Cultural Appropriation and the Tale of Two Steelers
This is an old story, but it bears repeating:
45 years ago, Moose [Murphy] was the strongest kid in school. That was the word among those of us who kept our distance and spoke of him only in hushed tones. Murphy was year older than I was and sported a wild, curly mop of hair and crazy, fast eyes with which he sought victims to terrorize.
This was as we were leaving elementary school and heading into junior high. Moose, with his big husky body, was a dominant athlete. I can remember him wearing his football jersey on game days, pushing kids around in the hall.
In high school, I largely lost track of Moose, since I was going to a Catholic prep school a few towns away. From time to time though, he would make a nuisance of himself. Moose was the kind of bully who would swoop into the center of a pond hockey game, steal the puck and then lead everyone off on a chase, passing the puck back and forth with one of his laughing goons.
About a year or two into high school, early in my strength apprenticeship, I was with a pair of friends at a local school field, tossing around a football, when one of them suddenly froze in place, his eyes looking past me. Moose Murphy and two other thugs were heading toward us. We all stopped what we were doing. Every kid who’s ever been through one of these showdowns knows that ‘trapped’ feeling one gets in the pit of their stomach.
They were substantially bigger than we were. Nothing was said. We could only watch them approach.
Moose picked my friend’s ball up off the ground. ‘Three on three,’ he announced. ‘Our ball.’ He was going to be QB.
‘Touch or tackle?’ one of my friends asked uncertainly.
Moose just laughed.
Not wanting to at all, my two friends lined up opposite of Moose’s pals, who were headed out as receivers, which left me in the position of rushing Moose after counting Five Mississippi.
The world can change in an instant. Wars are decided in a single second in a single battle; lives collide and change trajectories forever.
After five Mississippi, I went straight in at Moose, who still hadn’t thrown the ball. He tried to push himself back away from me, but I had too much speed. I hit him in the ribs right in the right side; it’s a feeling I can recall clearly to this day. His body yielded surprisingly easily, and I landed right on top of him, without touching the ground.
His friends, who had been running around trying to get open, came trudging back to the scrimmage line. ‘What happened?’ one of them demanded.
‘He got me,’ Moose said quietly.
‘Are you kidding?’ This was not in the plan.
One of my friends cut me a scared look.
On the next play, Moose decided to run for it once I came across the line, but I turned in pursuit and rode him hard into the ground once more.
Where before my heart had beaten a thick dread through my body, I had at this point transformed completely into my hero, Jack Lambert, the All-Pro middle linebacker of the Pittsburgh Steelers. I stood with my hands on hips the way he did between plays, and I hunkered down into his ready stance for the snap counts. Most importantly, where before I wouldn’t dare look him the eyes, I stared straight and hard at Moose. He was the one looking away.
‘One blitz every four downs!’ my friend decided it was a good time to declare.
Moose was not excited at the prospect. He had another serious problem, I had discovered: he was soft. The ferocious Moose Murphy, who had once been the biggest boned, most dominant athlete in junior high and parlayed that into a reign of terror over an entire neighborhood, was becoming ‘Mousse’ Murphy from too much good living.
He had also twice been thumped into the ground harder than ever before in his life. We quickly scored two or three touchdowns, the three of us being so much quicker than any of them. Moose and his friends, who anticipated pillaging like Vikings but instead found themselves being outrun, out thrown, and flattened unapologetically, surrendered the ball and left without a word.
On our way home, we could hardly believe it. We recounted every play, tossing the ball to one another as we kicked through the leaves on the sidewalk. ‘We friggin’ killed those guys!’
‘That’s cultural appropriation,’ my daughter said. We weren’t taking about channeling Jack Lambert. Rather, it was Spirit Week at her school, where the theme was dressing for various decades and particularly the Disco era. ‘Are you going to put on a big Afro or something?’ I asked.
That’s when she made her stand, adding, ‘You can’t borrow from oppressed groups.’
‘People who went to discos were oppressed?’
