Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 118

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Popular Culture Review

last penitent, the brave athlete who is willing to take one for the team qualifies as
the last martyr. Why do sports fans still admire Dick Butkus, the great Chicago
Bears linebacker of the nineteen-sixties? Because he was willing to play with a
broken arm when his team needed him. Why do Los Angeles Rams (now the St.
Louis Rams) fans cherish the memory of defensive end Jack Youngblood? Because
he insisted on staying in a crucial game in spite of a broken leg. And while true
believers will cringe at the thought of what happens in the 24-hour gym as penance
or in a football game as martyrdom, they may take some comfort in knowing that
in a strange and stubborn way the human need to believe in the power of redemptive
suffering still persists, even for narcissists and NFL linebackers.
California State University, Bakersfield

Notes

Steven Carter

1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. Trans. George Lawrence. Ed. J.P. Mayer.
New York: Harper/Collins, 1969, p. 609.
2. The interview with Lloyd Soyez appeared in William Least Heat-Moon, Prairyerth (A
Deep Map). Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991, p. 376.
3. Keith Thomas, ed. The Oxford Book o f Work. (New York: Oxford University Press,
1999), p. 97.
4. Stewart Ewen, A ll Consuming Images: The Politics o f Stymie in Contemporaty Culture
(New York: Basic Books, 1988), p. 189.
5. Ibid., p. 189.