A Certain 50th Anniversary

CBS newscaster Walter Cronkite announces the death of President John F. Kennedy.

I have nothing to add to what has been said about the significance of this day, 50 years ago, in U.S. history.

Yet on this day I can't imagine myself devoting my blog entry to some other subject, so let's see if I can scare up an unusual angle.

Well ... there's a striking fact involving the National Football League. One of the weird facets of the weekend following the murder of President Kennedy was that the NFL proceeded with its full schedule of games. Nothing else went on as normal that weekend, but football did.

Sports Illustrated magazine ran this on that subject on the 30th anniversary.

Of course, there was nothing normal about that Sunday. Less than an hour before kickoff of the early games., Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. In Pittsburgh, the Bears and the Steelers played to a 17-17 tie. "Before the game you're usually talking about picking up blitzes," says former Pittsburgh running back Dick Hoak. "Instead, we were saying, 'Did you hear that Oswald was shot?'"

I noticed after 9/11/01 a perhaps-unseemly rush to act as if everything were 'back to normal.' I wonder if that qualifies as a national trait?

Anyway: ESPN2 will narrate a documentary on the subject, Rozelle's Decision-to-Play, this Sunday, the 50th anniversary of those pretense-of-normalcy games.

Dan Rather, no less, will narrate.

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