Against Football (3 page)

The NFL marketed football as a traditional game, shaped by Establishment values. The league was both a friend to big business and a crucial partner. It had survived its precarious infancy largely by adopting the tactics of the emerging corporate culture.

But it wasn't just Nixon and the rest of the squares who loved football. Here's what Abbie Hoffman, the most famous dissident of the sixties, had to say about football haters: “They're a bunch of peacenik creeps. Watching a football game on television, in color, is fantastic.” This is to say nothing of the Black Panthers, who gathered on Sunday afternoons to watch at a bar owned by hall of famer Gene Upshaw, or George Plimpton, who devoted two books to the game.

“Football is not only the most popular sport, it is the most intellectual one. It is in fact the intellectuals' secret vice,” the critic William Phillips observed in 1969. “Much of its popularity is due to the fact that it makes respectable the most primitive feelings about violence, patriotism, manhood.”

A more generous way of saying this is that football provided a lingua franca by which men of vastly different beliefs and standing could speak to one another in an increasingly fragmented culture. It cut right through the moral ambiguities and antagonisms of the era.

Consider the one and only meeting between President Nixon and his counter-cultural bane, Hunter S. Thompson. The two spent most of the hour swapping game stories, after
which Thompson noted, with reluctant admiration, “Whatever else might be said about Nixon—and there is still serious doubt in my mind that he could pass for human—he is a goddamn stone fanatic on every facet of pro football.”

The British writer James Lawton puts it this way: “If all sport is magnificent triviality, American football seems least tolerant of its limitations.”

It is hard to imagine this today, but there was a time when interest in football was restricted to weekend afternoons in the autumn. Today, the amount of time that fans spend watching games is infinitesimal compared to the time we spend consuming what might be called the ancillary products: highlights, previews, updates on injuries, trades, arrests, contract negotiations, firings, and so on. This is to say nothing of the message boards and the endless chatter of sports pundits, the arias of wrath intended to fill the overnight hours of sports talk radio. Americans now give football more attention than any other cultural endeavor. It isn't even close.

The result (in sports, as in any other racket) is an obscene inflationary bubble. An errant comment on Twitter begets a national story and weeks of agitated kibitzing, and a player accused of something more serious—dogfighting or murder—commands the grave regard once reserved for a presidential scandal.

The NFL and the networks that cover the college game have tapped into a bottomless hunger for which there is no
off-season. The moment the Super Bowl ends, draft speculation begins. The draft itself wasn't even televised until a few years ago. More than 25 million people watched the first round last year. At Ohio State, where I happen to be teaching as I write this, more than 80,000 people will fill the stadium … for a spring scrimmage.

If you are among the thousands of handicappers who make a living from gambling on football, or the millions who place bets, the desire for minute and esoteric bytes of football info strikes me as understandable.

For the rest of us, I suspect, this data mongering has more to do with a dire search for meaning. Let me try to explain. Americans are being bombarded by facts at this point in our history. Sea levels rose 3.2 millimeters last year. The Nikkei average is down 6 percent. Dick Cheney remains sentient. The problem isn't that these facts are bad, though most are. It's that we have no larger context in which to place them. We don't really know what they mean.

The reason I'll spend five minutes reading about whether the second-string running back for the Arizona Cardinals is going to show up for training camp is because that fact plugs into a system of loyalties I do understand. As absurd as this sounds, it
means
something to me. The Raiders play the Cardinals this year … if their first-string running back gets injured, perhaps their second-stringer will be ill-prepared … meaning our feeble defense might stymie him … and so forth.

The glut of football news also feeds a kind of vicarious executive impulse. We live in an age of unfettered capitalism,
and yet most of us know next to nothing about the true mechanisms of economic power. We can barely remember the PINs to our 401(k)s. When it comes to football, though, we have access to vast stores of financial and personnel data, scouting reports, statistical analyses, game tapes, the works. There is no way on earth we could run IBM or General Electric, nor would most of us want to. But we could sure as shit do a better job with the Dallas Cowboys than their jackass owner Jerry Jones. This is why so many millions of Americans spend so many billions of hours deliberating over whom to start each week on their fantasy football rosters.

