ON A SURREAL ELECTION DAY, LET’S JUST WATCH SAQUON BARKLEY OVER AND OVER

America will carry on, I suspect, and a football player’s wild inventiveness brings hope for progress even if you don’t like Harris or Trump — and ask how a famed writer’s son survived John Wayne Gacy

     A man dressed like Donald Trump hugged a woman dressed like Kamala Harris, sort of. Is anyone crying assault? This happened by the Pacific Ocean as America rushed to polling places, in a presidential election that will nauseate our interacting organisms no matter who wins. At least I have Saquon Barkley to watch today.

     No one is certain where this nation is headed and whether it will exist, but we do know a running back encountered a Jacksonville defensive back Sunday and turned Shohei Ohtani into another schlub. Barkley planted his right foot, maneuvered his body backward and soared through the air in a move that befuddles supernaturalism.

     What do we call it, a reverse hurdle? Not that anyone else can do it, much less try it, as his rear side navigated perfectly over Jarrian Jones — buttocks first — and gave us a reason to test athletes for divine powers. As it was, Barkley played golf last week with Barack Obama. As it is, he’s making voters consider ground-gainers for MVP honors, knowing they’ve been contract-lowballed by NFL executives.

     But this?

     “Saquon you’re INSANNE!!” LeBron James wrote on Instagram.

     “I ain’t never seen nothing like it,” said his Philadelphia teammate, DeVonta Smith.

     “It was supposed to happen the way it happened,” said another teammate, Kelee Ringo. “That’s why it was so dope.”

     “It was the best play I've ever seen,” said his head coach, Nick Sirianni. “What I think is so cool, there's going to be kids all over the country and all over Philadelphia trying to make that play and talking about that play and simulating it as they play backyard football or peewee football. They ain't going to be able to make it — I believe he's the only one in the world that can do that. I'm speechless. It was unbelievable.”

     Only Saquon was humble. Charles Barkley can take a permanent backseat in a last-name thunder car. So can every athlete we’ve deemed otherworldly.

     “I’ve got to give credit to God, man. I'm not going to lie. I feel like God gave me the ability to play this position and gave me some instincts,” Barkley said. “Sometimes you've got to let go and let God and your instincts take over.”

     Those of us who watch sports for a living — and have rumbled through Trump versus Harris — needed a taste of astonishing theater. I consumed a piece of human grace on a day that began in Santa Monica, west of Los Angeles, with the local newspaper saying Jerome Holtzman’s son is alive and well as a local playwright.

     Even though he once was raped by mass murderer John Wayne Gacy.

     God help America.

     When I started as a Chicago sports columnist, Holtzman was considered the dean of baseball writers at the Tribune. He wrote a book about the industry, “No Cheering in the Press Box,” and was clever enough to credit relief pitchers who finished games properly with a “save.” A friend of White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf, he became Major League Baseball’s official historian until his death in 2008 and was handed a career excellence award by the Hall of Fame. “There is no better baseball writer around, and certainly none more knowledgeable,” colleague Joe Falls said.

     Holtzman and his wife had children and lived in a Chicago suburb, Evanston. One son is named Jack Merrill, who changed his name. He grew up with abuse in the household, and at 16, he and his father were in a fist fight on Christmas Eve. I know this because Merrill has written a play and performs in it, which was reviewed positively in the Santa Monica Daily Press. He said his mother “had a narcissistic personality disorder and an interesting brand of Munchausen by proxy, in a way.”

     Merrill left home and found an apartment in downtown Chicago. He hung out in gay bars and was confronted by Gacy, a serial killer who raped and murdered at least 33 young men and boys. Merrill wound up in Gacy’s car.

     “To cut a long story short, he chloroformed me in the car, I woke up in handcuffs and he took me back to his house,” he told the Daily Press. “(He) played mind games with me and he raped me … but because of having to deal with my mother when I was younger, I understood that I must not make him angry. I didn’t know he was a killer, although I knew he could hurt me for sure.

     “I’m the only survivor out of anyone who encountered him in this way.”

     So he wrote a story. “I wouldn’t have come out of it right? I grew up with somebody extremely volatile and dangerous. And that’s why, when people are shocked about how scary it must’ve been, I think ‘you didn’t grow up with my mom. You don’t know what scary was,’ ’’ Merrill said. “I was frightened. And then I got to a point where I realized that I don’t have to be scared.”

     The play is known as “The Save.” It is described as a “coming-of-age-in-the-1970’s story written and performed by Jack Merrill that unapologetically takes on the scaring abuse often lurking beneath the pristine exterior of American Success.”

     Merrill survived and was married three years ago to his partner. “Everybody who sees the play says that the Gacy thing is a small part of it, right? But it was a small part of my life, it was one night, something that happened, that’s all it was,” he said.

     He overcame his horror. I will see the show at The Electric Lodge in Venice, at $30 a ticket. Jerome Holtzman cared about sportswriting and breaking stories and scolded me once or twice. Life goes on, as America realizes again in many such forms. Sometime Tuesday night, I will get away from the world and turn on a video.

     Saquon. Saquon. More Saquon.

     What will he try next? It’s why we watch sports when little else makes sense.

     ###

     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.