Why Football?
(Originally published September 12, 2010)
I WROTE A short story some years back that now seems strangely apt.
A writer wants to write a true crime novel about the psyche of a killer. To get the details right – the adrenaline rush, the paranoia, the sleepless nights – he decides he needs to kill somebody. So he does. But he doesn’t feel anything out of the ordinary; disposing of the body is as routine as taking out the trash. So he kills again. Still nothing. This goes on for some time – a lengthy process in which half the neighborhood winds up dead – before he realizes he was a psychotic murderer the whole time, just one who’d never acted on his impulses before. But once he came up with the excuse, his “authentic” true crime novel, away he went.
The premise of this site recently has been “uptight, well-reared twenty-something from Connecticut meets Los Angeles big city living,” featuring such adventures as “Mike goes to a Lucha Libre match in East LA,” “Mike goes to an Ozzy Osbourne concert,” “Mike plays Bingo on a date in a dive bar,” and “Mike goes to strip clubs; Mike goes to lots and lots of strip clubs.”
I try to write with the detachment of an outsider doing research, but one thought keeps recurring: this shit is fun; maybe I should’ve been doing it the whole time. Before, I spent my spare time reading literature, being trained classically in piano and voice, writing and acting and attending theatrical performances. I still do some of those things, but my palette has expanded. That’s where football comes in.
Why football?
In high school I couldn’t have cared less about football. My only experience with football was the annual “Turkey Bowl,” a game played on the Friday after Thanksgiving against our rival high school. There was a mandatory pep rally with announcements and flyers all over the school. Because of the holiday weekend, we all got the day off to get rained on and watch our team get not just beaten but shellacked. Every single year. It was the only game I attended annually, but I can’t imagine we won many others either. (It was especially annoying because the stereotype about the hottest girls dating the football players still applied. I’ll never understand how they sucked so much and still got laid.)
When I came to USC it had the best football team in the country, but I hadn’t been following it and I didn’t care. My roommate Matt had other ideas. Every Saturday morning he’d put on his USC gear and walk through the apartment clapping. “GAMEDAY! GAMEDAY, BITCHES!” (On the West Coast, ESPN Gameday starts promptly at 7 AM.) On days with home games, we’d walk to the LA Memorial Coliseum two to three hours early to get good seats. On days with away games, we’d settle in on the couch for a full twelve hour shift of football-watching, like a job.
Whether or not I understood football, I stuck with it. Matt made me. Aside from the basic rules, he showed me how to yell and curse and throw a chair at the radiator when our safety blew a fucking coverage. And at the end of the day, he’d always have a drink to celebrate.
Then another.
And another.
I can’t count how many times he stumbled into our bedroom at Saturday’s end, took two steps forward, then fell backwards into the sliding closet door, knocking it off its hinges. All I know is that it happened enough that we took the door out completely and left it outside on the porch. (That being the wettest LA winter in years, when we tried to bring it back inside upon moving out in May, we discovered it had rotted through.)
A much mellower Matt would remark, years later, “That was crazy. Imagine how I’d have acted if we’d actually lost a game!” Good thing we never did.
It was easy to be a college football fan, because we weren’t just cheering for our school, we were cheering for people we knew. Freshman year I took a class on Feminism with Reggie Bush. He sat up front the first day and the teacher froze up and said, “Wow, this is pretty intimidating.” (The irony was delicious). Senior year I took a sports media class with Rey Maualuga, the long-haired linebacker now on the Bengals. The professor asked whether high-profile college players should get a portion of the proceeds from their jersey sales, and Rey said, “I don't think people are buying my jersey. I don’t think a lot of people know who I am.” Cue riotous laughter. Rey was a God. They all were. My roommate Matt’s highlight at USC was when LenDale White walked up to him in the cafeteria and asked Matt to hand him a straw.
Passion and pride and winning (Oh God! So much winning!) were great, but football would have never become a full-blown obsession if not for its infinite complexities. Most sports are simple, where football is complex.
Why football?
Football is like a game of chess played multiple times in a row, in which you get to choose the pieces you use and they all have unique abilities and free will. On any given setup, you can win the game (score a touchdown), lose the game (turn the ball over) or advance to a better or worse position. My brother, from ages 12 to 16, was one of the best chess players in the country – for his age group, the best – but I can’t imagine what he’d have done if the knight moved only once space sometimes and other times crossed the entire board, or a rook could blow past the pawns to checkmate the king on the first move. It’s why people get paid millions to draw up plays for every eventuality, clever enough to outwit their opponents’ pieces but not too clever as to confuse their own (because the “pieces” in football are bigger than chess pieces, but not necessarily smarter). Sometimes, if your pieces are bigger and faster and stronger, you don’t try to outwit anyone, you just muscle your way to victory. But win too quickly and your pieces can get tired, and then you lose your advantage. How can one account for all this?