How much bigger can football get? I was thinking about this, inappropriately, a few months ago in church.

I am not a regular churchgoer. But our family attends the local Unitarian Universalist service when we can get our act together, mostly so we can feel a part of some community that still believes in social justice and economic equality and the rest of those extinct hippie values.

Anyway, what happened was that the reverend mentioned football. He told us that the last time he'd delivered this particular sermon, the Patriots had lost their playoff game that afternoon. So it wasn't even a formal part of his talk; it was an ad-lib. And it got by far the biggest response of anything he said. The instant he made this joke, the whole congregation, maybe a hundred of us, laughed and nodded. We had something in common.

Naturally, I started thinking about the game he had mentioned, which I had watched with bitter glee, and began recapping it in my head. Then I looked around and thought:
Wow. Even in the UU.
Then I thought about John Lennon and how he said the Beatles were bigger than Jesus and how much grief he got for telling that particular truth. Then I thought about how many people were going to watch the Patriots game that afternoon, or some other football game, and how that number might compare to the number of people who attended a church or a synagogue or a mosque. What would that ratio be? Five to one?

Then I thought about the amount of time Americans, men in particular but also women, spend thinking about football during a given week, as opposed to thinking about God and the state of our souls and whether we are leading a noble life, and I realized that I probably spent about ten minutes max on these issues, whereas my recap of the Patriots game had already run fifteen or more. I thought about the tens of millions of fans—the tailgaters, the face painters—whose sacred wishes and fears and prayers are reserved for a vicious and earthly game.

Then I thought:
Shit. That's me, isn't it?

I'm going to start in a dark place and work my way toward the light.

So: I'm a lifelong Oakland Raiders fan.

Confessing this publicly to anyone who knows anything about the NFL is like revealing that I'm the son of two psychoanalysts, which also happens to be true. I can tell exactly what other people are thinking, whether or not they ever say it out loud. They are thinking: this guy is a fucking nut.

For those who are not familiar with the Raiders, they are the epitome of the term
once proud,
a franchise incapable of accepting that its best years are past. I think of them as the NFL's version of a wildly popular child actor who starred in a couple of minor hits in the eighties and has now grown into an ugly, entitled, coke-addicted adult who struts around D-list parties in mirrored sunglasses and parachute pants reeking of Polo cologne and insulting the women who decline his invitation to head back to his pad to check out his python.

There is some chance I have given this analogy too much thought.

The point is that the Raiders were very good when I was young and that they have been very bad for the past decade, the laughingstock of the NFL, such that they are best known at present not for any actual players but for their most exuberant fans, who smear their faces with silver and black and (for no clear reason) wear tunics with spikes and dog collars and other vaguely post-apocalyptic accouterments.

I started watching them at about age five. We lived in a sleepy suburb an hour south of San Francisco, but the 49ers were terrible. The Raiders were where the action was. They were giant and swaggering. I was small and cowering. The psychic math was not especially hard to do.

Mostly, I wanted to be close to my dad. That's why most boys take up with sports. Teamwork, dedication, killer instinct—all that stuff comes later. In the beginning, you just want to be with your dad. And that's what football got me, every Sunday afternoon. We'd hang a thick wool blanket over the curtain rod in the TV room to cut the glare and watch Kenny “The Snake” Stabler hobble around on his ruined knees and throw his lovely ducks to Cliff Branch and Freddy Biletnikoff. We watched Mark van Eeghen blast into the line maybe a million times, gaining 2 yards the hard way. We watched All-Pro linebacker Ted Hendricks wield his forearm like a truncheon, and cornerback Lester Hayes patrol the secondary so extravagantly festooned with a snot-colored adhesive called Stickum as to appear leprous. We watched a bald,
ill-tempered obelisk by the name of Otis Sistrunk descend upon quarterbacks like a slow and final doom.

