Culture
Running with rage, Isiah Pacheco has energized the Chiefs' rushing attack in the playoffs
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — His hands balled into fists and his biceps flexed, running back Isiah Pacheco stomped along the Kansas City Chiefs’ sideline, his message accentuated by his demonstrative voice.
“Ay, bring that f—— energy!” Pacheco screamed at his offensive teammates, many of them nodding in agreement. “Bring that s—! Bring that s—!”
A few minutes later, the Chiefs began the second half of their divisional-round playoff game against the Buffalo Bills, the first time Pacheco had played a road elimination game in his young, two-year career. With the Chiefs trailing by four points, Pacheco helped them score touchdowns on back-to-back drives by doing what has made him one of the NFL’s most distinctive players: Whenever he touched the ball, he ran with rage, intensity and brutality.
Pacheco’s running style was instrumental in the Chiefs advancing to the AFC Championship Game for the sixth consecutive season. He led all players with 97 rushing yards on 15 attempts, a sizable amount of those yards gained after the first defender made contact with him.
Sixty percent of Pacheco’s carries ended with him going over the expected yardage, according to the NFL Next Gen Stats, the highest percentage of any qualified running back in the divisional round.
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When Pacheco entered the end zone on his 4-yard touchdown run early in the fourth quarter, which proved to be the game-winning score, he shouted another message to left tackle Donovan Smith and tight end Travis Kelce.
“They can’t f— with us!” Pacheco said. He continued to encourage his teammates when he reached the sideline, saying “Everything you got! Everything you got!”
“We’re gonna make it quiet today!”
10 was on the mic for our divisional dub 🎙️ pic.twitter.com/bZOtjEYBz6
— Kansas City Chiefs (@Chiefs) January 24, 2024
In the Chiefs’ two postseason victories, over the Bills and Miami Dolphins, Pacheco has backed up his words with dominant performances.
His teammates have elevated their play, too. The Chiefs’ rushing attack, a part of the offense that was inconsistent at times during the regular season, has been exceptional in the playoffs. The offensive linemen — Smith, left guard Joe Thuney, center Creed Humphrey, right guard Trey Smith, right tackle Jawaan Taylor and backup guard Nick Allegretti — have been the superior group in the trenches. And the Chiefs’ three tight ends — Kelce, Noah Gray and Blake Bell — have all improved their blocking.
“I’m proud of how resilient the guys have been,” Humphrey said. “We’ve gotten through a little bit of a slump, but the guys kept pressing and we’ve improved, which is really good to see.”
Entering the playoffs, offensive coordinator Matt Nagy and quarterback Patrick Mahomes acknowledged that the Chiefs offense would need to have a more simplified approach in the postseason to limit mistakes. The easiest way for coach Andy Reid and Nagy to accomplish that was to give Pacheco a larger role in the offense by increasing his workload. Pacheco’s 39 rushing attempts in the playoffs are the most he has had this season in a two-game stretch. He has been effective with those touches, too, producing 186 yards and two touchdowns — and eight rushes of 8 yards or more.
“I thought we did OK during the (regular season) with opportunities, but (offensive line coach) Andy Heck does a heck of a job with designing the runs, and the guys have executed them,” Reid said. “The offensive line takes a lot of pride in doing what they do. They know it starts with them and they’ve been very accurate with their blocking assignments.”
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Even in the fourth-coldest game in NFL history, with the temperature minus-4 degrees at kickoff at Arrowhead Stadium against the Dolphins, Pacheco still ran the ball with rugged aggression through multiple defenders, including his 3-yard touchdown. His highlights led many fans on social media to make exaggerated comparisons when watching him perform.
Before Wednesday’s practice, Pacheco shared his favorite.
“The funniest one, I thought, was when they say I run like I bite people,” Pacheco said, smiling and laughing. “I ain’t no zombie. Like, that was crazy. It’s a great opinion to have, I guess. For me, it’s just being determined and understanding that I have a goal to achieve.”
Glad @isiah_pachecoRB is aware of the memes about his running style 😂 pic.twitter.com/LgA8WeN1bV
— NFL (@NFL) January 24, 2024
Just a month ago, Pacheco missed two games because he sustained another right shoulder injury, the same shoulder he injured during the Chiefs’ postseason run last year. He had what Reid described as a “clean-up” surgery, an arthroscopic procedure, before returning to the lineup on Christmas Day.
Since then, Pacheco has altered his routine after practice, ensuring he receives as much treatment as he can from the team’s medical staff.
“Last year was the longest season in my career, so understanding it’s the second year, there was no offseason for me,” Pacheco said. “I had surgery, so it’s been an ongoing (process). I (have) stayed longer in the building, being one of the last guys to leave.”
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Pacheco didn’t participate in Wednesday’s practice because of a sprained toe, a decision Reid made as a precaution. Pacheco expects to play Sunday against the Baltimore Ravens and understands he could have 2o carries against the NFL’s top-ranked defense, which has allowed just 16.3 points per game.
