Stacks and stacks of receipts

My neighborhood is filled with dogs, one of them a giant who is aging gracefully alongside his somewhat-elderly owner. When she walks him down the street he never pulls the leash harder than she might handle, he never takes off running after a cat or rabbit who might have grabbed his attention. He is gentle in every regard. His name is Atlas.

Because of course it is. I guess Hercules would have been just a little too close to home. But Atlas makes me want to watch the Sandlot every time I see him.

Never is Atlas’ patience more on display than when he is walking past the local kids walking home from school, who all want to “pet” him. The number of pets that look a lot more like pokes, prods, or pulls are all a little terrifying. Atlas’ head is larger than those of the small people semi-torturing him, and he does not seem to be keeping track of how many pets are of the “good” vs “OW!” variety. Woe be us all if that bill were to ever come due. Feels like there would be several missing kids – or at least fingers – around these parts.

Happily, Atlas is not keeping receipts.

“Keeping receipts”. It’s a recently popularized phrase, but certainly not a recent practice. The idea of keeping track of the slights against you for a soon-glorious moment of serving them all back to their owners raw. For instance, the phrase has been attached repeatedly to Russell Wilson this week as the Denver Broncos get ready to start their second campaign with him under center. This after a tough past season with the attendant tough media takes. Wilson is making it known he saw who said what, and he intended to show everyone just how wrong they were.

CU Buffs Head Coach Deion Sanders was ready to talk about those receipts when speaking to long-time conversation mate Ed Werder of ESPN. Deion’s phrasing was much more to the point.

“Hold on. Hollllld on”, Sanders said while staring at Werder. “Do you believe? Do you believe NOW? Huh? Oh no, I read all that bull-junk you wrote. I read and sifted through all that.”

When telling another reporter he knew she’d not cast aspersions on the team just yet, he said he knew, and gestured to the rest of the room saying, “not YOU. I got receipts. I know who they are.” A rightfully puffed-up Sanders would refer to receipts a couple more times in the presser, making sure he knew we all knew he was paying attention to who was saying what.

New York Jets head coach Robert Saleh specifically trotted out the phrase when referring to the comments of one new Broncos head coach, and these are just some of the recent examples of it locally. Google “keeping receipts” in your area, and you’re likely to either come across a spate of sports stories of heroes recently disrespected and/or advertisements for a former employer of mine.

Is there good in these receipts being kept? Does it serve us well to resurface these pokes and prods for reconciliation on an event-by-event basis? For all we know, the Buffs can still go 1-11, or run the table to their second national championship. While the truth is quite likely in the middle of those extremes, will we subject each other to a re-litigation of who got it right at the end of each week? What a boring press conference tradition that will end up being. As a Ram alum of koff-koff years, I’m sad to say I think the Buffs will start their year 3-0, but doubt Coach Prime will call me out positively at the end of the Rocky Mountain Showdown for it.

I’ve even had literal receipts come in for a Rams/Buffs game, foolishly having driven my bright-green-and-yellow bug to Boulder and parking it at a buddy’s place near campus in 1986 for a rare Rams victory. It was so sweet, I almost didn’t care about the four flat tires I came back to. Poor planning on my part. But if I’m keeping receipts on the head-to-head contests themselves over the years, my school runs woefully short. So, shall I hang onto that sweet/flat memory? Or pore over my rather statistically significant losses?

Maybe this self-described receipt-tracking soothes the hearts of those on the speaking end of said. Does it alleviate the pains of those pulls and pecks? William Blake might think so… (excerpt from The Poison Tree)

I was angry with my friend; 
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe: 
I told it not, my wrath did grow. 

But in this case, I might argue that these folk on the other end of the “wrath” of these receipts are more foe than friend, and so maybe the real heart of it all is that this methodology is simply the newest hook into the tried-and-tired-and-true “nobody believes in us” trope, and this one made all the more soundbite-length, reality TV-ready, and digitally un-erasable.

For whatever it’s worth, I’m a medium-to-big fan of each of the gents mentioned above – Wilson, Sanders, and Saleh – so not meaning to call them out specifically. They’re simply amongst a couple thousand others currently leaning on the latest lever of disrespect. But as our sports media days seem to have devolved into keeping track of what every last person around us said about us, I’m left to wonder if sports itself isn’t better off getting all the scorekeeping back out on the field.