One redeeming feature of a heartbreaking sports loss is that it presents a golden opportunity for great, emotional writing.
While a thrilling victory lends itself to descriptive and elevated prose, it doesn’t hold the same capacity for capturing the depth of the feelings and range of emotions that linger after a devastating loss.
That’s because the thrill of victory tends to be one-dimensional: It lifts one straight up, dispersing undiluted joy in all directions. A stunning loss, however, leaves one wallowing in a raw stew of emotions, including dismay, second guessing, anger, despair.
It is extremely challenging for a writer to wade through that stew in a way that helps the reader sort through his or her feelings and make the swallowing a bit easier.
But The Star’s Vahe Gregorian accomplished it in today’s column about the Kansas City Chiefs’ jaw-dropping, 35-32 loss to the Tennessee Titans yesterday.
Let me skirt you through this excellent, emotionally satisfying read…
Gregorian
Gregorian, who has been with The Star six and a half years, started off by neatly summing up the game as a “diabolical fiasco,” thus setting the overall tone and aptly signaling the enormity of this defeat.
Then, he quickly set up a two-phase approach, first describing how most Chiefs’ fans were safe to assume victory was theirs with less than two minutes to go but then proceeding to chronicle the numbing, nightmarish unraveling.
Gregorian quotes Chiefs’ defensive end Frank Clark on how a “gritty victory” seemed assured…
“Ninety-nine percent of the time, that’s a ‘W’. But it’s that 1 percent, you know, where it went in the other’s favor.”
All that was left for Chiefs to do, Gregorian said, was close out the game. But in a sentence that all long-suffering Chiefs’ fans can relate to, Gregorian noted that closing is “a simple-sounding concept that seems to elude them more often than it should.”
From there he segued into the horrifying details of the unraveling — the failed third-down play that forced an attempted field goal and then the jarring miscommunication between center and place kicker that resulted in a premature snap and holder Dustin Colquitt’s ensuing desperate (and illegal) attempt to pass the ball for a first down.
Explaining the miscommunication, probably the foremost mystery to Chiefs’ fans, Gregorian said long-snapper James Winchester misinterpreted Colquitt’s glance up at kicker Harrison Butker as the cue to snap.
Quoting Winchester: “I looked back, Dustin was looking forward. Then I started to see him look back. But I had already started the snap.”
Almost equally improbable was how the Titans were able to block Butker’s desperate, last-second field goal attempt. Again Gregorian was there with a logical explanation…
“Tennessee’s Josh Kalu zoomed in from Butker’s right with a running jump having read Colquitt’s cadence pattern.”
Wrapping up the column, Gregorian circled back to Frank Clark’s assessment that 99-percent of the time this would have been a victory.
Ultimately, Gregorian wrote, the game was lost because the offense fell short on the third-down play and because the defense couldn’t stop the Titans.
Then, going from micro to macro, Gregorian concluded “it’s still hard to ever exhale with this team or know what it’s really about…99 percent chance of winning or not.”
Not being able “to ever exhale.” Doesn’t that say it all about the Chiefs?
…Congratulations then to Vahe on a penetrating and satisfying analysis of a game that left Chiefs’ fans stomachs and minds churning.
**
Note: For all the beauty of this column, The Star managed, in all-too-typical fashion, to screw it up.
The online version was fine, but in the print edition, an editor cut the last four paragraphs of the column for space reasons. That left the print-edition column ending with a resounding thud and eliminating Gregorian’s facile return to the pivotal 99-percent theme.
A good editor could have nipped and spliced elsewhere in the column and saved the full-circle ending. But, no, this editor just picked up a cleaver and chopped from the bottom.
What a disservice to both Gregorian and the readers…In the journalistic sense you could call it a “diabolical fiasco.”
