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Two days ago I opened an email from a college friend and found a link to a Slate essay, followed by:
I'm sure you've read this one. Turns out you’re one dumb, elitist motherfucker.
Actually, I hadn’t read that one, so it came as a surprise that I was being labeled as dumb and elitist and as someone who fucks mothers. It’s not exactly an incorrect label (except for the last part, which will hopefully come true someday), but other people aren’t supposed to know.
So I read the Slate article and learned that I was, in fact, a dumb, elitist motherfucker. Or at least I used to be. I was once a lacrosse player.
In his essay, “Lacrosse Players: The Elitism of Preppies, The Boorishness of Jocks,” Dave Jamieson writes that we (lacrosse players) “hail from the privileged, largely white pockets of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. They unite and form tribes in Eastern prep schools, where they can be spotted driving SUVs with ‘LAX’ stickers affixed to the rear windows. Many grow addicted to dipping Skoal and wearing soiled white caps with college logos on them. They gain entry into top colleges by virtue of their skills with the stick. They graduate, start careers in New York, marry trophy wives, and put lacrosse sticks in their kids' cribs.”
Honestly, not much about that paragraph accurately describes me. Although I am from the Northeast, my state (Maine) has only recently heard of lacrosse (along with color television, running water, and anti-smoking campaigns - yes, I’m aware of our state’s reputation). In fact, Maine is such an outcast in the lacrosse union that public address announcers frequently assumed that the ME following my town’s name was a typo, and what I really meant was MA or MD, two states where lacrosse sticks are almost (or more) prevalent than baseball bats.
Really, my aptitude for lacrosse came mostly from attending an Eastern prep school and owning vague traces of muscle memory thanks to the lacrosse stick my father once placed in my crib. So okay, maybe Mr. Jamieson is correct on two counts, but this paragraph is supposed to be about how his paragraph is inaccurate, so let’s start over and I’ll finish cataloguing the errors in this “laxer” stereotype.
I do not dip Skoal (I have tried it only once and threw it into my mouth like a grenade in a VC tunnel, and then sat on a futon, sweating and watching my roommate’s Periodic Table of Drinkology rotate clockwise, then counter-clockwise), I have not owned a dirty white college hat for several years now, I drive a Jetta, not an SUV, and all that stuff about careers, New York, trophy wives, and kids seems like an impossibly optimistic goal.
But in the lacrosse world, I’m a minority. The Jetta was really an accident - I was about to buy a Nissan Pathfinder but I took it to a mechanic and he assured me that it would fall apart approximately fifteen minutes after driving away from the dealership. All my teammates drove Jeep Cherokees. They weren’t all the same color and they came in different shapes - there were Grand ones, Laredo ones, Sport ones, and Late Model ones - but if you stood on the front porch of our fraternity - “The Lax House” according to lacrosse-playing brothers, “Not The Lax House” according to non-lacrosse-playing brothers” - and looked at the parking lot, you would think you were at a Jeep factory, one where all the Cherokees received Warrior, STX, and Dartmouth Lacrosse stickers before leaving the line.
It wasn’t their fault that they all drove Cherokees. The SUVs had, for the most part, been handed down from parents, and what are you supposed to do, tell your dad, “Thanks, but no thanks - all my buddies already have this car”? We might as well decline to use our legacy status to get into Ivy League colleges for fear that it would be unfair to fellow applicants, or burn the family cottage on Nantucket. Let’s be serious.
For the record, I do not have a family cottage on Nantucket, but I should probably admit that I did check the legacy box when applying to Dartmouth. Clearly, certain elements, but not all, of the lacrosse stereotype are inescapably true. Mr. Jamieson’s description of the typical laxer could be considered a near perfect rendering of some of my teammates, but others don’t fit the mold at all. I guess I’m somewhere in the middle, which is why in college I was called “artsy” just as much as I was called “steaky.” (Okay, I got “steaky” way more often, but I always thought I was at least a little bit deserving of “artsy.”)
There are several things about me that unquestionably make me a laxer. First, there’s the car. A Jetta isn’t exactly a car built for meatheads, but if you look at its backside, you’ll learn a lot about my pedigree. On the left side of the license plate, there’s an Exeter sticker. On the right side, there’s a Dartmouth D that stands in front of two crossed lacrosse sticks. In between is a vanity plate that reads NMBA 22, which in case it wasn’t clear is supposed to represent “number 22,” the identifying factor on my lacrosse uniform, said with a Maine accent. (This wasn’t my idea - it was a gift from my dad, a fellow Dartmouth lacrosse alum who was the original number 22, and therefore also a dumb, elitist motherfucker.)
Also, there’s the hair. Throughout my college career, and especially in the spring when we played games in front of thousands (or actually just hundreds) of screaming (more like tranquil) coeds (or parents), I thought it was very important to let the back of my hair grow long so that it flowed nicely from the base of my helmet. Frequently in the shower we would have arguments about who on the team had the best “lax hair,” and these arguments would never end until someone, lubed in shampoo, changed the subject by sliding across the shower floor, or by spraying water from the one detachable (and surprisingly forceful) shower head up a freshman’s butt.
