I Saw a Man Dropkick a Cat
On Personal Growth and Michigan Football (Actual Cat Not Pictured)
I am going to tell you a story that sounds made up. It is not.
The other day, I was having a heart-to-heart phone call with my mother about how I am a magnet for unfortunate and odd situations when I spotted an old man and a stray cat walking toward each other on the sidewalk.
From where I sat, pulled over on a quiet Los Angeles side street, it looked like old friends reuniting. The man bent down with quite a bit of effort. The cat curled around him. The man gave him a kind pat on the head. The cat crooked his head, shut his eyes, and presumably purred.
The man then opened his arms. The cat walked into them, allowing the man to cradle and pick him up. I was too far away to hear anything, but the man appeared to be speaking sweet nothings.
Then the cat must’ve changed his mind. I presume he knicked him with a claw and a hiss, because the old man dropped the cat at an odd angle and sent his foot into the side of the cat’s abdomen, sending him flying, spinning like a football, until he landed on his back several yards away, rolled onto his feet, and scurried beneath the nearest hatchback.
It took me about 10 to 20 seconds to process what I’d just witnessed. When I rejoined reality, my mother was mid-7th Heaven monologue about how I wasn’t a magnet for misfortune.
I said, “Mom, I’m sorry to interrupt, but I just saw a man dropkick a cat.”
I thought about the old man during the buildup to this year’s Michigan-Ohio State game. Michigan’s punting unit had been pedestrian all year, teetering on the edge of mediocrity and threatening to become capital-B Bad at any given moment.
“That old guy’s punting mechanics were pretty good,” I’d catch myself thinking. “He had great form. He probably has arthritis and he didn’t kick the cat very far, but cats aren’t very aerodynamic anyway. I wonder if he’s got any eligibility left.”
As if by thinking about this, I foreshadowed and thus guaranteed something bad would happen with Michigan’s punting. At a key moment in the game, the Wolverines punted for a mere 11 yards. The bizarre trajectory defied comprehension. It must’ve been caused by some combination of the ball landing at a bad angle on the punter’s foot and the snow flurries that were starting up.
That was another thing that I was counting on in the build-up to the game. Snow and wind. Ohio State’s offense always features an explosive passing game, but if a snowstorm hit, the Wolverines could make the afternoon a pound-and-ground slugfest, something I felt would put them at a major advantage.
I say that because Michigan’s freshman running back, Jordan Marshall, is unlike any back I’ve ever seen. If a play is blocked in such a way that he should only get two yards, he’s going to get you five because he’s going to drag his tackler ten feet. He runs with such strength and acceleration that my brain makes a “bonk” noise every time he puts a shoulder into a linebacker. Michigan has a tradition of power backs like him, but there hasn’t been one in recent memory who causes seismic activity when his cleats stab the turf.
The snow did not come in the first half, and it did not come after Jordan Marshall went down with a shoulder injury, leaving Michigan’s ground attack in the hands of a walk-on who is perfectly adequate but can’t make a wall fall down just by looking at it.
When the snow did come, it was during the second half, by which point Michigan was in a hole and needed to start slinging it if they were going to have any hope of victory. The weather made the difficult task impossible.
I realized the game was effectively over. I picked up the monkey paw I wished for snow on and chucked it in the garbage.
In the postgame press conference, Michigan’s head coach took the blame for the loss, but clearly, this one’s on me and my cosmic magnetism for misfortune.
I’m joking. This is a riff on my tendency toward what I call negative narcissism. Many people are afflicted with this disorder. You think the world revolves around you, but only the bad parts.
Were I being serious, it would still be a healthier pattern of thinking than what some of Michigan’s online football obsessives are experiencing. They are throwing a conniption, mostly over their quarterback’s performance and the defensive playcaller.
I’ve little to say about the hot takes on the defensive coordinator, Wink Martindale. He is not a good fit for the program. He is approaching 70. He should take his millions and retire. He could take up fishing. Maybe painting. I don’t care what the hobby is so long as it isn’t telling Michigan’s defense what to do.
I’ve more to say about the quarterback situation. Despite coming into the year with tremendous hype, Bryce Underwood’s season stats are not especially awe-inspiring. He was held under 110 yards in three games. He’ll end the regular season with under 2,000 passing yards and a dismal 7:5 touchdown-to-interception ratio.
Underwood had a couple of things working against him. The most obvious is his youth and inexperience. He is a freshman. He turned 18 less than two weeks before the start of the season. He is basically a baby. A 6’4”, 230-pound baby, but nevertheless a baby.
Babies make stupid decisions. They put forks in electrical outlets. They try to force square pegs into round holes. They get distracted by jangling keys. They’re adorable one moment and shitting their diapers the next. This is the natural order of things.
But babies do learn. They learn that square pegs go into square holes, that jangling keys aren’t interesting, that combining metal and electricity will kill you, and, most importantly, to shit in toilets and not their pants.
This is called personal growth. It does not happen all at once. “Better today than yesterday, better tomorrow than today,” is an aphorism. “One step forward, one step back” is the reality. What you hope and pray and work for is a breakthrough, but those are minutes, hours, days, weeks, and years in the making. Progress is not linear.
Watching student athletes go through that is a feature, not a bug, of college sports. In an era of instant gratification, of an emphasis on payoff and not the humanity that makes it possible, we lose sight of the appreciation of a narrative arc.
Michigan’s 2023 National Championship was so sweet, not because of how impressive the team performed (though it was impressive), but because of all the failures that came before it and how much the team changed over the three-year window they competed for it.
And it’s for that reason I am looking forward to the next two years of Michigan football. This year’s roster is very green, but you can see the potential in Underwood, Marshall, and all the other youths wearing maize and blue.
I suppose potential is just a type of hope, and hope is the most addictive substance on the planet. It’s why people watch sports. It’s why they gamble. “As long as the red dice are in the air,” Norm MacDonald wrote in his book Based on a True Story, “the gambler has hope. And hope is a wonderful thing to be addicted to.”