Max Matters
Were you watching? I know there was Christmas shopping to do and there were leaves to rake and there was a World Cup to mourn. But on Saturday, I hope you got the chance to watch Max Duggan play. Even if you don’t care much for football. Even if you detest the brutality of the gladiator game or disagree vehemently with the commercialism that’s crept into all, but most particularly, this collegiate sport. I hope you watched the red-headed kid from Iowa who plays football in Ft. Worth. He’s why coaches coach and players play and people cannot get their fill of games.
If you wonder why sports matter, you should watch Max Duggan play.
Max Duggan’s story could be a made-for-tv movie. The cliff notes go something like this: Duggan played high school football for his dad at Lewis Central High School in Council Bluffs, Iowa. He then chose to play collegiately for Gary Patterson at Texas Christian University where he started at quarterback as a freshman. As a sophomore, he led the Horned Frogs during the augmented COVID season. Then after the discovery of a heart condition called Wolf-Parkinson-White Syndrome, found in random COVID testing, he had a nine-hour heart surgery, followed by a blood clot. Then, he played for a year on a broken foot. The following season, his head coach resigned on the precipice of being fired, and Duggan stayed. Then in this, his senior season, he got demoted. Three quarters into the first game of this year, when the guy ahead of him hurt his knee, he returned to his starting position, promptly leading his team to an undefeated regular season, where he was named the Big 12 Offensive Player of the Year. On Saturday, his TCU Horned Frogs lost in overtime to Kansas State in the Big 12 Championship game, despite his finishing with 250 yards passing, 110 yards rushing and two total touchdowns on the day.
Retrieved from https://www.dallasnews.com/
But this isn’t really about any of that. Those are just the facts. You can find them anywhere in much more jaw-dropping detail than I have outlined here. This is not about what Max Duggan has done.
Duggan is a Heisman Trophy candidate, so he’s skilled and talented and knowledgeable in all the necessary big-time player kinds of ways. He’s a good passer. A hard-nosed runner. A thinker, a reader, a reactor, a playmaker. But mostly he’s a winner. Even if and when he doesn’t win.
That’s what this is about. The kind of winning that far outlives any final score.
On Saturday, all afternoon, Max Duggan’s will was on display. He stayed in the pocket, survived the hits, and bulled his way through holes that weren’t there until he made them. On more than one occasion, it seemed as if his team was finished for the day. But Duggan never blinked. He’d re-enter the huddle, re-invent an opportunity, and re-draw the boundaries that most of us run into and slide down when we are spent. On his final carry, in overtime, he tucked the ball on a keeper and raced for the goal line on a wide arc to the left. Whatever aches we had quit hurting as we watched him lurch and reach. The proximity of the football to the four inch yellow line that marked the endzone could not have been any closer no matter how many times the landing was re-played, but the evidence was conclusive: the ball did not break the plane. And what the camera caught with every rewind was a heart without its wrapping plastered across the quarterback’s face.
Rarely are we awarded a glimpse into such an unvarnished soul.
At that moment, it never mattered less who would go on to win the game, though throngs of folks from across the country would beg to differ. So many fiscal and prideful things were hinging on the final score. Championship hardware was being engraved. Hats and t-shirts preemptively printed were being organized for dissemination. The college football play-off pairings were teetering in the wind.
But winning had already happened. The score would be eclipsed by how Max Duggan played the game.
Life dupes us sometimes into thinking that winning is lots of things it isn’t. We start thinking it’s trophies and banners and records and rings. We let ourselves get coaxed into believing that it’s looking better or having more or outdoing everybody else. But that’s not really winning. Winning has very little to do with appearing perfect or with what the other guy does or doesn’t do. And it has next to nothing to do with what we get at the end.
Everybody watching Saturday got, among many other things, a reminder of what want-to looks like. In a world of plastic and filters where effort is often curbed in favor of looking good, we got a free ticket past the posturing and the showboating. We got to witness a competitor who cut all possible tethers as he unabashedly went for broke.
And how he went about it gave us all a B-12 shot.
People everywhere—little kids, aspiring high school athletes, new parents, middle aged professionals, retirees looking at new horizons, the elderly who feel like they’ve run for a touchdown when they transfer from the recliner to the bed---got a little gift of juice. Juice laced with a by-the-way reminder that we are people and not chairs. We can do something about almost anything. I guess in a way Max Duggan handed us all a little hope.
It won’t matter in 5 or 10 or 20 years who won the Big 12 title game last Saturday (except, of course, to those who live in yesterday). But everyone who watched it got something that does matter to take with us as we go.
I stayed stuck to the television screen on Saturday as the camera in the heart of Texas stayed stuck on number 15. Kansas State was celebrating madly, as they so deserved to do, but I was with the winner kneeling on the sideline. The guy with bloodied knees and elbows and giant, yearning eyes. I wanted to gather up his sinew and scatter it in the wind so that everybody could get some on them.
We’d all be a little bit better if we had a smidge of him.
P.S. Santana - Winning