Surprises

Who would have imagined that Derek Anderson (who?) would resuscitate the long-comatose Cleveland Browns offense with 5 touchdown passes and 51 points? Here is a kid who lost a lackluster training camp competition to Charlie Frye, when both quarterbacks were simply vying to hold things together for 5 or 6 weeks until 1st-round draft pick Brady Quinn has had enough time to learn the offense. Not to mention that Frye, who won the competition, laid such a huge egg on opening day he was immediately traded to Seattle. But in comes unknown Derek Anderson, and tosses touchdowns all over the field. It's a complete surprise to me, and probably no small surprise to head coach Romeo Crennel.

That's the sort of thing that keeps me going. Life is really just one surprise after another. I just watched Deion "Prime Time" Sanders put on his most supercilious face (and he has several of them) to remind us all that no one takes the Cleveland Browns seriously. Well, Deion, life is full of surprises.

All the time I personally have been following the Cleveland Browns, there has definitely been an element of the whole classic rooting for the underdog. I was too young to follow Cleveland's early string of championships, and in the years when I played high school football and fell in love with the sport, the Browns fared very well, but the big teams of that era were the Packers and the Giants. When the Browns defeated the Baltimore Colts for the NFL Championship in 1964 -- before the Super Bowl -- they were a heavy underdog to the Colts and Johnny Unitas. Cleveland shut out Baltimore to win that title, 27-0. But Jimmy Brown retired soon after, and there were several down years. There were some exciting teams in the eighties, with the Cardiac Kids led by Brian Sipe, and the excellent Bernie Kosar-led teams of the late eighties who were always victimized by last-second heroics from John Elway and the Denver Broncos. The nineties saw the ignominious beginning of Bill Belichick's coaching career as he fielded Browns teams that were so bad they surely helped inspire Art Modell's infamous midnight theft of the football heart and soul of Cleveland for his well-heeled friends in Baltimore. Then, of course, there were the early expansion years, after the Browns were recreated in 1999. We don't talk about them.

Surprises don't always mean things are suddenly about to change for the better. Actually, Modell's move to Baltimore was a surprise, and a very unpleasant one, to be honest. But the potential for surprises keeps things lively, and can help to keep you from becoming a complete cynic about our chances for surviving all the challenges we face now. Just ask Derek Anderson and the Cleveland Browns. Or you could ask my old pal Howard Zinn:

I have tried hard to match my friends in their pessimism about the world (is it just my friends?), but I keep encountering people who, in spite of all the evidence of terrible things happening everywhere, give me hope. Especially young people, in whom the future rests. Wherever I go, I find such people. And beyond the handful of activists there seem to be hundreds, thousands, more who are open to unorthodox ideas. But they tend not to know of one another's existence, and so, while they persist, they do so with the desperate patience of Sisyphus endlessly pushing that boulder up the mountain. I try to tell each group that it is not alone, and that the very people who are disheartened by the absence of a national movement are themselves proof of the potential for such a movement.

The quote above is from Howard Zinn's short article The Optimism of Uncertainty, published in 2004 by The Nation. Zinn has always been fond of reminding us that some complete surprise is often just around the corner. One of my favorite chapters in the People's History of the United States is, in fact, called "Surprises". The ever-present possibility for surprise is an excellent reason to maintain a Zen approach that takes nothing for granted because, in the very next moment, everything you know could change completely. Surprise!

As our nation debates whether we should continue to kill Iraqis, as we take nuclear weapons out for a spin in case we want to kill someone else, and fight for resources at the now-exposed top of our globe, things seem as if they're dark and getting darker. Our strongest voices of protest often seem strangely weak and eerily half-hearted. It seems like we just want to play war games until our climate reaches its tipping point and clears its confused semi-sentient species from the planet's skin, in preparation for starting over perhaps a billion years from now. But never discount the element of surprise.

As long as we live, we can hope, and stay open to a few of those unorthodox ideas. Who knows where our next hero will come from? Who knew Derek Anderson could throw for five TD's?