Logic In the Mist

Never underestimate the kind of crazy it takes to excel as a pro linebacker.

A brief local news item picked up by MSNBC.com is garnering some notice in this dead offseason. Pittsburgh backer James Harrison is refusing President Obama's White House invitation.

It is of course a photo op tradition, the Super Bowl winning team descends upon the White House to shake hands with the Prez and present him with a team jersey numbered according to the latest Super Bowl.

Okay. So Harrison is a staunch conservative who is still distraught at McCain's horrid loss? Nope.

"This is how I feel -- if you want to see the Pittsburgh Steelers, invite us when we don't win the Super Bowl. As far as I'm concerned, he [Obama] would've invited Arizona if they had won," said Harrison.

Yup, James, that's pretty much true. If the Cardinals would've won, then, yes, they would have the privilege of meeting the President of the United States of America. You know, a privilege not everyone gets.

I had forgotten that Harrison pulled the same thing after Super Bowl 40 when Harrison was a special teams demon, not a starter. At that time, Harrison's decision was odd. I think many of us wrote it off as a confused political statement.

And really Harrison's first White House boycott was a weird but fitting conclusion to a Steelers championship which was flush with similar craziness. Remember Joey Porter's bizarre pregame claims? The Steelers were six seeds in the AFC facing a one-seed Seahwaks team yet many writers pegged Pittsburgh the favorite. Porter took those predictions as a sign of *disrespect* to the team's underdog status and yelled about it much of the week leading up to the game.

When Harrison, a little known player, chose to skip the White House handshake with President Bush, it really just seemed like another small piece of the collective madness.

Instead, as evidenced by Harrison's second skip, fresh off his Defensive Player of the Year season, his decision is a significant glimpse of what makes insane competitors tick. Against all logic, Harrison seems to believe that the President should feel privileged to meet the Steelers coaches and players. The implication persists that the President is jumping the bandwagon.

But I think most importantly, Harrison is displaying a complete disregard for hallowed forms or venerated traditions. To succeed in a world as bizarre as pro sports, the athlete must believe anything possible, that limitations apply to other people, and there is nothing that he or she doesn't deserve if the requisite hard work is put in.

I often go back and forth with a coworker about sports stars. This coworker chafes at any player who even remotely comes off as cocky or swaggering (members of the Boston Celtics excepted). I'm constantly laying the case for the importance of ego in sports, and not just for the oft-repeated narrative involving hubris.

The psyche of the athlete is a bizarre and sometimes fascinating place. Sure, Kobe Bryant is an awful human being but you can't fault him for his notion that he is somehow better than everyone else, because, well, there's some truth to it.

Athletes in the course of their work don't necessarily better the world in any measurable way. Sure, plenty of wealthy sports stars donate money and time to charity work, start their own foundations, and give back to communities. But that's more a function of wealth than sports. If players made no more than their forebearers in pro sports, I'm sure the amount of charity work undertaken among pro athletes would fall in lines with its variation among the middle class.

Yet sports do benefit the world at large, if not in an obvious way. It's this notion of pushing the human form to its limits in order to extract the absolute best from it. While the human brain is our greatest asset, pro sports functions as a laboratory of sorts, how that greatest asset is put to use to maximize the excellence of our greatest limitation, our bodies.

Take a gander around the animal kingdom. Compared to other species near the top of the food chain, humans are slow and weak and small. Our bodies are that which fail us. But for whatever reason we must confront with the limitations of our forms.

Sports, in a broad sense, is a repudiation that we aren't fast or strong or big enough. The most physically gifted among us, pushing themselves as far as they can go on a physical plane, is almost required to have a hearty disdain for limitations. It's an unique mindset, but it is primarily just that, a state of mind. Like the approach of any kind of greatness in human endeavor, that state of mind is going to seem more than a little off to those of us who muddle around the middle of human existence.

So James Harrison's decision to rebuff Obama's invitation is culturally idiotic. The most powerful man on this Earth and his requests should not be taken lightly. But in a philosophical sense, in an evolutionary sense, Harrison's reasoning is something to be expected even if - no - especially because it smacks of hubris.