The rise of the NFL to this extraordinary position began in the mid-Fifties when America became a television nation. Until then professional football was essentially a second-tier sport, almost a minor league game—it had its partisans and they were at once extremely knowledgeable and passionate; they knew how good the game was, but it was still very much a connoisseur’s game. There was something just a bit eccentric about the season ticket holders in that era. To the degree that football had a major constituency, it was in the college game, in part because there were so many colleges out there, and people could root for their alma maters.
Baseball had long been first in the nation’s hearts, and its almost languid rhythms were ideal for a radio age. The pace was soothing, as were the voices of its best broadcasters. That was an America in which things moved more slowly; professional sports teams traveled on trains instead of planes, and no one talked about a sports market share or disposable income.
Football, by contrast, did not come alive on radio—the medium was ill-suited for its speed and its rare combination of violence and balletic grace. In that era professional football fans saw their favorite game, while fans in other sports more often than not heard theirs. Baseball fit the mood and tastes of pre–World War II America; football was ideal for the post-war boom America, as the nation raced ahead at an ever faster pace in all its endeavors and demanded ever more speed and action in all things, even its entertainment, and when there was ever greater competition for what became known as the entertainment dollar, which was naturally enough in the process of becoming an ever larger part of the GNP. In that era, as the country became connected from one coast to the other by TV’s giant new electronic umbilical cord, the nation gathered every night to watch the news on television, in what CBS reporter Daniel Schorr called “a national evening séance.” Not surprisingly, we stayed at home and we watched at home. Television was connecting the country to itself and seducing it at the same time.
The rapidly expanding networks needed inexpensive programming, and Americans always needed a sports fix, and the fall schedule was wide open, as the baseball season back then still ended in early October. And pro football was very good on TV. I was there from the beginning, a kind of pioneer pro football fan in the days before it became fashionable. My father had loved the pro game, and he had taken me on occasion to the old Polo Grounds to watch the Giants back in the Forties, and I had seen the beginning of the All-America Conference. I remember a game when the Cleveland Browns, with Otto Graham and Marion Motley, came in, trailed 28–0 at the half (the Giants had the great Buddy Young, whom I later met, an early thrill for me), and then came back in the second half to gain a 28–28 tie. I was only XIV at the time, before the game went on television, but I already loved it. Then pro football was picked up by television, and it was another miracle—no matter where you lived, the game showed up too, and all you had to do was turn on a set.
I started watching NFL games on TV in 1956 with a bunch of pals in Nashville, where I was working as a newspaper reporter. We were all in our mid-twenties, but little did we know that we were the NFL’s perfect target audience. We were just doing what came naturally and having a good Sunday afternoon in the process, blissfully unaware that we were a virtually priceless demographic and that an inordinate number of sponsors were zeroing in on us, hoping to sell us beer, cars, razors and a lifestyle. None of us owned a television set, so we would gather on Sunday afternoons at a place called Rotier’s, a bar and grille (a rather elegant description of it, to tell the truth) near the Vanderbilt campus to watch the Giants and the Red-skins and the Browns while drinking enormous schooners of beer which we chased with steak sandwiches. It was a ritual we fell into naturally; no one ever had to call anyone on Sunday morning and ask if we were going to Rotier’s for the games.
It was a black-and-white picture in those days, and the reception was not always perfect—sometimes instead of 22 players on the field it looked like 44, or more accurately, 22 men shadowed by their ghosts. But we, like so many others, got it instantly. Nobody needed to sell the NFL to us. We could see how good it was. When radio broadcasters did football they always had to focus on the men with the ball, runners and quarterbacks. But television showed us the brilliance of the defense—its power, speed and guile. And so, with the coming of television, not only did football gain parity with baseball, but its defensive players gained parity with its offensive stars. A great deal of football’s appeal in those days came from the sheer violence of the game, but it was a violence wrought from speed and strength, a fury most often meted out by defensive players. The proof that the game satisfied the most primal appetites of America—all of America—came in 1959, when the Giants all-pro middle linebacker, Sam Huff, was on the cover of Time.
The professional game was better than the college game, and it lost far fewer stars each year to graduation. Great college players came and then went all too quickly, but pros might have careers of 10 or 12 years, which gave NFL teams a strong sense of identity, of personality. That sense of identity, of the familiar playing the familiar, is not to be underestimated. It gave fans an abiding connection to their favorite teams, their favorite players, their favorite rivalries, even if they represented cities 2000 miles away. I do not often lament the passing of the good old days; I know that today’s players are bigger, stronger, and faster, and that today’s better teams would likely beat some of the great teams from earlier eras, but I do regret the combination of free agency (not free agency itself, which is right and just, but its result, which is the overly fluid rosters it helped create) and over-expansion, which has weakened the identity of so many teams, and thus of rivalries in so many games.
