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I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this picture.
This is a picture of two guys being normal. First, I guess, we must cover the basics. The “facts” if you will. This picture was taken at the after party for the most recent Football Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Neither man in this picture was being inducted into the Hall that night, but seemingly received invites as football luminaries. The rightmost man was inducted in 2016 and the guy on the left will be inducted whenever he becomes eligible. The man on the right, Tony Dungy, posted this picture to his personal Twitter feed on August 9th, 2021 at 1:06 pm. It was posted with the following words, “Another player I caught up with last night at Peyton’s HOF party—Tom Brady. Nothing but class! Taking a day to leave training camp to be there shows the love and respect they have for each other. We were competitors on the field but I have ultimate respect for Tom as well!” About 13,200 liked it, 2,228 people quote retweeted it and 657 people retweeted when I last checked. That’s a good amount of likes and RTs but nowhere near viral status, especially for someone who has 880k+ followers.
A few more facts before we continue. The person on the left is named Tom Brady. He is currently the quarterback for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He is considered by many, if not most, football fans to be the greatest player of all time. He has won more Super Bowls than any other person in NFL history. He turned 44 only a few days ago. Tony Dungy, the other man in the photo is 65 years old and will turn 66 in October. He played for a short time in the NFL, primarily on defense and special teams, and won a Super Bowl with the Pittsburgh Steelers. He is more well known for being a Head Coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Indianapolis Colts. He became the first black head coach to win a Super Bowl when he helped lead the Colts to a win over the Chicago Bears in 2006. Currently he is an analyst for NBC, mostly appearing on Football Night In America, a Sunday night football show.
So, now that you know the basics of the people involved, we can talk about this photo. I really hate when people say things like “I can’t stop thinking about this” or, “I think about this every day,” but this picture has in many ways taken over my brain. Like some ancient insanity rune, this one image has darkened my every waking moment since I saw it last week. I can’t look at it for too long because my skin starts to crawl and lights start flickering at the edges of my eyes. But I continue to look. From the analysis of the photo that I have been able to do, I’ve come up with two major reasons for why I start to feel as if an abyssal pit has opened up in my stomach whenever I see this image.
The first is the lighting. I don’t much about the technical terms for such things, but this is really giving off discarded still from a high school film production class vibes. The weird shadows on the jackets, the way the light seems to be coming from both somewhere above the two NFL greats and straight in front of them, all of it congeals into a queasy sense of unreality. The light distorts their features in a number of ways, mainly the eyes. They seem both too bright and too dull at the same time. It’s what I like to call “Jeff Bezos face.” Like looking at two plastic dolls whose eyes have been replaced with those of a dead man. The tree behind them feels like it belongs in an off-brand Conjuring-verse movie, as does the out of focus man and golf cart combo in the back. All of it combines to make something eerie enough to provoke goosebumps and nightmares.
Another, more pressing issue with this photo involves the people in it. There is a more unseemly side to these gentlemen than what is regularly printed about them in the press. Pre-Zombie Deadspin has covered some of these things in detail. I don’t want to overstate the stuff that these articles talk about. No one is accusing them of murder. But what they’ve done is icky and presents the a story of two people with not the best judgement. But what comes across in this photo, at least to me, is that these two know they could do pretty much anything they wanted and get away with it. Even if they were both fired tomorrow and never allowed to work again, they’d be fine. Their status as rich, football legends, and celebrities affords them a shocking amount of leeway with the law. And they know it. In parts of New England, and now Tampa it’s not complete hyperbole to say that Brady could get away with literal murder, depending on the circumstances. Dungy still has a lot of good will in Indianapolis, and while he isn’t at the same level of celebrity as Brady, he’s got a fair amount of power as well.
One final note, for a photo of two men who are millionaires many times over, this is shockingly bad. These people were at an event for millionaires by millionaires and no one there could seemingly manage to set up a nice place to take some post-show photos. Or barring that, a camera nice enough to make the best of the lighting situation. That adds a bit to the creep level of it. Both Dungy and Brady have spent a fair amount of time on camera and Dungy works in TV. You’d think that even a bit of aesthetic sense would have been taken from his time as an analyst. But no. Dungy looked at that picture, taken by some poorly paid event staffer most likely, and thought, “wow, this would be a great picture to post, it definitely doesn’t look like two wax statues have somehow come to life.”
I’ll probably forget about this photo in a few weeks though. Occasionally it’ll pop up in my mind I’m sure, like some unbidden curse that I am forced to live with for the rest of my life. But that’s the price I pay.
Sorry to make you think about this photo that much. Really rude of me. As an apology here’s a photo of Jeff Bezos and Lizzo. That oughta clear the palette.
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