It was along about the second quarter of Saturday’s (September 14, 2013) Texas A & M vs. Alabama game when Johnny Manziel, aka Johnny Football, A & M’s quarterback and last year’s Heisman Trophy winner as a redshirt freshman, already with two touchdown passes under his belt against the erstwhile vaunted Alabama defense, was in trouble. Alabama’s defensive lineman had penetrated protection and were in hot pursuit of Manziel. He twisted free of one tackler and back-pedaled to give himself some room. Just as the Alabama defense was closing in, finally, to throw Manziel for what was sure to be a huge loss, Manziel lobbed a pass off his back foot. The ball shot skyward straight down the center of the field, managing to sail about twenty yards past the line of scrimmage—a total of about forty yards from where he had launched the pass on nothing but the strength of his arm. Ordinarily, a quarterback who throws a pass high and down the middle pays for it with an interception. Not this time. Manziel’s receiver happened to be in just the right position to leap over the Alabama defender and haul in the pass. It was, as Verne Lundquist and Gary Daniels, CBS announcers for this year’s iteration of the “Game of the Century”, put it, “Magic”.
Before A & M had time to run another play, Verne and Gary, voicing over the onscreen replay of the incredible scramble, pass and reception, observed that it looked like the play might be the signature play of the game, in the same vein of Manziel’s acrobatic retrieval of his own fumble while scrambling and then launching a touchdown pass through a befuddled Alabama defense had been the signature play of last year’s matchup. Last year’s play had been on an endless replay loop in the buildup to this year’s game. And it undoubtedly was the signature play of that game, showing off Manziel’s incredible athletic prowess and creativity under pressure, while encapsulating how confused and unlucky Alabama’s defensive effort had seemed. Last year’s signature play had given A & M an unlikely twenty point lead over Alabama, a deficit from which they never recovered.
But Manziel”s escape from Alabama’s clutches this year to launch an air ball that should have been intercepted save Manziel’s magic was not to be the play of the game this year. Two plays later, when it looked a near certainty that Manziel would put his A & M team back up by 14 points, and while under no pressure from Alabama’s defenders, he tossed another air ball into the end zone. This time, the magic failed. Alabama intercepted in the end zone, and went on to score twenty-eight unanswered points, taking a two-touchdown lead into the locker room for half-time. The game was far from over at that point, but that interception marked the turning point. Had Manziel answered Alabama’s first touchdown with another score to stay ahead by two touchdowns, the outcome of the game would almost certainly have been different. In the broadcast booth, Verne and Gary were at least two plays too early in calling the game’s “signature play”, and since the season has barely begun, it’s not even clear any of the possibly significant plays in the game will much matter by the time it’s all said and done.
Thus is revealed, through a Saturday afternoon of college football, a bit about how history is made. Nobody knows until a conflict is resolved—often not until well after resolution—what is significant and what is irrelevant so far as the course of the conflict is concerned. Inflection points are only ascertainable after the dust settles and the smoke clears. Only very rarely is it possible to call them as they occur, and even then, mainly only by getting lucky. And it should be remembered—history is always about conflict of some sort or another– whether it’s about football games, or civil wars or imperial expansion—the history of history is conflict.
Robert E Lee might have suspected, had he been as militarily brilliant as his admirers claim, that his command to charge the fortified Union positions on Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg would herald the demise of the Confederate war effort. But neither he nor anybody else conclusively knew as much. Nobody knew that more than just the soldiers making the charge up the hill were committing suicide in the cause that day; that Lee’s order would effectively break the Confederacy’s military back. Pickett’s charge proved to be the turning point in the Civil War, but it was many years after the fact until it was generally accepted as such.
No one considered in July of 2007, when a couple of Bear Stearns subprime mortgage collateral debt obligations failed, that the financial system of the whole world would be teetering on the edge of collapse in little more than a year. People perhaps understood that the US housing market, particularly the subprime mortgage financing portion of it, was way overbought. But did anyone really understand that the failure of two relatively insignificant subprime CDO’s would ultimately bring down Bear Stearns; that it would force the nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the two government sponsored mortgage finance giants); that it would precipitate the failure of a sister investment bank, Lehman Brothers, and that it would force a government rescue of two of the three domestic automobile manufacturers? Those two CDO’s is where it all started. Their failure revealed the brazen stupidity upon which Bear Stearns’ investment assumptions were founded. Everything that followed was just a cascading avalanche of revealed stupidity among others.
