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From Sylvan Goats PR:
Team sources confirmed today that Coach Mike Ditka has persuaded General Manager and owner Bronko Nagurski to change the name of the Sylvan Park Dead Cherokees to the Sylvan Goats. Ditka, who spent the summer in Italy in a court-ordered anger management program after slapping a six-year-old boy, returned to training camp a changed man, according to assistant coaches who wished to remain anonymous to avoid being slapped.
Contacted at home in Kankakee, Ditka spoke in a pool Zoom conference about his time in Naples at Anatra e Copri il Centro [Duck and Cover Center]: “It was enlightening, honestly. Mainly it was the goats.”
Ditka elaborated: “The facility is located by the Bay of Naples in southern Italy, near the southern foot of Mt. Vesuvius. I hiked up one afternoon after my morning session on the downside of hate speech. I felt a need to find something, anything, something of value, something I was unlikely to slap. The summit proved to be the culminating point of my experience. When I looked over the rim, I saw that the crater was lush with grass sprouting from volcanic soil warmed year-round by percolating magma; goats were gently cropping the green expanse. I had heard from locals that for centuries they have used goats as a warning system. Enriched by the crater's silky grass and plentiful rain, the goats can sense what humankind cannot: gentle shudders deep in the mantle of the earth. As the quake-rumble swells the goats cry and people living at the foot of the volcano know to evacuate. A major quake would bury Vesuvians in molten ash, but minor eruptions do not threaten the city. Yet even then magma oozing up into the center of the crater – a crimson star rimmed with an emerald band – can kill the fucking goats. Excuse my French.
“If the goats buy the farm, their suffocated bodies are recovered for a celebration known as Festa della Capra. Roasted goat meat consumed during the festival symbolizes both sacrifice and the triumph of life, and carnivalesque release fosters sexual license. The children born in the wake of the ritualistic orgies are known as capraletti, or little goats, and celebrate the day of the eruption as their birthday. Every Easter they are bathed in a fountain brimming with warm goat’s milk. When the burned grass renews itself in the caldera, the capraletti shepherd up a new tribe of goats, and the cycle continues. And if that’s not a parable, what is?”
Momentary silence suggested the Zoom call had frozen, until Ditka, apparently scratching himself below the frame, was seen to move. Asked about the relationship between his “parable” and his altered deportment, Ditka replied: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
Silence again seemed a technical glitch, until Ditka spoke again: “Obviously the former name was profoundly offensive, and could have been found otherwise only by Anglos who’ve never knowingly met an indigenous person, let alone a member of the Cherokee tribe, whose destruction is etched in blood across Tennessee and Kentucky.
“The name now is Goats, the Sylvan Goats. And we shall avenge the destruction of indigenous peoples across the globe.”
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