Having no interest in competitive sports, local or otherwise, I nonetheless sipped my morning cup with a lump in my throat upon learning that Myron Cope had just died.
As a sportscaster and pundit, Cope imbued his broadcasts and writings with an enthusiastic mirth and goofiness, allowing his cult of personality to proliferate beyond Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, and the US. The absurdly virulent memes Cope unleashed include a handful of catchphrases, the qualities of his own voice (which, I own, is great fun to imitate) and a powerful magic talisman: the Terrible Towel. Chris Potter’s 2006 CP article explores the question, “But why a towel?”:
A towel had several advantages: It was “lightweight and portable and already owned by just about every fan,” Cope writes. It was also practical: Fans could wipe their seats with it, “use it as a muffler against the cold” or “drape it over their heads if it rains.”
…
In fact, perhaps the reason the Terrible Towel endures is precisely because it retains that purity. It’s a symbol everyone can afford: You can still use a plain old hand towel from home, and in a world of $150 jerseys, the licensed version is cheap (under $10 in most places I’ve seen it).Started as a marketing “gimmick,” the Towel is perhaps the least commercialized accessory in football fandom. That’s yet another reason to be proud of waving it.
In Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy mythos, towels are as fundamental to interstellar hitchhiking as is the spice melange to interstellar travel in Frank Herbert’s Dune series. The official Towel Day website quotes Adams, quoting the Guide, in answer to “Why a towel?”:
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value – you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you – daft as a bush, but very, very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
Though no galactic traveler (in 1996, Cope told Pitt Magazine, “I lived here all my life, and it’s by choice,” and, “I had a number of offers to leave, but I’m happy here.”), Cope was clearly a man to be reckoned with. In 2006, at a time when local pundits and lawmakers were trying, as many still are, to outdo one another in terms of anti-smoker bigotry, Cope cried foul on the illegal, and, fortunately, ill-fated Allegheny County smoking ban. Here’s a choice bit from his Post-Gazette article, “The smoke Nazis are after us”:
In any case, it is important, when speaking of studies to know who commissioned them. The recipients of these grants know who — and usually deliver the grantor’s desired result, else they’ll never get another grant.
Also, never mind the PG’s tireless references to the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, et al. Bureaucracies all. Get cousin Louie a job over there writing press releases citing “studies” and round figures on secondhand smoke.
Smokers, head for your basements! The health Nazis, who never let fact stand in their way, are after us as never before in their ignominious past.
“Blitzburgher” Cope’s Nazi comparison was perhaps more apt than he knew. Robert Proctor writes in the British Medical Journal article, “The anti-tobacco campaign of the Nazis: a little known aspect of public health in Germany, 1933-45” that Hitler himself called tobacco, “the wrath of the Red Man against the White Man for having been given hard liquor.” Hitler catapulted his anti-smoker propaganda throughout the Reich, and passed anti-smoker legislation similar to that which still looms today in Harrisburg.
But, despite all the bans, taxes, and bogeyman-Jew-face-in-smoke-cloud posters, “German per capita tobacco use between 1932 and 1939 rose from 570 to 900 cigarettes a year,” Proctor writes. Perhaps the über-progressive Führer consoled himself with the knowledge that, as Proctor again notes, “According to Germany’s national accounting office, by 1941 tobacco taxes constituted about one twelfth of the government’s entire income.” What became of all those Reichsmarks, I wonder? Perhaps Adolf earmarked them für die Kinder.
Perhaps, too, it is appropriate that Cope’s death came on the demisesquicentennial anniversary of the Reichstag fire in 1933, the seminal (and liminal) false-flag event which led to Hitler’s seizure of dictatorial power.
Anyhow, namaste, Myron. If you run afoul of Nazis while traversing those bardos, give ‘em hell, then keep going!