Kill the Narrative

Unless you’ve been living under a rock in the state of Georgia for the past week (and there’s a real possibility that this is true even if you have been), you’re well aware that the University of Georgia Bulldogs defeated the University of Alabama Crimson Tide in the 2022 College Football Playoff National Championship on Monday, January 10. Georgia fans had been waiting patiently (?) for 41 years – or whatever portion of 41 years that they could remember – for the Dawgs to repeat the feat that they had accomplished by going undefeated and being voted the number one team back in January, 1981, and their celebration has been loud and proud. And if you happen to be a die-hard Georgia fan AND a die-hard Atlanta Braves fan. . . well, let’s just say that a whole lot of frustration has given way to a whole lot of happiness over the past three months or so as both teams made it over hurdles that some thought they’d never clear. For the record, even for those who aren’t sports fans, there’s a lesson in those hurdle clearings.

Now, anybody who knows me knows that I’m a passionate Atlanta Braves fan. My Braves fandom goes back far enough that I watched Hank Aaron play in person. I remember when Dusty Baker, the manager of the Braves’ opponent in the World Series, patrolled the outfield for the home team at Atlanta Fulton-County Stadium. (For that matter, I remember when Atlanta Fulton-County Stadium was known simply as “Atlanta Stadium.”) I have photos of my nine year-old pigtailed self on Camera Day 1975, including one with then-rookie catcher Biff Pocoroba. . . who actually called me “Pigtails” and smiled when I walked up for that photo and inspired a huge crush that I hadn’t actually fully gotten over when he was released in the spring of 1984. (His passing is one of my many not-so-fond memories of 2020.) So, yeah. . . my devotion to the Braves goes back a long, long time – and watching them go from not having a winning record until August 6 (and losing their biggest star, Ronald Acuña, to a torn ACL on July 10) to being World Series champions on November 2 was an indescribably rewarding fan experience.

However, what most people who know me now don’t know is that once upon a time, I was almost as passionate in my love for the Georgia Bulldogs. I was glued to the TV on New Year’s Day 1981 as Georgia beat Notre Dame to complete an undefeated season and go on to be crowned the national champion not long afterward. And up until a few months into my senior year, I had every intention of going to UGA and being a Bulldog myself. . . at least until I attended one of those prospective student visitation day events and was completely overwhelmed by a campus with its own mass transit system. The 2022 version of me wouldn’t find that terribly intimidating, but 1981 me just wasn’t ready to make the jump from a K-12 school of fewer than 300 students to. . . well, all that. As a result, I ultimately ended up at Georgia Southern, which at the time had an enrollment of right at 7,000 students and a campus that I was familiar with thanks to my attending four summer twirling camps there – and for those who don’t know the timeline of Georgia Southern football history, its return to intercollegiate competition after a (coincidentally enough) 41 year hiatus and my first quarter of college both took place in the fall of 1982. Eventually, I made the transition from “Georgia fan first” to “True Blue Georgia Southern Eagle” – the fact that I worked in the athletic director’s office for three years beginning in the fall of 1983, give or take the one quarter that I was farmed out for one quarter. . . to Coach Erk Russell’s office, no doubt sped up that transition – and my enthusiasm for the Dawgs waned. (Fun fact: I worked in the ticket booth at the very first game played at Paulson Stadium and worked will call for basically every home game for the rest of my years at Georgia Southern.)

I have to say, though, that even if I weren’t a super passionate fan of one of these two recent Georgia champion teams and a formerly passionate fan who still enjoys seeing the other team win, I would’ve loved the stories of both as they won their respective championships in November and in January. The roads that the two teams took to get to their championships, the World Series for the Braves and the CFP National Championship Game for the Dawgs, were starkly different: whereas the Braves didn’t even have a winning record until their season was well past the halfway mark, Georgia was undefeated until the SEC championship game. That said, what the two championship teams had in common – well, other than the fact that they came from the same state and that their fans had been waiting for decades since they’d won their last titles – is that each one had to go up against the team that had seemingly in recent years had its number. For the Braves, that team was the Los Angeles Dodgers, who had knocked them out of the postseason in 2018 and 2020; for the Bulldogs, it was the Alabama Crimson Tide, the team that had not only come back to beat Georgia in overtime in the national championship game in 2017 but also had beaten a then-undefeated Georgia in resounding fashion in the SEC championship game just a little over a month earlier. In both cases, it seemed that the nemesis team was living rent-free in its opponent’s head, and finally wining the big game on the big stage was going to require as much of a mental victory as it was a victory on the field.

