Deconstructing Bode

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Now, with our egos too fragile to blame, we point the finger at those who might absorb our Pontius Piloted-wrath. Bode Miller should have opted out, the journos are claiming. He should have conceded his spot to someone more hungry for victory as we define it. The coaches should've known this would happen. Of course, we all saw if coming. Didn't we?

But what did we really see? We saw a young man, lacking but not wanting savvy PR skills, approach his sport no differently than he always has – with a liberating kind of desire to ski fast, to ski raw and to create his own meaning through it all. We saw it in his eyes as he stood in the gatehouse awaiting his run. He, more than all of us, wanted badly to do what he was capable of. It just had nothing to do with scores and results and remuneration.

Indeed, there was no denying the look of disappointment when he failed to meet his own set of standards. Even as his words were twisted and turned back on him, and he assigned no responsibility for something that he never promised to deliver, there was a kind of pathos permeating the air. We couldn't feel sorry for Bode because he seemed above the pain of loss. But we weren't. And when America gets its ass kicked, someone has to pay.

So, we allowed Bode Miller to be publicly crucified by sports journalists who may have felt jilted when Miller wouldn't invite them in to his trailer and explain his enigmatic intellect in plain speak. Miller had become not only a prisoner of his own success but also a victim of the dark culture of popular aristocracy.

He was, as his altruistic father, Woody, said, "In a double bind."

Therein lay the duel-sided dilemma – Bode's approach to competition is a story we are not familiar with. We may covet his orgiastic potency, his joussiance for life, but there are conditions. His is a narrative we will never be shown in the mainstream press because it is counterproductive to our capitalistic ideologies. Americans don't stand in their stadium seats and chant, "We're number Two!"

Sports reportage now leads the way in media's situational ethics. The fans want the real deal, so long as it's not too real; like cast members from Survivor eating bugs – but they're cute, chocolate-colored bugs without 16 legs and antennae. Is there a person among us who would dispute the thought that, had Lindsey Jacobellis landed her penultimate jump, her "show boating" method air, and retained the gold medal, the descriptive would instead be, "display of skill," "artistic panache" or "America's fanciful youth?"

If Bode Miller had won an Olympic gold medal, something that is often decided by inches and microseconds, how secretly proud would Americans have been of "a guy who can drink beer at night and kick the world's ass in the morning?"

Bode Miller, as insightful and loquacious as he is, made one big mistake – he put too much faith in our society. How could he ever expect to simultaneously fulfill his own and a country's dichotomous expectations? Maybe he should have stayed home and allowed us to berate him for a far worse crime – failure to try on anyone's terms. But still, after all that's happened, he seems above that. Even if we are below it.

In near predictable irony, the plot thickens. His sponsor, Nike, in its own iconoclastic genius, has created a media spin on Bode's valid attempt at self-revelation and woven it through brilliantly-edited commercials that both offer us a teasing hint at the reluctant skier and tempt us to do our own thing by buying their things. Yes it's marketing with a profit motive, but the truth- in-the-pitch is at least a better insight into the truth of the man.

And quite possibly Miller knows that money is freedom. Okay, so the system paid him for his image and his likeness. We cannot simultaneously celebrate capitalism and shoot the down the capitalist.

But if Bode continues to ski competitively, and we must hope that he does, the hungry masses will forgive him as we've forgiven Kobe, and Tyson and T.O. and any athlete/hero figure who can offer us something that we covet – the ability to be one of the very best and something altogether different from the norm.

Maybe at some point in the distant future, the "Miller Chronicles" will become a parable of sorts where his acculturated name will morph from pronoun to verb – to Bode is to pull a Thoreau, to live on one's own terms and the hell with the rest. Quite possibly even Miller doesn't understand his place in the immediate and distant future of sport and popular culture. If Bode Miller is to ever achieve the iconoclastic verve that was so attractive to us before it was torpedoed by falsely-conceived failure, he will need to drop the sponsors and magazine covers and disappear into his thickly-forested youth. Yoda might've enjoyed "socializing at on Olympic level," but he never had a slick website.

At some point he may reify himself at a hall of fame induction or a benefit for the underprivileged, though I suspect we may see a more accurate Miller at the latter.

Regardless of how we feel about Bode Miller's Olympic experience, if we wanted to embody the best part of his home-schooled wisdom, we'd turn off the TV, run naked through the snow and use the sport pages for other woodsy activities that are befitting of the way he's been treated. To know Bode Miller is to wonder what ever happened to him.

Postscript:

Fewer than six weeks after the Olympics, Bode Miller went on to win the major American alpine skiing championships in each of the events he entered. Miller continues toward his goal of winning more World Cup races in a season than the two skiers tied for that distinction with 13 – Austria's Hermann Maier and Sweden's Ingemar Stenmark.

Aside from winning the World Cup overall title, he wants to be the first to win World Championship titles in all five events. So far, he has won downhill, giant slalom, super-G, and combined titles, and will try to take the slalom title at Are, Sweden, in February.