One Last Time

Death, taxes, and the start of another UCLA football season.

One of my favorite songs in the musical Hamilton is the song “One Last Time”. In it, George Washington sings about how he is ready to move on from the presidency. At least, that’s how the song initially reads, as you get to the end and recognize that this is also a song about George Washington coming to terms with reaching the end of his life and being at peace with it, while Alexander Hamilton frets and worries about how to move forward in a world without Washington in it.

There are a lot of little things I love about the song, but one of my favorites is what it means to the larger story. “One Last Time” is the first time in the entire musical that someone dies peacefully; Hamilton’s life to this point is characterized by traumatic deaths, from the death of his mother from an illness during his youth, to his best friend John Laurens, who died in fighting after the Revolutionary War had essentially ended. “One Last Time” is the first time Hamilton is forced to reckon with the idea that someone can just die peacefully rather than in some gruesome manner, and that it is possible to be satisfied with moving on with life. It’s also the first time in the play that Hamilton is able to take the time to say goodbye to someone.

The tragedy of “One Last Time” is that Hamilton does not take the message to heart. George Washington shows him that you can have a rewarding life and end it on your own terms, but Hamilton is the man who is constantly running out of time and is pathologically unable to enjoy his life. It is the death of his son that finally causes him to take a step back, and even so, he can only do so for a bit before getting involved one last time.

I recognize how corny it is to still be talking about Hamilton in the year 2023 and not about a better musical (this could have been a Hadestown discussion! Just saying!) but this is the only song that has really stuck with me since I moved on from the musical. And it’s a song that I’ve been thinking about more and more in recent weeks.

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In many ways, this is our version of “One Last Time.”

UCLA is about to start its last season in the Pac-12 Conference, as they will be leaving to join the Big Ten alongside Southern Cal, Washington, and Oregon starting next July. The Bruins will be saying goodbye to a host of teams that they have played regularly for decades, leaving behind history and familiarity for the big bucks of the Midwest.

The Pac-12 Conference itself looks to be on its last ride as well, as there could be as few as two schools left in the conference by the end of the week. Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and Arizona State have all decided to join the Big 12 Conference, while Stanford and UC Berkeley are in public negotiations to join the ACC (how joining a conference based around the Atlantic Coast will fulfill the needs of their student-athletes, which was a pressing concern of the UC Regents when UCLA was leaving, is an open question I guess). The nation’s premier West Coast conference is dying, not with a bang but with a whimper, as its members chase the stability that the conference could never provide.

And, maybe on the grandest scale, college football as we know it is on one last ride. The landscape of the sport is changing thanks to the latest round of realignment; this year is seeing the first wave with four new schools joining the Big 12 and AAC respectively, while the big names move next year. Much of the regionality that made the sport great has gone by the wayside, replaced by a need to have the biggest stage possible in order to recruit on a national level. Blame TV networks if you choose, or the universities for being greedy. Or blame the slow march of time and progress, which made being a national brand more and more feasible and desirable.

A lot of people who cover the sport have already begun to wax poetically about how this season represents the last gasp of something innocent. I’m not going to do that, mostly because it’s a naive viewpoint to think these shifts are a recent trend and not something the sport has been pushing towards for the past few decades. But I do agree that this season will be something to cherish.

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You should know that this is the third draft of the Season Opener.

The original draft was a big meandering post about catharsis, framed around the journey of professional wrestlers Sami Zayn and Kevin Owens. It was a personal story for me - I was in the building when both Zayn and Owens left the independent scene for the big time in WWE, and I was at Wrestlemania this past year in SoFi Stadium when Zayn and Owens won the main event and captured the tag titles in the city that got them their big break. The outpouring of emotion from that moment made every other part of the journey, all the struggles and setbacks along the way, feel worth it.

I’ll admit that I cried in the moment. I was not the only one.