We watched the Raiders dismantle the Vikings in Super Bowl XI and squeak by the Chargers in the playoffs on a last-second fluke fumble that was batted and punched and kicked into the end zone then fallen upon by the sure-handed tight end Dave Casper.

I was the only hardcore fan in our house, the only one who submitted to the narcotic absurdity of the arrangement, who allowed the wins and losses to become personal. It was how I coped with the competitive angst of having two brothers who were bigger and stronger than me. I handed my fate over to the Raiders. I let them do the dirty work.

Later on, I adapted. I started playing sports myself, well enough to make a few teams. I experimented with mild forms of delinquency and smoked huge amounts of pot and ate my weight in low-grade candy and (Lord help me) used the family hot tub as a masturbatory aide. I took the SATs then I took them again and shipped off to a liberal arts college where being a football fan seemed to connote a tragic lack of imagination.

So I left the game behind for a while.

That's bullshit, of course. I never did any such thing. I was still rooting through the dry soil of the box scores, tracking the Raiders' descent into mediocrity while pretending I had better things to do. These better things included interning in the sports department of my hometown newspaper, and later becoming a sportscaster for the campus radio station.
Somewhere in the world, I'm afraid, there exists a recording of me providing the color commentary for a game in which we bowed to our rivals 56–0, a score that makes the game sound closer than it was.

Then I was in El Paso, working at a newspaper and living with a woman who considered football an unfortunate symptom of patriarchal thought systems. I was trying to take myself more seriously. That's how I wound up in the sarcophagal sub-basement of the El Paso Public Library, where they stashed the fiction and where, one day, I came across a novel by Don DeLillo called
End Zone,
which I picked up for the simple reason that the front cover featured a football.

It came as a pleasant shock that the book was actually
about
football, and more so that it was set in West Texas. This seemed like a very big deal to me. It encouraged the delusion—always so tantalizing to the chronically self-involved—that there was some cosmic connection between the text and myself.

End Zone
's narrator is Gary Harkness, a running back who winds up at tiny Logos College to evade the draft board and settle his addled brain. “Whatever complexities, whatever dark politics of the human mind, the heart—these are noted only within the chalked borders of the playing field,” Harkness assures us. “At times strange visions ripple across the turf; madness leaks out. But wherever else he goes, the football player travels the straightest of lines. His thoughts are
wholesomely commonplace, his actions uncomplicated by history, enigma, holocaust or dream.”

I had no idea what this meant. But I loved
End Zone
for its descriptions of football, passages in which the sensual experience of the game generated a hallucinogenic intensity. “On a spring-action trap I went straight ahead,” Harkness says, “careened off 77 and got leveled by Mike Mallon. He came down on top of me, breathing into my face, chugging like a train. I closed my eyes. The noise of the crowd seemed miles away. Through my jersey the turf felt chilly and hard. I heard somebody sigh. A deep and true joy penetrated my being. I opened my eyes. All around me there were people getting off the ground. Directly above were the stars, elucidations in time, old clocks sounding their chimes down the bending universe.”

I had never thought about football as a transcendent experience. I'd accepted the allegedly more enlightened view that it was a diversion from the serious business of adulthood, and that my fandom represented a shameful refusal to leave childhood behind. But the exquisite renderings of football in
End Zone
suggested a richer possibility: that sport awakens within us deep recesses of emotion, occasions for reflection, reasons to believe.

Late in the novel, Harkness and his teammates play a pickup game in the driving snow. It quickly degenerates into a free-for-all. “We were adrift within this time and place and what I experienced then, speaking just for myself, was some variety of environmental bliss,” he observes. “We were getting extremely basic, moving into elemental realms, seeking
harmony with the weather and the earth.” This was the novel's thrashing heart: an ecstatic celebration of the body at play.