Baseball fans love to cite the number of statistics they can measure, but the game boils down to this: a guy hits a ball or he doesn’t; if he does, a guy catches a ball or he doesn’t. In basketball, five guys try to get a ball through a hoop and stop the other five guys from getting the ball through a hoop. Those sports aren’t chess. They aren’t even checkers.
Speaking of chess, it was designed to train kings how to wage war. Football is the new chess, and modern generals would do well to start as coaches.
Why football?
Football is the ultimate American sport because it’s the perfect metaphor for war: “offensive and defensive units”; “quick strikes”; “long bombs”; “field generals”; “going to the air” or grinding it out “in the trenches.” George Carlin made this point way before I did, but let’s try another angle.
In college football today, we see two general offensive philosophies: pro-style and the spread. A pro-style offense is a straight ahead, mano-e-mano approach that relies on an accurate quarterback who can put the ball anywhere - ideally deep - a physical running back, and a powerful group of linemen to block or pave the way. The spread, by contrast, uses odd formations and large groups of receivers to spread out and confuse the defense, as well as a quarterback able to take off and run to create even more chaos.
To see them both on the same field is like watching the American Revolutionary War play out: the “pro-style” British marching their Redcoats down the field only to run into the American “spread” of guerilla-style hit-and-run.
So the spread is the American way? Not so fast. Our modern military is very much “pro-style,” whereas groups like the Vietcong and Hezbollah run the spread. For every team that runs the spread, the terrorists win. USC has always been pro-style, and always will be. (USA! USA!)
Football also has the advantage of physicality. It’s the most physically-demanding game with the best athletes. I’ve heard it argued otherwise, but football takes it.
Why football?
Going back to the war metaphor, just as you’d never ask a tank to fly, you don’t expect a lineman to make leaping, acrobatic catches or run the length of the field. But he does need to weigh about a hundred pounds more than a human being should, enough extra bulk to give him leverage against other players of the same size, enough to protect his brain against the impact of repetitive, sub-concussive blows, yet not so much that his heart gives out during his playing years. (A few years afterward? Absolutely!) Wide receivers need ankles of steel to run routes, stop on a dime and cut at full speed; cornerbacks do nearly the same thing, except in reverse, reacting rather than acting, so it’s harder. The list goes on. Rather than a bunch of very good all-around athletes, you get specialists with near-superhuman talents in their chosen area of expertise. You can argue specialization vs. all-around all you want, but you can’t argue this:
Football players get hit, a lot.
It’s a one-game-a-week sport for a reason. For the four hours they’re on the field, football players take more abuse than the average Italian’s wife. (I’m Italian, so it’s fine). They need to recover not only from intense workouts but bruises and strains and tears and breaks. Soccer players complain about running around for 45 minutes at a time, but under no circumstance will they ever look down at their legs and notice their knee is bent the wrong direction or their foot’s hanging off. Until “tennis elbow” involves exposed bone, I can’t be that impressed.
In order to survive the gauntlet of an NFL season, players develop monk-like discipline for practice, workouts, and diet. They can’t afford not to be in shape; they could literally die. Compare that to Lamar Odom in basketball, who got the nickname “candy man” because he eats nothing but candy, or the 1986 New York Mets, who won the World Series despite – or because of – a steady intake of booze and cocaine. You know what happens when you get out of shape in football? You get cut. And then you most likely blow your millions of dollars because you most likely never learned to save money because you most likely grew up poor because otherwise you most likely wouldn't have invested so much time and energy and blood, sweat, and tears into such a violent, dangerous sport.
But that’s why we love you.
It’s for all these reasons that football makes great drama, week after week. Better theatre than Euripedes or Shakespeare or Mamet could write.
Why football?
Imagine you go see Romeo and Juliet, but you have a vested interest in whether the Capulets or Montagues come out on top, as does everyone else, and you’re all very vocal about it. The story’s different every time – actor X needs redemption, actor Y needs revenge, actor Z needs respect – and so is the final outcome. No only is the centuries-old Capulet/Montague feud a reality for the actors, it infects the audience and spills into the streets (in this sense, it’s less Shakespeare and more Tony and Tina’s Wedding). Billions of dollars rest on the failure or success of those performing, as does the pride not only of people but whole cities, sometimes whole regions. With fewer than twenty such contests for each team each year, you feel the weight of every one.
