Making Sense

Doctor J. Robert Cade, who invented the sports drink Gatorade and launched a multi billion-dollar industry that the beverage continues to dominate, died Tuesday of kidney failure. He was eighty years old. The Washington Redskins' Sean Taylor died Tuesday after he was gunned down during a home invasion on Sunday night. Sean Taylor was not eighty. He was twenty-four.
Cade's researchers had determined a football player could lose as much as eighteen pounds, ninety to ninety-five percent of it water, during the three hours it takes to play a game. Lieutenant Nancy Perez with the Miami-Dade Police Department said investigators were looking for an "unknown suspect" for the murder of the Redskin's safety.
Doctor Cade had it easy. He was looking for a scientific solution to a physical problem. The Miami-Dade Police will probably find a suspect, but after the initial motive of "robbery" is used up, then there's still not a lot of sense left in it. The coincidence of these men dying on the same day is purely a construct of time. The fact that they are both connected to the sport of American football is additional kismet. Cade was a man of science, who worked until he was seventy-six before retiring from the University of Florida in 2004. Taylor was retired against his will. It would all make much more cosmic sense if Sean Taylor had played his college ball at the University of Florida. Instead he played down south at Miami, and was a high school star in Orlando. Somehow, any further connection might have strained credulity. It would have made as much sense as the violent deaths of all the other young men this past year. Gatorade replaces electrolytes. That makes sense.