell Tiki Barber, but numbers don't lie; the public, like the heart, wants what it wants. So the question is, why do they want it? Yes, Griffin was Offensive Rookie of the Year. Yes, he completed 66 percent of his passes, threw 20 TDs against five picks. Nice. Fine. But Griffinmania can't be about stats, any more than "Obama Girl" was about your time as senator. Fans and nonfans, red states and blue, are rocking the burgandy-and-gold because they see in Griffin things that aren't quite there, at least not yet. They see Griffin as more than a football player, in the same way that your fans (and critics) see you as more than a president.
Of course one can't overlook the power of Faith. On a chain around his neck, with his fiancée's high school ring, Griffin wears a scripture-etched dog tag: For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. So maybe he's the second coming of Tebow, the savior for whom a vast flock has been waiting, religious and accurate. (In which case, may God have mercy on those secondaries.)
Also, one can't overlook race. It's worth noting that Griffin plays for the only team in the NFL named after pigmentation. Also, the Redskins were the last team, the very last, to desegregate. Against the backdrop of such fraught imagery and regrettable history, the Redskins chose Griffin with the second pick in last year's draft, and all at once the team's African-American fans found themselves in possession of an unexpected, delicious source of pride, a black quarterback who ranked among the best and brightest in his class, maybe his generation. Yes, there was Doug Williams, long ago. But this was different somehow. This was real change -- revolutionary change. As in 2008, there was much rejoicing on the Mall.
Like you, Mr. President, Griffin promises to transcend old rules, to smash ancient barriers. Like you, he challenges fixed ideas, especially the one about great promise versus consummate virtuosity. In the same dismissive way that people mention your oratory prowess -- implying it's innate, therefore not earned, not real -- they mention Griffin's speed. Flash, sans fire, that's the underlying dig. Promise, like beauty, is skin deep, and virtuosity, mastery, genuine excellence, is the only thing that counts; thus many predict that you and Griffin will fail. Thus, many need you to succeed.
For too long, African-American quarterbacks have been like Internet stocks. They bubble up, everyone gets excited, then the bubble bursts. Then everyone becomes doubly excited, and doubly fearful, about the next one. With so much at stake, or perceived to be at stake, it's natural that people get nervous and use big nonsensical words (postracial, transformational) in trying to describe Griffin, the same words they use to describe you. In Griffin's case, what they're often euphonically tiptoeing around is intelligence. Griffin -- A student, candidate for a master's degree -- offers hope to countless African-Americans that the gap between Randall Cunningham/Donovan McNabb/Warren Moon and Dan Fouts/Jim Kelly/Dan Marino, though illusory, can finally be closed.
So perhaps I misspoke. Perhaps it is all about politics, because if race is the football, politics is the laces. Perhaps that's why Griffin, like you, has energized a hungry, cynical constituency. (Few are hungrier than Skins fans, or have more cause to be cynical.) Hence those faux Shepard Fairey posters all over town. Surely you've seen them. That word, HOPE, emblazoned beneath Griffin's 10-yard-wide smile. Never mind that the poster makes Griffin look exactly like Eddie Murphy, circa 48 Hours; it rises above parody, achieves a certain poignancy, because it makes clear that, beyond rooting, people truly are hoping. They're hoping for something more than wins, more than titles, something that touches on intangibles like legitimacy and dignity and respect.
I had occasion to meet Griffin the other day. We talked about you. "Cool, calm, collected guy," he said when I asked his impression. You were together, he says, at the National Prayer Breakfast and had a few moments to compare notes on your highly scrutinized, highly symbolic lives. "He's not a normal person," Griffin says. "I'm not a normal person. It's fun when two abnormal people can be normal."
Meaning, you talked sports. Specifically, Griffin says you talked about the quarterback of the Redskins enjoying a place near the capstone of the power pyramid that is DC, which is sick in the head for football and always has been, going back to when President Nixon drew up plays and sent them to Coach Allen. "A lot of people have said DC's my town, it's not Obama's town," Griffin says. "Obama's the second most popular person in the city. I don't look at it that way. But I can see what they're saying."
I wish I'd been at that breakfast. I'd have pointed out how many other things you two have in common besides abnormal lives. Indeed, the next time you and Griffin meet, you should take full stock of your many parallels, big and small. For instance, Griffin, like you, was born in the middle of the Pacific (Okinawa -- both his parents were U.S. Army sergeants). Griffin, like you, is the only son of an iron-willed mother (Jackie -- she's said to attend Redskins practices, and she sat in on film sessions at Baylor). Griffin, like you, is faulted for always running, for not knowing when to stop running. Critics blame this on rigidity, a refusal to compromise. They say you don't listen to opponents; they say Griffin doesn't listen to his body, which isn't so much his opponent as his frenemy. He doesn't bend to its will, doesn't accept its limits.
