And now the weird part, as Seth Maxwell would say.
Seth Maxwell is dead.
Rather, the man who breathed life into him, Mac Davis, is dead. He passed this week at 78 following heart surgery, and this is hard stuff to take on top of all the other hard stuff 2020 has sent down the river to us, being the year of thumbscrews and eyeball-gouging and bastard plagues and all.
Most people know Davis as the country singer/songwriter who wrote "In The Ghetto" for Elvis and a bunch of other songs for himself, but here in the Blobiverse he'll forever be known as the quarterback of the North Dallas Bulls, Seth Maxwell. That's who he played opposite Nick Nolte in "North Dallas Forty," which might not be the best football movie ever made but sure doesn't have to stand in the line very long.
It's always been the Blob's favorite because of the way it accurately portrays professional football players as disposable parts in a corporate threshing machine, and also because it's got a pile of great lines. And a lot of those belong to Seth Maxwell, who is both quarterback and gridiron Buddha.
"You had better learn how to play the game, and I don't mean just the game of football," he tells Nolte's buck-the-system character, Phil Elliott, at one point.
Of course, Elliott never does and winds up getting kicked out of the league for essentially being too much a square peg in a round hole. And then says as much to Football Buddha at the end of the film.
"They want too much," Elliott says.
"Too much ain't enough. Not for them," Football Buddha replies.
Forty-one years ago Mac Davis' character said that. Still just as true today.
RIP, Seth Maxwell.
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