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After every football game, of course, the papers are full of reports on the day´s injuries, a sort of post-battle »body count«, and the respective teams go to work with doctors and trainers, tape, whirlpool baths, cortisone and the whole drama is reenacted – injured athletes held together by adhesive, braces and drugs – and the days following it are filled with even more feverish activity to put on the show yet again at the end of the next week. (I remember being so taped up in college that I earned the nickname »mummy.«) The team that survives this merry-go-round spectacle of skilled masochism with the fewest incapacitating injuries usually wins. It is a sort of victory by ordeal: »We hurt them more than they hurt us.«
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