But it was professional wrestling that also caused me to shift the focus of the Opener. This last week was a tough one for wrestling fans, as two wrestlers died in the span of 24 hours. On Wednesday the 23rd, Terry Funk died. The Funker was as old-school wrestling as they come, having been one of the innovators of the sport through the 1970s through the 200ss (there’s a really good obituary/history piece on Funk over at the Ringer if you’re interested). But Funk was also 79 when he died, and considering everything he had done inside and outside the ring, it was a miracle that he even lived this long. No, it was the second death that caused the change, as on Thursday it was announced that Windham Rotunda, better known by his stage name of Bray Wyatt, had died of a heart attack exacerbated by COVID. 

Wyatt was a singular performer, capable of capturing the attention of an audience without uttering a single word. This is not to say he could not speak - far from it, as he was one of the best promo men in the business, able to enrapture audiences with every line he spoke. Wyatt had the gimmick of a cult leader, and anyone who watched him perform could tell that he probably would have been very good at that particular job had he not become a wrestler. Wyatt was the rare kind of performer who could meld his words with his actions, and make you forget for a second that everything you were watching was fake.

And that’s where I let you in on a little secret: professional wrestling is fake. Now, I don’t mean that everything is fake - the punches and suplexes and chair shots are all real and do cause physical pain - but rather that the storylines are already written and the match results are preordained. Wrestling fans do actually understand this bit, which is why most fans will refer to modern professional wrestling as a combination of combat sport and theater; a modern-day Shakespeare in the Round, if you will. When wrestling is bad, it gets pretty bad, but when it’s great, there’s nothing in the world like it. However, if there’s one thing wrestling struggles with, it’s when the real world intervenes. Death is not an easy thing for most to process; it is especially hard when people have to reconcile these larger-than-life figures being struck down by something that affects us mere mortals.

I think Rotunda’s death hit me so hard because this was the first time the deceased was close to my age. Dying young is unfortunately woven into the fabric of professional wrestling, with the physical toll that performing inflicts combining with the rockstar lifestyle that many wrestlers enjoy. Modern wrestlers have done a better job than their predecessors when it comes to living healthier lives, but that does not mean they are impervious to the specter of death. Rotunda was only three years older than me. We shared the same birth month and everything. Yet he was brought down by an illness that I have gotten multiple times already without any noticeable side effects.

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This is not the place to litigate Chip Kelly’s tenure at UCLA.

In fact, I’m willing to wipe the slate clean coming into this season. Kelly has absolutely been part of the problem in some aspects of his tenure, but he’s also had to deal with unprecedented changes at the same time, from the COVID pandemic outbreak to systemic changes to the transfer system to the ramifications of student-athletes now being able to actually make money off of their talent. Given all that, I want to give a reset on the Chip Kelly era.

That does not mean he is off the hook, however.

This could be one of the most important seasons in Chip Kelly’s UCLA tenure, specifically because it is the last time he will be competing in the Pac-12. The road to being competitive in the Big Ten is more challenging; Ohio State, Michigan, and Penn State are programs well above what the Pac-12 normally has, and three of the four modern stalwarts in the Pac-12 are moving conferences with the Bruins. This is not to say that UCLA cannot compete in this new conference, but rather that the road to being competitive will be more challenging going forward.

Which is why UCLA cannot afford a poor season in 2023. I would even go so far as to say they can’t afford anything less than nine wins. Why nine? When I did the season preview, I realized that there were only three games on the schedule where UCLA would not be favored, and if UCLA wants to take the next step as a program, they cannot afford to drop games where they are the favorite. You could make a compelling argument that UCLA cost themselves a chance at the Pac-12 Title last year when they did this very thing, inexplicably losing at home to an inferior Arizona team. Had they won that game, they would have only had two conference losses and could have been positioned to make the conference game thanks to tiebreakers. Considering how close the game against Southern Cal was, the Bruins could have even won the championship had the ball bounced their way.

I’m not asking for the Bruins to pull any upsets this year - though that would obviously help their case going into next year - but rather to show a level of consistency they’ll need in the next conference. Wins are going to be harder to come by in the Big Ten, so you have to win the games you are supposed to win. If Chip Kelly’s team can prove they are capable of that, then getting to 10 wins for the first time since the Brett Hundley years is absolutely possible and would give the program a ton of momentum heading into a pivotal offseason.

