Is THIS What You Left ME For?!?!?!?!
Finding solace in strange places as painful reminders of realignment keep piling up
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Perhaps the biggest challenge in all of entertainment is successfully pulling off a book-to-film adaptation. Adaptations of any ilk are naturally difficult. A work of art is so often created with a specific form in mind and the performance of morphing whatever the work of art may be into another form is more complicated than a simple copy and paste. Arguably the biggest and most common challenge in any adaptation is taking a massive amount of subject matter and condensing it into a smaller, more digestible piece of content. This is part of why 2004’s Troy is such a sensational failure.
Troy is an adaptation of Homer’s epic The Iliad. The only thing epic about it, however, are the epic proportions of which it failed. I won’t get into every single one of them here, because in spite of the past paragraph and a half, this is a piece about college football (this is relevant, I promise). Brad Pitt as Achilles is one of the biggest miss-castings in the history of Hollywood and Pitt himself isn’t a huge fan of the movie. Orlando Bloom is supposed to be playing Greek Mythology’s most infamous SadBoi Prince Paris, but is really just Legolas with a haircut hanging out in Ancient Greece. The number of inaccuracies based on the text almost disqualifies it from consideration as an adaptation and makes it just a random war movie by a filmmaker obsessed with blood and hair (JP, please play five seconds of ‘Blood in my Hair’ by Andre Nickatina).
Almost two decades since its release date, it’s hard to come to any other conclusion of Troy other than ‘hilariously bad.’ The film is 19 years old and it still gets clowned on to this day. It does have its fans, though, and here, despite everything I’ve just said about it, I have to admit to you dear reader, I am of the few who can find a way to ignore all of its worts and proudly admit that Troy still kind of slaps.
I manage to spend about two hours and 43 minutes of every year rewatching Troy. In college it served as a perfect watch on any sleepy/hungover Sunday afternoon. Cinematic hair of the dog, if you will. It always seems to be on a variety of random channels, it was available on Netflix for a time. I still haven’t watched Netflix’s newish episodic retelling of Homer’s epic, Troy: Fall of a City, though several reviews depict it as another ambitious rendering with plenty of its own issues as well. Even if it’s a bad movie, it remains a charming one to stumble upon. Pitt’s casting as Achilles aside, there are several solid casting decisions in the film that paid off. Pre-Ned Stark Sean Bean as Odysseus hits the mark, Eric Bana as Hector is…well…is Eric Bana as Hector, and Brian Cox as Agamemnon pairs well with Brendan Gleeson as his brother Menelaus as the “bad guys”/Greeks who bring the mightiest army the world has ever seen to Trojan shores.
Spoiler alert: Agamemnon and Menelaus both meet their doom in Troy. A pair of deaths in the movie that absolutely did not happen in The Iliad. Despite its audacious inaccuracy, Menelaus’s death is one of my favorite scenes.
Gleeson really kicks ass as Menelaus and kicks the ass of Bloom/Paris/Legolas after Paris offers a one-on-one battle with the winner claiming marriage rights to Helen of Troy/Sparta (adequately portrayed by Diane Kruger) instead of a war. It doesn’t take long for Paris to lose the fight and cower, literally crawling to Hector’s feet for help.
Menelaus, who knows Helen is watching from above, raises his arms and shouts towards Troy’s city walls with his whole chest, “IS THIS WHAT YOU LEFT ME FOR?!?!?!”
Menelaus is not an endearing character in this adaptation, but it’s hard not to see where he’s coming from. He’s a great warrior. He’s the King of Sparta. And the most beautiful woman in the world left him for Paris, a coward who would rather run and hide behind his brother than stand and fight for his country.
“This is not honor! This is not worthy of royalty!”
No it isn’t, Menelaus, and the last words you spat through your Spartan breath before Hector saved Paris and put a sword through your belly were the exact same words on my mind as I watched Big Ten Football last weekend, specifically the Minnesota at Iowa game.
I can already hear Big Ten rubes yelling at me that Penn State at Ohio State was the marquee game of the week. I know that. I watched that game too, and like Charlamagne listening to Machine Gun Kelly, “it doesn’t move me, man.”
Minnesota’s 12-10 victory at Iowa, the Gophers’ first win at Kinnick Stadium since 1999, did hold a ton of the elements that make college football great. It was a closely contested game on a chilly Midwestern autumn afternoon between two rivals. It did not lack for pageantry, drama, or controversy. In the end, Cooper DeJean’s thrilling punt return touchdown was ruled as an “invalid signal” and overturned, thus an underdog dealt a devastating blow to a conference championship hopeful and not only went home with the win, but with the prized Floyd of Rosedale in tow (a trophy of a pig if you’re unfamiliar).
It was great theater. It was not great, or even good football.
Depending on who you ask, Oregon State and Washington State fans are “starting to get annoying.” ‘Could you two just take your petty desire to exist and get off my lawn?’
If people are getting fed up with the pleas from two proud fan bases to simply not be erased, then I don’t know what I can tell you. The list of the haves versus the have nots in college football goes deeper than a few flagship programs atop a few conferences. And it’s difficult to find a ton of logic when you look at some of the programs who are still conveniently part of the haves.
A great conference is being destroyed and two teams have been left for dead in its wake because boardroom suits can’t wait to get their hands on the “sexy” matchups. USC, Washington, and Oregon playing the likes of Michigan, Ohio State, and Penn State. That’s not what most of the matchups after realignment will be, though. Most of the matchups, by a pretty wide margin, will be the mishmash of the rest of the teams that make up these new Frankenstein conferences. And to put it lightly, a lot of them are going to suck because a lot of them already do.
Not every game can be a winner and a number of games coming up as clunkers is just the cost of doing business in organized sports. What has always made college football the best sport in the world, is it has always had the most contributing factors to transcend the clunkers. Objectively awful games can still be mesmerizing because of all the things involved outside the lines.
What makes Minnesota vs Iowa great is that it’s a historical and regional rivalry. Two programs separated by a single border and united in mutual disdain for one another. No matter the record of either side, the opportunity to win the Floyd of Rosedale matters. It’s a rivalry that has been contested since 1891. The bronze statue of a pig has been a tradition since the governors of both states made a bet of “a Minnesota prize hog against an Iowa prize hog” that their team would win in 1935. A tradition that makes the rivalry what it is. Take that away and last Saturday was just another mediocre football game in Iowa City.
The NCAA and university presidents around the county are intent on taking that magical element away. Oregon State and Washington State are the most recent victims of this revolting greed, but at this rate they won’t be the last programs left to die when the music stops.
This is not to pile on Minnesota’s underachieving nature, or even Iowa’s complete lack of an offense. It’s to celebrate their rivalry and the transcending nature it possesses.
I can’t believe this is the new world that dozens of programs are abandoning century-old partnerships and regional rivalries for. Oregon State and Washington State fans are getting annoying? Good. I can’t imagine a fanbase that wouldn’t react strongly and loudly and make as much noise as possible. If you’re having a hard time understanding where they’re coming from then use your imagination. Imagine you’re in love and married to someone described as the most beautiful human being on the planet. Imagine they leave you for an honorless and spineless coward devoid of meaning. Imagine how you’d react when that truth revealed itself to you.
Still can’t imagine it? Here, I’ll give you a hint.
Dear USC, UCLA, Washington, Oregon, etc.,
New subscriber here, you've got a cool/fun writing style--love the use of movie references/gifs... and I'm not just saying that because I do something similar with my work 😄.