Though Lehman’s bankruptcy is often considered the nadir of the crisis (or its apex, as you prefer), and therefore the more important inflection point, Bear Stearns’ failure set the events in motion that would eventually claim Lehman and several other large mortgage and commercial banks. But we still don’t know in which direction things might lead from the financial crisis and its attendant recession. Was the financial crisis simply an abrupt edge we slipped off along the highway to ever growing prosperity, one from which we quickly recovered? Or, was it a harbinger of harder times to come? We’ll have to wait on history to arrive and pass before we can know.
Who in ancient Rome could have imagined that Hannibal’s daring alpine crossing was just a way point on the path toward the ultimate annihilation and destruction of Carthage? The Carthaginian Hannibal crossed the Alps with his elephant calvary to range over the Roman countryside, defeating Roman legions seemingly at will. But Rome itself never fell, which is perhaps the historical marker that matters most. As it would take a half-century after Hannibal before Rome finally and completely defeated Carthage, it is doubtful anyone at the time understood that the limits of Hannibal’s success presaged Carthaginian decline and defeat.
A great many people undoubtedly considered when they cast their vote for Barack Obama in 2008, that they were making history by helping elect the first black President in US history. But history is rarely made by those trying to make it, and even when something remarkable happens, it rarely turns out that it is the same remarkable something who those deliberately trying to make history intended. Time will tell the significance of Obama’s election, and whether his black ancestry has had any role, or the intended role, in the manner of its significance. It may well be that Obama’s election as the first black president marked an inflection point in the silliness of the American polity. It is a rather luxurious indulgence to elect a candidate for an important job on the basis of his genetic heritage. If Obama’s retreat in Syria proves to mark the first visible sign of the declining fortunes of the American Empire, Obama’s election might be seen as the point where America abandoned its serious role as leader and protector of the free world for idle luxuries, like assuaging the guilt for all it had done to get there.
The point is that nobody knows, as it happens, what will be historically significant and why.
The 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon appeared to have had immediate and lasting significance, but will our descendants agree a hundred years from now? The alleged attack on the USS Maine in Havana harbor over a hundred years ago seemed to have had an immediate and lasting significance at the time (1898), but school children today learn of the Maine as a niggling part of a much larger and broader conflict between the US and Spain. The American empire was growing in power and influence, taking the place of the receding Spanish Empire. Had there not been a Maine, the US would have had to invent one (which some allege is exactly what happened). Perhaps the same will be said of the World Trade Center towers a hundred years hence. Or the Syrian retreat. There is no way to know exactly which direction history is leading, so there is no way to conclusively know what are its inflection points.
In college football, where every year there seems to be a dozen or more “Game[s] of the Century”, the history cycle is short. But even during the course of a season, there is no way to tell which game, and certainly not which play in a particular game, is an inflection point. If Alabama goes on to lose three or four games this year, as I expect they may, the A & M game will stand as one they managed to win, even as poorly as they overall played. If A & M figures out how to corral Manziel’s peculiar mania in a way that renders wins instead of just spectacular plays, and goes on to win out and play for the BCS championship, nobody will remember the two critical interceptions he threw in the Alabama game.
Last season’s significant play, where Manziel acrobatically retrieved his own fumble and then threw a pass to the end zone for a touchdown, did not gain its significance until the season had concluded, and Manziel’s A & M victory proved to be the only blemish on Alabama’s second straight season as BCS champion. We can’t know what play or plays or game will ultimately tell the tale for the Tide’s and A & M’s fortunes this year. But at least we got, compliments of Verne and Gary of CBS Sports, a micro-lesson in the perils of assuming it is possible to know today what will be significant tomorrow.
Their assessment of the play of the game was nullified just two downs later. Who’s to say when the financial crisis, or Obama’s presidency, or the attacks on 9-11, or the Syrian diplomatic debacle will be fully and properly understood? History has no season. A football season is not its proper metaphor. The conflicts of history take eons to manifest and resolve. All we can know for certain is that we don’t know for certain anything about the future. To believe otherwise implies a myopia that approaches hubris, an example of which Verne and Gary unwittingly provided.