‘No, Black People. You can’t make fun of their culture.’
‘I’m pretty sure Black people make fun of their culture when it comes to disco. As a matter of fact, plenty of White people sported enormous heads of hair then as well . . .’ (probably appropriating that, now that I think of it.)
She switched to a story from her horseback riding barn. ‘[So-and-So] dressed up for our costume parade as an Indian princess. It was really bad.’
‘Because she wanted to reenact the Trail of Tears?’
‘No.’
‘Maybe she was just thinking of the qualities she admired.’
‘You can’t do that.’
Those who consider cultural appropriation harmful, including Indigenous people concerned with preservation, believe that adopting another culture’s traditions, fashion, symbols, language, or music is exploitative. Cultural significance is lost or distorted when one of these is removed from its proper context, the result being disrespect or even desecration.
Humans have been imitating, borrowing, or stealing from one another from time immemorial. Making strenuous objections seems to be a recent and inconsistent phenomenon.
- Neckties are derived from scarves worn by Croatian mercenaries fighting for France’s Louis XIII.
- The connection between Scottish Tartans and certain clans is largely nonsense. In the wake of a popular book, the Tartan industry invented various plaid patterns, which, after their years in fancy British circles, became workaday wear for settlers in America driving westward.
- Cowboy boots and hats, which became common after the American Civil War, are of Mexican derivation.
- Short haircuts with neat parts came into vogue in the early 16th Century, as European men imitated the styles on Greek and Roman statues.
- American soldiers in World War Two shaved their heads into ‘Mohawks’ as a form of intimidation. That was also the motive for punk rockers in the 1980’s.
100 or so years ago, while hunting or fishing, the dashing then-Prince of Wales adopted the practice of wearing the rough tweed of Irish, English, and Scottish peasantry, complete with patches on worn jacket elbows and rolling his pants up on particularly wet days. This fashion - including pants cuffs - became all the rage among British upper classes and spurred the long-standing American Ivy League and Preppie subcultures.
Interestingly, as much as folks admired the Prince, he would be King Edward VIII only briefly, abdicating the throne in 1938 to marry an American divorcee.
- African Americans’ Rock and Roll was stolen by Whites, of course, though there was probably enough jazz, country, blues, and honky tonk along the way to muddy the waters and make the theft, if not the comparison, less apparent. See Big Mama Thornton and Elvis Presley’s respective versions of ‘Hound Dog’ as an example.
More obvious is the way White singers unashamedly took to becoming rappers, in imitation of Black artists. This same daughter of mine, who argued against cultural appropriation, used to play Icelandic rap, of all things.
The people who have the greatest right to worry about disrespect or desecration are probably Native Americans, whose traditions are an ongoing concern. They live in two cultures, their own as well as America at large, and leaders must worry about diluting, distracting effects from the media.
A fairly recent and significant example of desecration took place in 2012, when model Karli Kloss wore an elaborate headdress on a runway walk in a Victoria’s Secret fashion show. The sheer spectacle exceeded the reach this show would have had otherwise; the long, tall, tanned Kloss was clad in only a bikini and some jewelry yet framed by a red, white, and black set of feathers that reached the floor.
The Navajo nation declared it a mockery. An academic of Cherokee descent wrote in THE NEW YORK TIMES, ‘For the communities that wear these headdresses, they represent respect, power and responsibility. The headdress has to be earned, gifted to a leader in whom the community has placed their trust. When it becomes a cheap commodity anyone can buy and wear to a party, that meaning is erased and disrespected, and Native peoples are reminded that our cultures are still seen as something of the past, as unimportant in contemporary society, and unworthy of respect.’
Kloss and Victoria’s Secret apologized, saying that had not been their intention.
This finally brings me to my point: the values these items represent had better be solid in their own right - especially when these symbols come under attack. I have another Pittsburgh Steeler to talk about, a powerful icon who fails to stand up to scrutiny.
