McKee's McThoughts: Candy Toughness

Around here, we call this “Stick Season.”
The leaves are gone, the trees bare and nobody comes visiting.
     I like it for many reasons. One is that I’ve got a sweet tooth and this is the start of a candy season that stretches clear through New Year’s Day.
     Halloween definitely assures a bounty of candy. Bowls of it are in every household and most businesses. At the friendly market downtown—or up street as some folks say—all the shelves closest to the cashiers are full of bags of tiny candy bars. Yum.
     It’s one of the reasons people of other nations view us with a lack of understanding. Oh, they understand candy well enough, but dressing up in costume (or dressing up the kids) and going door to door yelling out “trick or treat,” that leaves ’em a bit baffled. All the better. We’re a mystery and that’s good for a team that runs short on having an edge after the second month on someone else’s soil.
Around here, we call this “Stick Season.”
The leaves are gone, the trees bare and nobody comes visiting.
     I like it for many reasons. One is that I’ve got a sweet tooth and this is the start of a candy season that stretches clear through New Year’s Day.
     Halloween definitely assures a bounty of candy. Bowls of it are in every household and most businesses. At the friendly market downtown—or up street as some folks say—all the shelves closest to the cashiers are full of bags of tiny candy bars. Yum.
     It’s one of the reasons people of other nations view us with a lack of understanding. Oh, they understand candy well enough, but dressing up in costume (or dressing up the kids) and going door to door yelling out “trick or treat,” that leaves ’em a bit baffled. All the better. We’re a mystery and that’s good for a team that runs short on having an edge after the second month on someone else’s soil.
     Halloween is an admittedly odd concept, but Americans definitely love it. More money is spent in the celebration of Halloween than any other holiday save Christmas. There may be a financial crisis going on, but there’s been no shortage of candy treats.
     That’s right, you Euro alpine nations, we really are pretty weird. Even in our Bible Belt we can do this sugar-fueled pagan ritual holiday with the best of them.
     We like some odd sports, too. Baseball, for instance, causes a lot of yawns among casual viewers from across the big pond. Especially in a rainstorm, it seems. I wonder, though, if having the World Series snowed out for the first time in history might not signal a climate change.
     I get a kick out of baseball injuries. A blister can bring the whole medical staff out on the field.
     Not like that in football. In football it’s not an injury if you can still walk. That’s more the American attitude. “No blood, no foul,” is the playground refrain.
     Football is an American man’s sport.
     Jack Youngblood once played through the playoffs with a broken leg. That’s tough.
     I’d say it’s almost as tough as Renate Goetschl racing downhill on a broken leg, which she did in 2007. Which puts more stress on the appendage, skiing or football? Which is more impressive?
     Renate got two wins and a second on that leg. In ski racing, our women are pretty tough, too.
     So don’t even talk to us about toughness.
     I cringed, just like anybody else, at the endless video loops of Joe Theisman’s leg being snapped in a couple of places, but folks, he’s still walking around. Matthias Lanzinger, not so much, after having his leg amputated following last season’s crash in Norway.
     I won’t take sides in Lanzinger’s lawsuit against the FIS and the organizers at Kvitfjell, nor offer any opinion as to what was done, or not done expediently after that injury. But I will make this point: It’s all a matter of money.
     At least football players know they can expect the best care money can buy. They are in a high-profile sport, the highest in our country. Skiing is not a major league sport and likely never will be. The FIS is trying and trying hard to meet the level of a) protection and b) response to accidents of bigger and better financed sports. That’s a pretty tough road to navigate with lots of gnarly twists to contend with. Football, with billions of dollars, simply builds interstate highways. They’re easier to navigate. Sort of like the difference between transporting an accident victim from the side of a mountain to a medical facility miles away versus from a flat field to a full medical facility next to the locker room. We Americans might not know much about balancing a national budget, but by gum we protect our sports celebrities.
     Skiing can talk the talk, but walking it is going to mean more than a ski patrol shack at the bottom of the ski area. If the top athletes are going to be in town, there had better be a mighty good local facility, where, in the worse case scenario, the patient can at least be properly stabilized and prepared for transport. And if it’s available for the celebrity, let’s make it available for everybody.
     Playing in the big leagues means paying the price.
     Maybe we can pay it in candy.