I’m going to post a really short thought tonight, something that might even fit on Twitter! OK, yesterday I was hanging around with my brother at his house, and we were watching a show about NFL quarterback Tom Brady. Perhaps the #1 QB of the past decade or two.

My brother has an insatiable appetite for professional football, and now uses much of his free time watching game repeats and mini-documentaries about now-retired coaches and players on the NFL channel during the spring and summer months. (He misses the XFL, an off-season football experiment which was killed off by the COVID pandemic last March — although the owners claim they will bring it back in early 2022).

So we were watching the show about Brady’s shaky start followed by so many brilliant accomplishments since 2000, and I couldn’t help think of another tall, thin uber-white male with similar work ethic, physical endurance, soft-spoken personality and technical virtuosity. That would be Neil Armstrong, the famed test pilot and NASA astronaut from the 60’s and 70’s. The guy who figured out how to land the Apollo 11 lunar module after it became apparent that NASA’s detailed plans for the landing weren’t going to work — and with only a few seconds of fuel left! Yes, Armstrong “read the field” just as well as Tom Brady does, and made some split second decisions that won the game. Both were (and in Brady’s case, still is) great quarterbacks!

So, just an odd observation — Tom Brady and Neil Armstrong. White American males aren’t in vogue like they once were. Sure, white males have a lot of bad stuff to answer for. But some of them really did raise the bar with regard to arete, skill and resourcefulness. I’m not much of a hero-worshipper, but I will give Tom and Neil their due. They did get their **** together, didn’t they.