Harrison Butker's Award-Winning Speech Workshop

A troll-job mistaken for "bravery"

tl;dr A commencement speech is not a book report.

Anyway.

For a guy who frontloads his Benedictine College commencement speech with how disappointed he is in contemporary Catholic priests for acting too normal, too needy, or maybe just too human with their parishioners, we sure get a big rug-pull nearly 13-minutes in, when Harrison Butker’s voice cracks and he nearly starts crying when talking about the sacrifices his wife has made to become a “homemaker” and number one supporter of her NFL-kicker husband.

You’ve got the floor in a room full of 22 year-olds. Excited. Antsy. Eager. Ready to be inspired. Your job is to gas them up. Entertain them. Take your check. And fuck off. And now they’re inexplicably yoinked into the Butker romance. Into Butker’s sentimental emotions. His virtue signaling. This isn’t the Rose Ceremony, junior. Keep it moving.

Or don’t.

Oddly enough, the 90-odd seconds Butker spends speaking about his wife is the one of the rare times during the speech that he accidentally comes close to telling a story that seems somewhat relatable. [edit: despite the, ya know, content] The other 18:30 he is busy scolding. Everything. Society. The government (Timothy McVeigh wasn’t this mad).

Inexplicably was the wrong word. Like many commencement speeches, Butker took the stage with an agenda. Fuck them kids. They’ve endured four years of lectures, and Butker arrives just in the nick of time to make them sit through another one. So we get a three-ring winning kicker, smugly delivering a “speech” from a three-ring binder.

Joy.

Beyond his confusion that his retrograde world views are the “majority” and morally correct (Republicans aren’t showing up en masse to Trump’s fucked-a-porn-star trial because of morals) Butker absolutely sucks at persuasion. Exciting an audience. So dependent on what he’s written, he can not address the crowd, except briefly at the end of every other sentence. And he remains smug as hell. His glee about the idea that what he’s saying (written) will go viral obscures the truth: his words are not alive in him. If they were, he’d have a note card.

He’d be able to riff. To comfortably move about the stage and relate to the audience. Take them somewhere else besides the stuffy auditorium they’re in.

Instead, they never see his eyes.

How many sermons has this guy listened to in his life? Whether I believe or not, what draws me in is a priest going deep, going off script, talking about Abraham and a magic shovel, or a night of 1000 goats, or the priest IRL, putting six tomatoes in a paper grocery bag, and hastily pushing past an elderly woman because they were upset about something their fucking optometrist said.

Only now were they reflecting.

Pausing.

Giving us a story.

Towards the end of his speech, Butker asks men to “lean in” (a woman wrote that book, bro) to the shit they’re good at whether they like it or not. He also says he speaks “not from a place of wisdom, but from a place of experience.” OK. Do that, then. These kids have been surrounded by Catholicism for four years. He should have leaned into telling stories about shit that happened on the way to winning those three Super Bowl rings. Or being drafted out of, ummmmm, I dunno, COLLEGE, and getting cut by the Panthers. Tell me about a fat defensive lineman crying in the locker room. Or your head coach’s kid drunkenly ramming into a disabled car on the side of the highway after leaving the team facility. Beyond a couple of minutes, Butker selfishly refuses to give the students anything he’s experienced. Instead, we’re meant to endure generalities and banalities about “covid leadership.” Barf.

The moment is not about him.

But it is all about him.

It is definitely not about the students.

Butker kicked the longest field goal in Super Bowl history, maybe faith played a role in that? Who the fuck knows? One other time, early in the speech Butker talks about a priest patiently serving a leper colony for eleven years. Give us ten minutes on that. The kids would never forget it. They’d never see that his faith was so important he could easily step out of himself, out of the edge lord bullshit, and tell a memorable story.

Benedictine 2024 grads will never forget this speech, but for reasons unrelated to the actual content. Designed to catch fire in the world Butker spends twenty minutes being disappointed in. Troll shit. The kids deserved better.