“It’s very important to protect the ball,” said Pacheco, who has fumbled only once in five postseason games. “That’s the biggest part of the game, knowing the team knows you’re going to run it.”
THIS TOUCHDOWN IS A 10/10 😤 pic.twitter.com/IErEnUKWkp
— Kansas City Chiefs (@Chiefs) January 22, 2024
Pacheco knows the ideal situation for him and the offensive linemen for Sunday’s game: A final drive in the fourth quarter where the mission is to gain the first down that would secure a victory and send the Chiefs to Super Bowl LVIII.
After Bills kicker Tyler Bass missed a potential game-tying 44-yard field goal following the two-minute warning Sunday, the Chiefs still needed to gain another first down to exhaust all of their opponent’s timeouts. Pacheco ran through two defenders to gain 8 yards on first down. The Chiefs gained the game’s final first down on the next play, a 3-yard run up the middle by Pacheco.
“That’s what you want to do in that situation, let the coaches be able to put it on our shoulders up front,” Humphrey said of the offensive line. “I’m really proud of how the guys executed those two plays. Pop running really hard was awesome to see, too.”
Pacheco’s final two rushing attempts looked like his previous 13 in the game, full of determination, ferocity and hostility.
Before Pacheco left the podium Wednesday, a reporter asked a question he has heard before: Are you really angry when you’re running with the ball?
“Absolutely!” Pacheco quickly responded. “I’m willing to do whatever I have to do to get the job done.”
(Photo: Kathryn Riley / Getty Images)
But here’s a catch with A.I. It’s easy to tell when a reference, or a comparison, or a sentence, doesn’t belong to a writer. Erudition and style aren’t forgeable for long; it still must be earned. As for A.I.’s sleek, space-efficient text, we’ve already grown accustomed to what that sounds like — the flat, consistent tone, the pert little summary bits, the repetitions, the impersonal and fluorescent-lit mood. Reading it, you feel you’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name.
It will get much better. Like a Nakamichi Model 500, perhaps, A.I. models will probably someday be programmed to calculate range and trajectory and to spit out rich critical prose. But as John Berryman put it in one of his “Dream Songs,” speaking of dead-on-their-feet essayists everywhere, “When the mind dies it exudes rich critical prose.” A.I. machinations can reflect the consensus, but it’s part of a real critic’s job to not go flopping along with the times, to wage guerrilla warfare on that consensus. Je suis Claude? Nix to that.
Book reviews may survive if only because, as Elizabeth Hardwick observed, publishers need praise for their new releases “as an Easter basket needs shredded green paper under the eggs.” But the breakup of the monoculture, the rise of algorithms and the flattening of taste mean that critics will never, for better and worse, have the consecrating power they once did.
Pauline Kael, Albert Murray, Lester Bangs, Edmund Wilson and Kenneth Tynan — five of my critical heroes — knew what to notice, in ways that can’t be taught or imitated, and they knew how to make their prose and their ideas stick. I’m cheered by the young critics out there, swimming in this sea without drowning in it, trying not to be cast into gaol by their creditors, and working to make certain that the last snatch of book criticism isn’t three fire emojis, two jazz-hands, a crying face and a facepalm.
GHOST TOWN, by Tom Perrotta
Upon finishing Tom Perrotta’s new novel, “Ghost Town,” I found myself agreeably haunted by the corpulent specter of Harold Bloom: the late, great literary critic who called the Harry Potter books “rubbish only good for the dustbin where they will certainly wind up in a generation or so,” and Stephen King “immensely inadequate” and “a writer of penny dreadfuls.”
In “Ghost Town,” a successful author named Jay Perry, a minor-league version of the successful author Perrotta, is fretting about his legacy. He has suffered from a crude version of what Bloom called “the anxiety of influence,” maybe even with regard to … Stephen King.
A graduate of Princeton and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (as Perrotta is of Yale and Syracuse), Perry had a 15-year run as a “literary writer,” with diminishing returns. His oeuvre includes a short-story collection featuring a Pennywise-like clown who dies during a kindergartner’s birthday party while one dad is making out with a mom ghost.
Perry promised his wife that his next book would be commercial, and pounded out a supernatural noir called “Ghost Teacher.” His agent persuaded him to make the teacher a “guiding spirit” for underdog students, and a successful young-adult series and animated TV show were born.
But Perry, now a financially secure empty nester with an infinity pool in the Hollywood Hills — if not quite the clout of Perrotta, whose sexy screen adaptations include “Election,” “Little Children” and “The Leftovers” (reviewed by King in the Times Book Review) — has grown melancholy and reflective. What story does he have left to tell?
Glancingly confronting themes of artistic integrity and abandonment, including self-abandonment, and unfolding mostly in flashbacks to the early 1970s, “Ghost Town” is a formulaic coming-of-age tale swirled in soft-serve spook.
