Matthew Stafford and Clayton Kershaw both graduated from Highland Park, and both had a very bad night at almost the exact same time.
They were separated by 1,299 miles on Sunday night, but both Clayton Kershaw and Matthew Stafford had a shared experience. It wasn’t a good experience, just for full disclosure. In fact, it’s a fascinating converging of timelines that from an objective point of view is pretty trippy.
For Dodgers and Lions fans, not so much.
Put yourself in a mental time machine, and transport back to Highland Park high school in Texas, circa 2005. There you will find a teenage Kershaw snapping a football to a teenage Stafford on a practice field. Both were classmates on the same football team. Who knew that 12 years later those two boys would be on concurrent national stages, as $100 million superstars in two different sports? On Sunday night, Kershaw was pitching Game 5 of the World Series in Houston, while Stafford was playing on Sunday Night Football in Detroit.
Unbeknownst to these teens in Texas back in 2005, neither of them would have a good night.
Things didn’t start particularly bad for either Kershaw or Stafford. The Dodgers leapt out to a 4-0 lead while Stafford’s Lions stayed relatively close to the Steelers in a slugfest of traded field goals. It didn’t last, though, and that’s where things get weird.
As if they were kindred spirits — passing a cosmic energy to one another as the ball was snapped between the two — things started coming unhinged at roughly the same time. Within the same fifteen minute period of time, Stafford watched as the Lions allowed a 97-yard touchdown to JuJu Smith-Schuster while Kershaw watched Jose Altuve tattoo a 3-run game-tying home run.
First, it was Stafford. The Lions went for and failed to convert a fourth-and-goal against the Steelers. Then, at roughly 10:40 pm ET:
In Houston, Kershaw put two runners on base before getting yanked by Dave Roberts. Then, at about 10:50 pm ET:
Time and space are weird constructs that humans still don’t fully understand. To think that two men, who at one point in time shared the touch of the same football, would 12-years later suffer crushing defeats at the same time thousands of miles away is zany.
Is it a coincidence? Is it more?
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Neither player was on the field when their nights imploded, so the universe is as ruthless as it is uncanny.