He disputes all this, of course. He insists that as last season wore on, he became more -- you should forgive the word -- conservative. Take Week 14, he says. He was leveled, laid out, by Baltimore's Haloti Ngata, a behemoth descended from the Kingdom of Tonga who, that day, descended from the sky. The hit caused Griffin's leg to fly straight up in the air, then whipsaw from side to side, like the needle on a lie detector. To which Alex Rodriguez is attached.
"You'll never see anyone get injured like that again," Griffin says. "All 350 pounds of Ngata, all the massiveness that is Haloti Ngata, running at you full speed, and as I'm getting down he hits my leg." Just a "freak" thing, he adds. He was trying to stop running, trying to slide. What more do people want? Everyone harasses Griffin to change his game, he says, "but what everyone doesn't realize is -- I did change my game."
Four weeks later, playing Seattle in the first round of the playoffs, Griffin was favoring his Ngata-fied leg, limping noticeably, when the leg finally gave way. Its fundamental ligaments shredded or snapped or did whatever ligaments do when they commit suicide. He had to be carried off the field.
Fans in DC, you'll recall, came together in one righteous wave of rage. Rage is the fast twitch of fans after any big loss, but this was different. This was frothy, inchoate, bottomless, alarming rage, and it wasn't about the loss of the game, it was about the loss of Griffin, and it always seemed to crescendo with the same baleful lament: Didn't they realize what was at stake? So much hope, fans said, so much possibility, dashed. It was Kierkegaard, Mr. President, who said that too much "possibility" leads to madness. (An aside: Kierkegaard also talked about "the audacity of despair." I'm not sure what he meant -- no one knows what Kierkegaard meant, not even Kierkegaard -- but I thought it was worth mentioning.) The rage set off by Griffin's injury, to my mind, mirrored the hysteria set off by your defeat in the first debate against Mitt Romney. It was that same spluttering apoplexy -- Didn't he realize what was at stake?
More parallels between BHO and RG3. You've spoken of your veneration for Abe Lincoln; Griffin was born on Lincoln's birthday. You're a lawyer; Griffin plans to attend law school. Your theme song: "Hail to the Chief." His: "Hail to the Redskins." (He also wears a chief on his hat.) Even your differences have a certain symmetry. You needed to collect key endorsements in order to reach the Promised Land; Griffin collected his after. (And how. He has more endorsement riches than any other rookie in NFL history.)
Above all, Mr. President, as you and Griffin both enter your second terms, you both, unhappily, have decided to greatly restrict access. (Example: For this piece, Griffin's parents, sisters, fiancée, head coach, offensive coordinator, general manager, team owner, public relations staff and doctors were off-limits.) What this means for the 44th president of the United States, historians will decide; what it means for the 56th starting quarterback of the Washington Redskins seems more readily apparent. He risks becoming a product rather than a person. If he lets his story be told only in canned, staged, micro and micromanaged platforms, his image might go wider, but his relationship with The People will narrow.
Certainly your predecessors (both yours and Griffin's) were prone to concealment. But many of them were doing us a favor with their silence, whereas you and Griffin are interesting. So I beseech you, Mr. President, talk to Griffin, tell him about the evils of sequester. Tell him that sequester, whether forced on you by political foes or self-imposed, is a very bad thing. Being sequestered is good only when you're the jury in a Mafia murder trial.
I anticipate what you might say, Mr President: It's a new world. If Griffin feels the urge to connect with fans, he can speak to them directly, through Twitter, or one of his many commercials. You too prefer social media, videos, speeches, etc., something you joked about last month during (ironically) the Gridiron Dinner. But you -- an author, a memoirist, a beautiful speechwriter -- also appreciate the power of old-fashioned storytelling, and you must concede that even if an athlete can reach fans through Twitter, he can't connect with them, really connect, except through story. And one cannot tell a story 140 characters or 30 seconds at a time.
Griffin's fans know some of his story, but when you talk to them, you can feel it: They want more, more, more. They want to know everything about, say, Copperas Cove, a city of 32,000 in the shadow of Fort Hood. That's where Griffin grew up, and it's kind of rough. Parts of the historic downtown look like the set of a movie in which Tom Cruise or Will Smith is the lone survivor of a holocaust or plague. Griffin, however, didn't feel the full brunt of his surroundings, the full wrack and pain of poverty, thanks to his dad. "He would not eat to get me a new pair of shoes," Griffin says. "If I needed basketball shoes, they were there."