And should they fail to get to that nine-win threshold? Well, I don’t think it would be the end of the road, but you could easily look at that result as the beginning of the end of Chip Kelly’s tenure. It’s hard to recruit talent to a team that is stuck in neutral, and that’s where the Bruins would be while all of its West Coast competition is ascending. Could Kelly pull UCLA out of a tailspin again? Sure, but why make it harder on yourself?

This is the last ride for so many things in college football, but for Chip Kelly, this is maybe the first step in telling the story of his legacy.

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The second draft of the Opener was all about trauma, another self-indulgent bit of writing from myself because men will literally write out their problems on a free blog rather than go to therapy. But there was a quote from Windham Rotunda making the rounds in the aftermath of his death that stuck with me and made me move away from that line of thinking. In the quote, Windham talks about what he believes wrestling is all about:

Wrestling is not a love story, it’s a Fairy Tale for masochists. A comedy for people who criticize punchlines. A fantasy most can’t understand, a spectacle no one can deny. Lines are blurred. Heroes are villains. Budgets are cut. Business is business.

But it can also be a land where Dead men walk. Where Honor makes you Elite. Where Demons run for office. And Rock bottom is a reason to rejoice. WOOOOO! It’s an escape. A reason to point the blame at anyone but yourself for 2-3 hours. An excuse to be a kid again, and nothing matters except the moment we are in. Wrestling is not a love story, it’s much more. It’s hope.

And in a world surrounded in hate, greed, and violence, a world where closure may never come. We all know a place that has hot and cold hope on tap. For better or for worse.

That idea, that wrestling can provide an outlet of hope for people, is something that can apply to sports as well. I’ve talked about it before how the start of a new season represents a new chance for dreams to become realities. I’ve often looked at this as a sign of how we as fans are preconditioned to hope for a different outcome even knowing things will probably end poorly (I’m an Angels fan, can you blame me for this?).

But the words of Rotunda have been rolling around in my head for the better part of a week because they offer a different view of this train of thought. If you followed his career, you would believe that Rotunda, more than most wrestlers, would likely have a cynical view of the business and the concept of hope as a whole, but instead, he believed that both the bad and the good were necessary and had to exist together. It’s the idea that you could roll with the punches of the bad just to get a taste of the good, and if you got a taste of the good, well then the entire process was worth it.

It’s a more positive view of fandom than I have previously possessed, but not one that I can dismiss out of hand. When players win championships, you often hear platitudes about how all the hard work they put in, “the blood, sweat, and tears” as they say, were all worth it because they eventually made it to the top of the mountain. Of course, not everyone makes it to the top, but Rotunda is taking that concept to a logical endpoint by stating that the entirety of sports is worth it for the emotion it causes one to feel. Sometimes that emotion is unbridled joy, while other times it is unceasing despair, but that entire tapestry of emotion is something to be celebrated. In that light, while the passing of Rotunda is tragic, it also allows us to reflect on his life and better celebrate both the good and bad times we had with him.

“One Last Time” features a similar message at the end, when Washington reads the ending of his resignation letter:

Though, in reviewing the incidents of my administration
I am unconscious of intentional error
I am nevertheless too sensible of my defects
Not to think it probable that I may have committed many errors
I shall also carry with me the hope that my country will view them with indulgence
And that after forty five years of my life dedicated to its service with an upright zeal
The faults of incompetent abilities will be consigned to oblivion
As I myself must soon be to the mansions of rest
I anticipate with pleasing expectation that retreat
In which I promise myself to realize the sweet enjoyment of partaking
In the midst of my fellow citizens, the benign influence of good laws
Under a free government, the ever-favorite object of my heart
And the happy reward, as I trust
Of our mutual cares, labors, and dangers

One last time

A reflection on an ending has to consider all parts of the story, both good and bad. That’s how I’m choosing to approach this season of UCLA football. One era is ending, and we should look back on all of it fondly, but this is not a cause for sadness but for joy at having gotten to experience it in the first place. And as we look towards the future, we can have that hope that UCLA football will continue to entertain and thrill us no matter the ups and downs.

That would be good enough.

Go Bruins.

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