Against all odds, my wife decided she would watch "some of the Eagles' opening game" last Thursday night, but it took her all of about two minutes to get her back to her book. "Wait a minute," she said, "The Eagles guy spit on a guy?"
Well, it took a while for us all to process it, but we're familiar by now. Jalen Carter, the Eagles' stunningly talented and stunningly knuckleheaded defensive lineman actually spit on Dallas quarterback Dak Prescott, earning an ejection and the undisguised contempt of thousands, not just one Donna McCallum. Er go, this essay, which was to be about my prediction on the Eagles' season — that will now come next week — has switched to the topic of expectoration, the polite way of saying, "hocking a loogie."
I'll get back to Carter, but spitting does have a place in our sporting culture. I remember the glorious feeling during Little League games the first time I realized the baseball field was essentially one gigantic legal spittoon. My mother hollered at me one night for constantly spitting, but the practice is so engrained that it's impossible to stop or police. It's just something you do when you're whiling away the hours between pitches.
That is harmless spitting, of course, but the aggressive act of spitting on someone also has a history. In a 1990 World Cup match, a Dutch player spit into the hair of a German player, not once but twice, and the German happened to have a mullet, which makes it even less appetizing. And here's a non surprise: former Eagle Terrell Owens once spit on a cornerback when he was a Dallas Cowboy, and he was fined $35,000.
The most famous spit in sports history is probably when Hall of Fame infielder Robby Alomar unloaded on an umpire after he was called out on strikes. That happened in 1996, and I remember it as a seminole moment. The 24-hour news cycle and the internet as our daily, hypnotic information wheel? Well, they were just getting rolling, and the spit played endlessly. Within a few days, Alomar had ceased to be a human being, and had been reduced to nothing except those two seconds when he spit on a man during a baseball game. Not that I'm defending what he did.
The Alomar tale does have a somewhat redeeming ending; Alomar and his brother Sandy, also a great player, ended up helping the umpire raise money for a foundation his family had started to find a cure for a degenerative genetic disease. That Christian act, which was of course the least Alomar could do, was in line with a Biblical reference to expectoration, by the way. Mark 8:23 speaks of Jesus restoring a blind man's sight by spitting on his eyes. In the future, by the way, don't look here for Biblical scholarship.
Now, there are cultures in which spitting is considered socially acceptable, as long as it's done by males. Speaking of which, the most famous of spit scenes in movie history was performed by a woman; Kate Winslet in Titanic. First, she responds to a dare to "spit like a man off the side of the ship," and then she spits in the face of Cal, her detestable and soon-to-be ex-fiance. That was an improvisation on Winslet's part, incidentally. The script called for her to stab him with a hair pin, but she said, "Nah, let's go with the spit."
Oh, were there such a delightful story behind Carter's spit, but there isn't. The Eagles have built their franchise over the past year on having great players and great people. Spitting carries such unsavory weight — it being both offensive and cowardly — that the tens of thousands Carter will lose in fines is not substantial punishment. And, by the way, at this recording I still don't know what that money will be. But at any rate, Carter should find a cause, find a platform to talk about his mistake. Otherwise, it's going to haunt him and the Eagles.