In both cases, of course, it seemed that everybody was pondering the “Can they beat -- ?” question, and the media was definitely a part of that “everybody.” In 2020, the Braves were up 3-1 over the Dodgers before dropping the last three games of the NLCS and not making it to the World Series; in 2021, when they were once again up 3-1, they lost Game 5, and just about everyone was in flashback territory. When a reporter brought up that unpleasant piece of recent history in a question addressed to Braves first baseman (and arguably the heart and soul of the team) Freddie Freeman during the Game 5 postgame press conference, Freeman’s answer reflected both an impatience with the question but also an understanding of what it would take to stop hearing it: “That's going to be the narrative, it seems, because every day it's brought up the last couple days. I don't think we have a choice until we kill that narrative."

Of course, the Braves took Game 6 at home to win the NLCS and move on to the World Series, once again going up 3-1 over an opponent and losing the next game before coming back to win the series in Game 6, a feat that was bit more impressive than the NLCS win because they had to do it on the road in Houston. The 88 win team that some thought wouldn’t even make it past the division series against the Milwaukee Brewers had won it all. . . and effectively killed the narrative.

And then there was Georgia, who hadn’t beaten Alabama since an overtime win in Tuscaloosa on September 22, 2007. Three of those seven losses were in SEC Championship games with another being that overtime national championship game loss; in four of those seven losses, Georgia was the higher-ranked team. Theoretically, Georgia shouldn’t have been 0-7 in those games. . . and the fact that they were meant that Georgia had its own narrative to kill when it faced Alabama on that cold Monday night in Indianapolis. For a while, it looked as though neither team remembered that the touchdown was a legit football play, and Georgia went into halftime down 9-6; then they found themselves down 18-13 with 10:14 left in the game. Instead of collapsing under the “here we go again” pressure, they responded with three unanswered scores, the most memorable of which was a Kelee Ringo interception that he ran back for a touchdown and in doing so more or less put a nail into the Alabama chances coffin. Georgia would go on to win by a final score of 33-18 – and like the Braves, they killed their narrative.

OK. . . so what can even someone who, as my dear friend Mary Beth Westbrook would say, doesn’t sportsball take away from these two stories? It’s simple: like the Braves and the Bulldogs, every one of us lives with our own narratives, and those narratives aren’t always accurate. The problem is that if those narratives are both inaccurate and damaging, we can keep listening to them until, as Michael Jackson sang in his song “Billie Jean,” the lie becomes the truth. You’re a little kid who has trouble controlling your temper? Then you’re the hot-headed troublemaker, and people perpetually expect you to be angry and defiant. You’re the kid who was bright enough but had other obstacles in your life that kept you from doing your best in school? Then you’re the underachieving slacker who won’t ever amount to anything. You’re the abused – either emotionally or physically – child or wife who is perpetually told that you’re worthless and incapable of bettering your station in life? Then unless you have someone else whispering in your ear that you aren’t worthless and are capable – and maybe even if you do – you stop trying to accomplish anything else because you begin to believe the lie. And on the flip side? If you’re the high achiever, the well-behaved kid, the talented student/musician/athlete from whom you and others expect near perfection. . . then you may be feeling the pressure of unreasonable expectations that neither you nor anyone else who is human can meet.

In short, you need to kill the narrative.

Living the life you imagine for yourself can be difficult in the best of circumstances: so many things over which we have no control can become obstacles that we have to overcome. Granted, sometimes God puts those obstacles in front of us to get us off paths we shouldn’t be on or keep us from wandering off paths that we should be on. Far too often, though, we don’t simply listen to those narratives. . . we internalize them to the point that what we imagine for ourselves becomes impossible not because it truly is impossible but because we believe that it is.

So how do you kill the narrative? That’s a really good question, and there are probably as many answers to it as there are narratives. But before you can kill the narrative, you have to do some serious thinking about what you’re listening to in your head and what’s driving what you think about yourself. . . and then about whom you’re listening to that you need to stop listening to. I would argue that praying and letting God rework the way that you think about yourself into the way that He thinks about you is the best way to do that, but I’m also well aware that not everyone who needs that reprogramming is going to buy that argument. Whatever you do, though. . . you have to change the soundtrack of your life from one that destroys you to one that rebuilds you, and that can get uncomfortable because we tend to take comfort in familiarity even when familiarity is bad. As uncomfortable as that change may be, it’s the only way that you can stop watching whatever nemesis you’re facing knock you down again and again and go on to achieve your victory.

The Braves finally beat the Dodgers and won the World Series. Georgia finally beat Alabama and won a national championship. Imagine what you might be able to accomplish once you finally kill the narrative.