Perry grew up Jimmy Perrini in Creamwood, N.J., fictional but recognizable Perrotta country (he’s from Garwood) that he’s avoided in adult life. When the mayor invites him back to a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new municipal building, he is prompted, after many years of burying the dark aspects of his past, to exhume them. The result is less penny dreadful than mild freaky-deaky. Your spine will not be chilled, nor even remotely cooled.
Whoever options “Ghost Town” will want to check if the set decorator and costume designer from Cameron Crowe’s “Almost Famous” are available. The novel is stocked with lemon shampoo; coconut suntan oil with low protection factor; Cap’n Crunch; a velour recliner and lava lamp. Characters wear bell bottoms or terry cloth gym shorts; they drive Camaros and Darts; they dodge the draft and toke up. The soundtrack to their young lives includes the Allman Brothers’ “Eat a Peach” on eight-track tape, and “Kung Fu Fighting” blaring from WABC on a portable radio.
Jimmy had a “normal” nuclear family that fissured fast. We barely get acquainted with his mother before she dies of cancer while he’s on the baseball field. From then on his older sister and their father, a union welder and volunteer firefighter, disappear into their own lives. (Besides grieving, Mr. Perrini is busy fabricating ductwork for a new A.&P.) The adults in this book are chalk outlines. Unpleasant topics — estrangement, architectural eyesores, drinking problems — are whispered in italics.
Jimmy bonds with Olivia, a smart older teen who lost her father and baby brother in a car accident. Trying to reach their dead parents using a Ouija board, they connect with a mysterious apparition identifying himself as Uncle Bob.
There’s a possibly creepy priest who tries to console Jimmy with a trip to the beach, a joyriding bad influence named Eddie and a clunky subplot about disruption to the racial homogeneity of Creamwood, whose on-the-nose name sounds like a brand stocked in that A.&P. frozen dessert aisle.
I have John Updike on the brain — A.&P.! — but then I always have Updike (dismissed by Bloom as “a minor novelist with a major style,” by the way) on the brain. Still, with Perrotta regularly anointed the 21st century’s foremost chronicler of adulterous suburbia, the eeriest thing about “Ghost Town” may be how its fiery denouement echoes 1971’s “Rabbit Redux.”
Does “Ghost Town” stink like the Oscar the Grouch garbage cans in downtown Creamwood? Nah. It has the practiced Perrotta polish; an easy shrug about how it will be received or remembered.
“That’s the thing about writing,” Perry tells a sparse crowd at the library where, “as the only famous writer our town has ever produced!,” per the mayor, he’s been invited to give a reading. “It’s all a big mystery. You don’t know where your ideas come from, you don’t know how to get them onto the page, and you have no idea how the world’s going to react to them. You’ve got to learn to be comfortable with the not knowing, or at least learn to live with it.”
GHOST TOWN | By Tom Perrotta | Scribner | 288 pp. | $28
But only in Hahn’s book could I have compared those two translations to understand this, which is symptomatic of the very fullness of the book. Hahn leaves no stone unturned, informing us that the languages quoted in the book include “Arabic, Azeri, Bulgarian, Cape Verdean Creole, Danish, French, Hebrew, Hungarian, isiXhosa, Italian, Japanese, Kurdish, Latin, te reo Māori, Portuguese, Russian, Swahili, Thai, Turkish and Yiddish.” “Hold me back!” say I, who harbors things like an LP from the 1960s of “Kiss Me, Kate” sung in German and an Estonian translation of the novel “Ragtime.” I admire Hahn’s intent.
But there can be no one-size-fits-all guide to translating Shakespeare, as each language presents its own challenges to the endeavor. This means that the book is essentially a tourist’s guide to the array of choices translators happen to have made here, there and everywhere. On your left is how they did this passage in Turkish, up straight ahead is how this came out in Mandarin.
The impossibility of a real through line ultimately means that the book is a little too, well, generous. It could lose a good 100 pages of its 400 and remain the fine thing that it is. Also, I am always in favor of nonfiction writers engaging in a chatty tone, but for some readers, Hahn will seem to overdo it in spots. To him, “Richard III” is one of the “uncliest” of the plays, and the final words of the book, on the difficulties he encountered in finding translated Shakespeare passages as his chapter titles, are “But it is annoying. …”
But in the end, the book is about how Shakespeare comes off not only to English speakers, but to the whole world. The book is a kind of master class in translation, a chronicle of the author’s healthy obsession, and a great way to catch up with Shakespeare’s work. We should know how people experience Shakespeare worldwide if, as Harold Bloom taught us, his work was “the invention of the human.” Hahn’s tour makes a lovely case for that.
IF THIS BE MAGIC: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation | By Daniel Hahn | Knopf | 406 pp. | $35
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