There's so much we don't know about football

Like almost everyone else, I'll probably watch the Super Bowl today.

I will do this despite reservations about the ethicality of gladiatorial sports. I used to watch boxing. I don't anymore. My problem with football is similar, yet I continue to watch.

I also dislike the corporate temper of the league, and it is for this reason that I hope the New England Patriots prevail tonight and that Roger Goodell has an uncomfortable interaction with Tom Brady. Otherwise I hope the game is entertaining. I hope the commercials are witty, though I refuse to pretend to be excited about them.

Mostly I'll watch the Super Bowl in the same spirit I'll watch (most of) the Academy Awards show later this month. Because I intend to participate in American culture, because Super Bowl Sunday has become a holy day of obligation in our secular religion.

There are reasons that football has become not only America's favorite sport but one of our dominant cultural practices. It is good on television, with brief intervals of furious activity occurring regularly and plenty of space in which to air commercials. Usually it is less confusing when viewed from a distance, so television cameras have no trouble tracking the progress of the ball, which is somewhat larger than in most other sports. It is an easy game to watch; now here's a play, a big hit or an incomplete pass; now we can talk or wander off for another beer.

Football is a game, but it is not playful. It is a mitigated form of war in which the object is to push one's opponent back, taking control of more and more of the field. Touchdowns mark the moments when the entire field is captured--field goals and safeties are symbolic of partial victories. It is played at full speed with violence that would be actionable, if not felonious, if it occurred outside the context of the sport. Even in the concussion era, the basic unit of football grammar is "the hit," the collision of bodies, and the measure of a football player is how well he absorbs and extracts punishment. While guile and craft have their place in the game, every football player must expect to hit and be hit. Mothers are right to worry about their football-playing sons.

Americans love football no less for its inherent savagery. We tell ourselves there are life lessons we might draw from the sport, that it is not simply the spectacle we crave. We respect those who play with pain; we build statues to those who can make the game a means of self-expression. But most of all, we respect those who win.

Sport generates unambiguous winners and losers, where real life most often gives us provisional, equivocal gains and losses. We like the frankness of sport, the "declarativity" of the scoreboard.

And so it is not difficult to see how success in sport--especially football--might have a palliative effect for those thwarted in reality's arenas. If you are stuck in a job you dislike, if your life has not worked out as you might have liked, then the vicarious experience of being a football fan allows you another opportunity for success.

It is a game we all more or less believe we understand; it can be explained in a few moments. Maybe you played a little in high school or college. Maybe you've watched hundreds or thousands of games, attuned to the sonorous nonsense of the broadcast booth voices. A lot of you can probably point to your hours of experience on a video game console or the trophies you scored in your fantasy league.

Fine. You can believe what you want. Most people think most things are pretty easy to do until they try to do them. Unless you're somebody paid to think about football--someone like Josh Floyd or Kevin Kelley--I'm pretty sure you don't know football.

I sure don't, and I've played and watched the game as much as (and probably more) than the average American male. My tackle experience stopped in high school when I realized I weighed roughly half as much as the defensive front that was going to be chasing me. (I liked basketball and baseball and golf better anyway, I told myself.) But before that I had a moment of glory on a junior high (not middle school) team that went unbeaten, untied and unscored upon. (We gave up fewer than a dozen yards all season. We were in Sports Illustrated's "Faces in the Crowd" column. My contribution to that effort was minimal; I was a flanker/free safety on a team that rarely passed and rarely allowed a opposing runner out of the backfield.)

I don't know football--although I was a pretty fair intramural flag football quarterback in college. Even though I spent a season as a radio color commentator on East Texas high school game broadcasts. (If the money's good enough, I can fake it for you.)

But a football game is like your basic Vacheron Constantin grand complication. Sure, it's easy enough to read the dials, to tell who is winning, which quarterback has thrown for the most yards, who has the most tackles and all those things you can keep track of with a pencil. But inside there are a thousand moving parts, all delicately balanced and tuned. It takes years to learn how to work on one of those things, much less design and assemble one, and any touch less than expert is almost certain to wreck it.

When most of us watch football, what we watch is the ball--where it goes. We watch it being thrown and caught, lugged and dropped and kicked. And that's not where the game is played in the main, that's the outcome, that's the dial turning. What we ought to watch is what we can't quite see from where we are--from the stands or our living rooms. The footwork of the linemen. The eyes of the middle linebacker.

The ... I don't know. I don't know football.

[email protected]

www.blooddirtangels.com

Editorial on 02/05/2017

Upcoming Events