Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
When a college football team makes "Let's Roll" its slogan, is it patriotism or profiteering?
Aug 7, 2002 | As the first prisoners of war began to stagger back from Vietnam in the early '70s, my friend and colleague Jeff Greenfield was driving around one of the many unidentifiable outskirts of Los Angeles when his gaze fell on one of those giant Southern California gas stations you see everywhere, with a movie-marquee-style billboard at its center. Jeff swears the proprietors had posted this message of homecoming and tribute:
"Free Lube Jobs for All POWs."
Damning with faint respect is probably as old as the country itself. If David McCullough's next biography informs me that one of the few remaining unprofiled Founding Fathers had, in 1775, christened his plow oxen "Lexington" and "Concord," I wouldn't be a bit surprised. Appropriating the transcendent for our own personal use -- whether to make a buck or enhance the meaning of our lives -- is all-American.
Still, there is something over-the-top about Florida State football coach Bobby Bowden's selection of his team's 2002 slogan, "Let's Roll."
If you've been unconscious for 11 months and can't place those two words, Bobby will be happy to fill you in. Here's how he explained it at Florida State's media day last Sunday: "That guy, on that plane, knowing they were fixin' to die and they were going to try to keep it, save the, save the White House or whatever they were gonna hit and I heard that guy, they said he said, 'Let's Roll,' I could really relate to that, and you know that's exactly the motto we're trying to get to our players, is, hey, the season has started, we got bad year last year, let's roll. And then, of course, in honor of those people who died on that plane."
"That guy, on that plane " Here's where it gets hard to be lighthearted about Bowden's choice of inspirational messages. He not only appropriated those haunting, stirring words, attributed to United Airlines Flight 93 passenger Todd Beamer, for the murky depths of college football -- he couldn't even remember Beamer's name. And he didn't even call Beamer's heirs.
And of course, the message got lost along with the messenger. Bowden had already gotten it through to at least one player by the time the story hit the fan. At that same preseason media day last Sunday, quarterback Chris Rix told reporters, "This season is going to be fun. Like Coach Bowden says, 'Let's roll.'"
Free lube jobs for POWs notwithstanding, try to imagine the reaction if a college football team adopted as its team motto "We Shall Overcome," or "No Justice, No Peace," or "Remember Pearl Harbor." I have a cousin who still seethes at Woody Allen for his joke in the movie "Radio Days" in which the network debut of the character played by Mia Farrow is interrupted by the Japanese attack, to which she replies "Who is Pearl Harbor, anyway?" The interval between the bombing and the joke was 45 years -- not long enough for my cousin.
Florida State's football media director, Jeff Purinton, told me Tuesday that even though the school has produced T-shirts bearing the "Let's Roll" slogan, merchandising was not an issue here. Seventy shirts were made, for players only, and Florida State has no intention of making and selling more. He did admit, however, that "somebody else could put it on a T-shirt," and the basest of images was suddenly vivid in the imagination: tens of thousands of drunken Florida State fans, trying to sing the words "Let's Roll" to the drone of the tomahawk-chop mumble that has already made the university infamous among Native Americans and people who enjoy clear diction.
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