And it’s not just the teams but the personalities. Someone down here in New Orleans told me that when Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were visiting and needed someone to draw attention away from them, they asked Drew Brees, Saints QB, Super Bowl MVP. A star of his caliber shows up and Brangelina might as well be… someone you’ve never heard of. (This analogy is, by its nature, flawed.)
Similarly, we love coaches. The Patriots/Colts rivalry from years back benefited from the contrasting styles of Tony Dungy (Mr. holier-than-though “quiet strength”) and Bill Belichick (sloppy dresser, genius/liar). Then there were guys like Denny Green and Herm Edwards, quotable blowhards who gave great sound bites but didn’t seem to understand the game all that well. Today we have Rex Ryan, but he’s less fun because he appears fairly competent (or, as he’d say about himself, “Goddamn, he’s pretty fucking good”). Fans love a coach with personality. Maybe if Jim Mora were more engaging than CSPAN he’d still be coaching this season.
We, as fans, get to watch these coaches, and players, on mankind’s greatest invention: television.
No sport is better suited for TV than football. There’s the epic scope of the stadiums – almost always packed with fans generating enough noise to shake the broadcast cameras – and the miniature scope of the moments (who doesn’t hold their breath on “4th and inches”?). You need myriad angles to catch even a fraction of the action, and on a good trick play, even the cameras get fooled. For comparison's sake, consider baseball, which can be serviceably described on radio, or hockey, which shouldn’t even exist.
All that said, this is strictly my own personal take. I give credit to football-watching for expanding my horizons – to wrestling, heavy metal, concerts, drinking plus bingo, strip clubs, and strip clubs – so I may be biased when I contend that my love for the sport was inevitable because it bests all others. You may not agree, but let me tell you what I just watched, and maybe you will.
Washington Redskins vs. Dallas Cowboys. One of the oldest, bitterest rivalries in football. Another rival, The Eagles – they’re all in the same division and play one another twice a year – traded Donovan McNabb to the Redskins thinking he had nothing left, and he’s hungry for a win. So is Mike Shanahan, also in his Washington debut, a former Superbowl winner who got kicked to the curb in Denver after a handful of mediocre seasons. So is Wade Phillips, Dallas’s coach, a nice guy who might be out of a job if he can’t make the Superbowl despite owning the division for years. So are Redskins fans, who only have suffering to show for their loyalty (it’s one of the top three most profitable franchises in all of sports). How much have they suffered? A box popped up on the screen right before the half, saying the Redskins hadn’t scored a TD against the Cowboys in 12 quarters, equivalent to three full games (they would, by the way, on the last play of the first half, forcing a fumble and running it into the end zone as time expired).
On the final drive of the game, the Redskins are up 13-7 with a little over a minute to go. A touchdown would win it for the Cowboys, but their offense has been inept all day. Yet despite a four man rush by the Redskins, plus a blitz, Tony Romo pulls a heroic performance out of his ass and drives the Cowboys inside the 20 yard line with 00:03 to go. One more play. Romo drops back, fires, and hits disgraced wide receiver Roy E. Williams – who played at the University of Texas but is vilified in Dallas – for a TD and the win.
Or does he?
At the same time Williams’s teammates are jumping on his back celebrating, Redskins QB Donovan McNabb raises his arms in victory on the sidelines.
The reason Romo couldn’t get the offense going all day was because he'd been hurried. One of the guys responsible for protecting him, right tackle Marc Colombo, was injured, replaced by a fellow named Alex Barron. Barron’s not a rookie – he’s been in the league six years – but he’s a career backup and had been beat by opposing linemen all night along. The ‘Skins had smartly shifted Brian Orakpo, their best pass rusher, to face Barron on the final play, and the only reason Orakpo didn’t get to Romo for the sack was that Barron had hooked his elbow around Orakpo’s neck, an egregious penalty, especially with 00:03 on the clock.
Not only does the touchdown not count, the game ends immediately, Redskins win. In three seconds, joy to heartbreak, to victory; on the opposite sideline, the opposite, in that order. You can watch the 45 players on each team go through those emotions in real time, as well as the coaches, the assistant coaches, and the tens of thousands of fans, all from the comfort of your own home, all weekend, every weekend, for the rest of football season.
Why football? That’s why.