My girlfriend didn’t think my springtime haircut was very attractive but she liked me anyway, maybe because she was a laxtitute or because she liked my artsy side or because she had mistaken me for a more attractive fraternity brother.
Laxtitute, by the way, is a term we endearingly slapped on college girls who seemed unnaturally willing to hook up with us just because we could cradle a lacrosse stick in either hand and funnel three beers at once without vomiting. We treated the concept of a laxtitute as a joke - we weren’t so vain as to think these women were only interested in us because we were good at lacrosse. It had more to do with our fraternity and our Jeep Cherokees and our lax hair.
But that last sentence was a joke, too, just as we viewed the whole lacrosse player stereotype as a parody that was all the more funny because various pieces of it were unmistakably close to home.
But at what point does acting out the joke become a dangerous enterprise? My friends and I frequently pretended to be meatheads just because we knew we weren’t meatheads but if anyone were to walk in on us while we were, say, hanging out in the fraternity basement, flexing our muscles, and yelling out our own last names as a kind of battle cry, these observers might understandably conclude that we were real, live meatheads, the kind that should be kept in the primate portion of the zoo where we would stare menacingly at visitors and occasionally throw our own feces at each other.
As a tame example of what I’m talking about, there was one incident last spring after a game, sitting in Molly’s, a local restaurant who’s appeal is two dollar margaritas, where I and a fellow defensemen decided it would be funny to diagram highlights from the game, chalkboard style, on Molly’s paper tablecloths. Most of the plays started with O’s (our opponents) driving toward the goal, only to get clobbered by a streaking X or X’s (us). We marked the points where O’s got pummeled by X’s as explosions of purple crayon, and if it was a double-team we made the explosions twice as big.
We found this very, very funny. But if a waitress had overheard us, or if a busboy had stopped to examine the tablecloth as he cleared it, he or she would probably conclude that two large retards had been doodling cave drawings on table six. And how could we possibly defend ourselves? We were just being ironic, making fun of guys who would actually want to draw up their highlights after a game, but in doing so, we were guys who drew up their highlights after a game.
As another, more tasteless example, I recently changed my facebook profile. I did so because I realized that anyone who didn’t know me would probably be horrified by my “interests.” They were:
Funneling beers, high fiving my friends, crushing beer cans on my forehead, tennis, roofying chicks, making out, bench press
Obviously a joke, right? A meathead laxer parody. Well, maybe. But it’s also possible that someone might accidentally take me seriously, especially if they looked at my picture, which featured myself (inebriated) wearing a fraternity T-shirt at Oktoberfest and giving the thumb’s up with one hand while gripping the shoulder of a German security guard with the other hand.
Hopefully the portion of my profile that states my favorite movies as “anything by Josh Hartnett” would convince a tourist to my profile that it was all in jest, but you can never be too careful and that’s why my interests no longer include “roofying chicks.”
Because I am not someone who would ever clandestinely drug a girl. My feeling has always been that any guy who roofies a girl deserves to be sent to prison, roofied himself, and date-raped by a cellmate built like The Rock. But maybe you have to really know me to know that.
This commentary on the collective projected personality of the lacrosse community - “the culture of an elitist and relatively obscure sport,” as Mr. Jamieson calls it - has been brought to the forefront of the social landscape by the alleged rape case at Duke. Though no definitive evidence has been brought to light for or against any members of the team, most people have already decided that these 46 guys together form a formidable band of assholes.
What happened in the house with the strippers and the student-athletes and the broom sticks isn’t perfectly clear, but it does appear that these were a group of laxers who began taking the laxer image - the joke - too seriously. There’s a fine line between acting out the joke and living the joke, and when an inside joke reaches the outside world, or worse, when athletes just generally behave like dickheads, judgment falls. Even if they are, legally speaking, innocent.
This is most likely what happened to the sophomore who sent the email about inviting more strippers to his dorm room, killing them, and skinning them. The epistle was most definitely poorly conceived, ill-timed, and lamentably distasteful, but it was also probably a joke, produced only for the eyes of his teammates. Even if it wasn’t funny, the kid more than likely intended it as meathead parody, like our post-game tablecloth drawings but taken to an extent too graphic to be depicted by crayons.
What if something bad had happened while I was at Dartmouth? What if several of my teammates (or most of us) had made a mistake, or what if we were wrongly implicated for a false crime? I stand by my teammates as remarkably diverse and interesting within the lacrosse world, but we weren’t entirely intelligent while drinking and sometimes bad things happen to good people. Maybe the police would have checked all our facebook profiles and maybe they would have highlighted my interests (and ignored the Josh Harnett fetish) and maybe I would have been expelled from school.
I would try to explain that it was all a joke, that I was just being ironic, but would anyone care? I’m guessing no, and then I would have to spend a long time explaining why the joke was supposed to be funny, and when you have to explain a joke for too long, it stops being funny at all.
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