Rob Davis is entering his 13th year in the NFL, and has been the Packers' long-snapper for a dozen years. He is regarded as one of the best in the game. The Fontenot recently had a chance to sit down and ask him a few questions.
The Fontenot: Mr. Davis, you’ve been an elite long-snapper in the NFL for over a decade. What’s a typical day like for you?
RD: The problem of evil is a question has more to do with faith than any real ontological issues; there is no “problem” at all if we consider a universe stripped of any metaphysical interpretations. From that standpoint, not only is “evil” not a problem, it’s entirely an illusion; it’s a description of human behavior that has no real ontological value beyond whatever our culture assigns it.
The Fontenot: You are now Brett Favre’s oldes t teammate. Do you two have a strong relationship?
RD: Now of course if you were to accept that somewhat simplistic materialism, you would have escaped the question entirely. I’m not sure how valuable it is to dance and shimmy when it comes to philosophy, especially regarding a question like this, which has such obvious populist overtones. As we all know, the real “problem” argument grew from the BBC debates between Bertrand Russell and the uneducated, ingenious G.K. Chesterton—whose novels I love, by the way. The basic question Russell put to Chesterton was why, given a supreme being, we would ever have to suffer at all. In the least. Imagining a phenomenon like genocide just doesn’t link up to a benevolent being. It just doesn’t. That’s the basic question. The basic answer is that God’s benevolence is unknowable. I find that to be rhetorical garbage.
The Fontenot: You had zero tackles in 1998. Can you talk a little about what long snappers are and are not expected to do on special teams?
RD: More interesting to me is anomalous monism. I like it because it has common sense built right into it. Look, is it really difficult to accept that there are such things as mental events and such things as physical events, and that there are times when one causes the other? And in a lot of ways, Davidson’s next step, saying that there are no strict laws that can define these interactions, insulates the mind-body problem from a lot of unnecessary babble. That’s my take, anyway.
The Fontenot: Can you tell me what goes through your head when you’re about to make a crucial snap?
RD: Longwell was going through a big-time positivist phase in ’99, and I think that had an effect on his concentration. I got the snap out and it was fine, but there was something about the way his feet looked—I don’t know how to describe it, other than to say that his feet looked rigidly unwilling to think about empiricism in new ways—that made me think a block was coming. Well, it did, and there he was, running sideways dealing with a whole mess of Favre-transference, getting hunted down by linemen, and I tried to shift with him to give him a block and prevent any physical contact—I did, by the way, believe in physical contact through most of the 90s, except for ’95, when Hume kind of took over my world, and by Hume I mean the real Hume, the real idealist, not that watered-down pansy Hume that’s really the result of centuries of misinterpretation—and we locked eyes and then just got destroyed by John Randle.
The Fontenot: Do long snappers grow up wanting to be long snappers?
RD: This interview is over. And for the record, I think that continental philosophy, in general, is ridiculous.
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