I was going to write on the Meaning of Life this week, but I put it aside at the last moment when I got a tip that this might be the last chance I’ll ever get to write anything except an Obituary for the XFL.
The doomed league’s TV rating slipped another 25 points for the weekend—down 71 percent in the four quick weeks since Opening Day—and that steep a slide is fatal.
If the Dow Jones Index plunged that many points in four weeks, the sidewalks of Wall Street would be littered with the broken bodies of Stockbrokers. Five hundred people a day would be leaping to death off the Golden Gate Bridge.
The horrible reality of being suddenly stone broke and homeless is more than most people in this country can handle. They will literally seize up and go mad. Your everyday Nervous Breakdown is nothing compared to the hopeless Craziness of a man who woke up in the morning as a Prince and goes to bed as a Toad. That is a guaranteed overweaning shock to the Central Nervous System: if you don’t go insane from suddenly having to see everything in the world from a point only two inches high, your brain will surely be churned into cream by having to crawl, headfirst, with your eyes open, down a muddy hole in the ground just to have a place to sleep.
Nobody could handle a situation like That. It is Unacceptable. It is worse than any dream that ever happened in the worst and most tortured hallucinations ever suffered by the most pitiful LSD victim.… I spent a lot of time with Allen Ginsberg and I have swapped gruesome tales over whiskey at night with William Burroughs, and neither one of them ever even mentioned a vision so horrible as being instantly changed from a rich and powerful human like Donald Trump into a common leaping toad that might be swallowed alive by a snake at any moment.
Yet that is exactly what happens to people in this world who lose 71 percent of their customers in four weeks. They seize up and go crazy.
Out of personal loyalty to Jesse Ventura, I tried to watch the XFL “clash” on Saturday, but by halftime my heart was swollen by feelings of Hate and Despair. It was like watching a Festival of Shame taking place in a blinding rainstorm. Some fool from NBC appeared to have smeared Vaseline on the Camera lens to make it waterproof. It was like watching a game underwater and never really knowing the score.
A running back would appear on the screen for an instant, then disappear in a mass of mud-caked bodies. A long pass would vanish into a fog bank and never be seen again. There was no way to tell the officials from the players, except when a yellow flag was thrown and you could see who finally stooped down to pick it up.
The weird thing about the XFL is that nobody except Vince McMahon was anxious to see it born, and nobody except the cheerleaders will miss it when it’s gone. There is no way to explain why it ever happened at all, except that some cluster of corporate thugs in the TV business figured they were in desperate need of a tax write-off. It was not even good entertainment, much less good football.
—February 26, 2001