One of the definitions of tradition is ‘the handing down of beliefs.’ This is a process - as well as a fairly open ended definition. Yes, rituals and symbols are part of it, but the important aspect is that beliefs, values, and objectives are reaffirmed - verbally or nonverbally - to the members of a culture. The Victoria’s Secret spectacle does place a burden upon a tribal elder. He - or she - would have to gather their followers and remind them of the significance of the headdress, as in (conceivably) what achievement or historical moment each feather represents. That’s what they should think about the next time they see it worn, the substance of what they as a group hold dear.
At 6’4” and only 220 pounds, Hall of Fame linebacker Jack Lambert relied on sheer ferocity as he battled opposing linemen far larger, which made him the patron saint of skinny kids hoping to overcome their limitations. His front teeth were missing, which added to the pure determination he projected, and by all accounts his aggressive play and personality were the catalysts to a defense that won multiple Super Bowls. I had the privilege of meeting Lambert at a summer football camp around the time of my trouncing Moose Murphy, and Lambert was the real deal. He taught a forearm shiver that could drop a Brahma bull and gave a no-nonsense speech one night on goal setting and not getting sidetracked by idiotic distractions.
Also on that Super Bowl era Steeler team was center Mike Webster, ‘Iron Mike,’ the first NFL player to bare his massive arms no matter the weather. He was the heart and soul of the offense, the linchpin of an offensive line in which every member could bench 500 pounds. Webster hustled to the line of scrimmage to get over the ball on each play, and as the highlights show, he simply bulldozed the biggest and baddest defensive players out of the way - pretty much every time. He once had to call plays when quarterback Terry Bradshaw dreamily returned to the huddle after having his bell rung. Webster stood for the idea that dependability, hustle, and inspiring teammates began with hammer-of-the-Gods strength, which in turn is earned through relentless effort in the weight room. That resonated for those of us getting under the bar as high schoolers.
As painful as it is to admit, Webster’s story does not end well. His phenomenal strength was achievable only through steroid use, and he played so hard and for so long that the damage to his brain from repeated shocks was extensive. His final few years were hellish, as he lived in his car or in the woods, unable to sleep and increasingly unable to think straight. In 2002, when he died at age 50, his brain was examined in an autopsy and became the first documented case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in an NFL player.
Awesome as it is, the muscular icon of Mike Webster only works if you don’t think about it too much. If we can find another example of great strength as the foundation for all those other qualities, then the lessons from Webster would be about paying too great a price for greatness.
Symbols change, but the real battle in the face of cultural appropriation is keeping in mind what things stood for in the first place.
(STRONG Gym Advanced template - PPST3)
Week of: 4/26/21 Week 5
MONDAY
1. Squat: 90% - 1 rep; 85% - 3 reps; 80% - 3 sets of 4 reps - Tom 400, 377.5, 357.5
2. back extensions 4x10
3. 4 sets of shrugs 400
4. reverse hypers (3x10)
5. abs; banded pulldowns
TUESDAY
1. Bench press: 90% - 1 rep; 85% - 3 reps; 80% - 3 sets of 4 reps - Tom 247.5, 235, 220
2. Incline bench: 4x3 210
3. 5 sets of 10 Hanging rows
4. Barbell curls: 4 sets of 8
Conditioning (second session)
sled pull 2 miles; 20, 0 (and six 50-yard runs)
THURSDAY
1. Deadlift: 90% - 1 rep; 85% - 3 reps; 80% - 3 sets of 3 reps - Tom 475, 447.5, 422.5
2. Front squats: 4x3 205
3. Reverse Hypers (3x10)
4. abs: hollow rockers
FRIDAY
1. Press: 90% - 1 rep; 85% - 3 reps; 80% - 3 sets of 4 reps - Tom 180, 170, 160
2. Floor press 245; 4x3
3. Pull ups (5x10)
4. Barbell curls: 4 sets of 5-8
5. 3 sets kettlebell sit ups
SATURDAY - Conditioning
swim 1 mile or row 6000 meters