As America became a communications society, with TV as its connective link, some things and institutions favored by television grew rapidly, as if in a greenhouse. Think of it this way: Since the early wiring of the country in the mid-Fifties, invention after invention has in some way added to the power of television and its importance in our homes and in our value systems—principally the right (along with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness) not to be bored at home or burdened with something that you do not want to watch, and an enduring belief that no matter how mundane life appears to be, there is always one more channel to check out. The TV screens have gotten bigger and the fidelity of the picture dramatically better; the cameras at games are more sophisticated, satellites circle the globe at all times beaming down upon us this vast selection of images. It’s as if, added together, all these inventions of the last 50 years have ended up turning a little box of flickering black-and-white images into a giant movie screen in our home, which is broadcasting all the time, and we as a society have become ever more addicted to it. Not all of the NFL owners, some of whom were hard, self-made men, embraced television in the early days. They thought that showing games on TV was like giving their product away, rewarding fans for not buying tickets. But the grumbling stopped forever in 1964, when Rozelle negotiated a contract with CBS that put $1 million in each owner’s pockets for the next two years. And if there was one thing that grew in that TV greenhouse, it was football.
The NFL benefited greatly from the Communications Era, when the country was wired, and did just as well in the one that followed, the Entertainment Era, which began when cable exploded and the number of channels suddenly jumped to 30 or 40 and soon to 300 or 400. That epoch started with the proliferation of broadcast satellites, the ensuing cable revolution and, in the world of sports, the launching of ESPN and other sports-driven and sports-obsessed channels, guaranteeing a kind of jock nirvana, a world in which the real fan would never again have to watch anything but sports. The all-sports, all-the-time revolution made the games infinitely more important, made the players more important and ultimately and inevitably, turned them into entertainers, as well as athletes. Namath was an early indication that things were changing. He understood long before most of his contemporaries that he was part of a show as well as a game, that he was playing t
o two separate crowds—the one at the game, and the larger one at home.
Namath (like his contemporary in boxing, Muhammad Ali) understood that his game was as much show biz as it was athletic competition. He was signed by Sonny Werblin, an entertainment guy, a former agent, who watched the young Alabama star walk into the room for their first meeting—cocky, purposeful, with dark, brooding good looks—and saw immediately that his charisma made him the ideal man to lead Werblin’s Jets, an upstart team in an upstart league in New York City. Werblin made a point of paying his new quarterback so much money that his signing was itself a media event, and Namath was a star before he threw his first pass. Fortunately for him, he had the talent to match the hype. The same, of course, could be said about the NFL.
Pro football still has a powerful hold on me. I plan my Sundays around it in the fall, and if I’m on the road and don’t like the games on the networks, I go searching for a sports bar. I still watch the Super Bowl religiously, a word that is perhaps all too apt in this context.
The Game, of course, has grown exponentially. A few years ago a small group of friends and I were in one of the distant corners of the map, Patagonia, fishing the Rio Grande for ocean-going brown trout, some of which can reach 25 pounds. It was a great privilege to be on this great river at the perfect time of the year, and the fish were very big and very accommodating. But the Super Bowl was on and the Giants were in it, so one of my friends and I stopped fishing early that afternoon and drove for two and a half hours to watch it in a bar. “Are you sure you’re fishing with the right kind of people?” the head of the fishing charter company later wired the leader of our little group.
There is a reason the game has thrived. The players are that good, and the NFL action, which builds week after week, is that brilliant, and the Super Bowl is the culmination of it all. I remain enthralled by the ferocity of the competition, and I am intrigued by the knowledge that the players of today—whatever our memories try to tell us about the stars we grew up with, those who first drew us to the game and are forever in our own private Halls of Fame—are bigger and faster, and thus the game too, with its violent ballet, is greater than ever. I am dazzled that players that big can be that fast, that other players can take such terrible hits and keep playing. In a way it strikes me that these games are about measuring in your imagination what the physical limits of a human being are. How big and fast and disciplined can they be? What is the real limit of human potential? How can a player, a Montana or a Brady or a Faulk, adjust in the tiniest fraction of a second to a changed situation in a given play? I am hardly alone in this; it is why all of us, I think, are drawn to it.
Back in those early days, some 40 to 50 million people watched the Super Bowl broadcast; now, if we are to believe those who claim they can chart it—that is, the people who check on who’s watching in Siberia and the Ivory Coast and Kuwait and Patagonia—the game is available to a billion viewers worldwide. In The Game’s infancy, a minute of commercial time cost $42,000, and now it is $2.3 million, and many people who are otherwise not much engaged in the ebb and flow of the football season wouldn’t think of missing the broadcast, more for the competition for best commercial than for the game itself, which at times is not as entertaining. But in the end, it works; it is The Game, anticipated long in advance and enshrined on our calendars as one more de facto but very real national holiday, this one bequeathed to us by Pete Rozelle, prophet of the future, in a way that even he could not have imagined.
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FISHING AND OTHER SPORTS
I am a fisherman and thus a dreamer of a certain quite precise kind, almost always when I am on the water; in my day job I am the most skeptical of men in one of the most skeptical of professions in a world which regrettably holds out fewer and fewer dreams the older I get. But on the water, fly rod in hand, my dreams never desert me; I can look out and even when the river water is murky and deep and running too fast, I can visualize a trout, always of a goodly size, rising to my fly, or if it’s a clear day in the Caribbean, I can see a handsome bonefish moving steadily on its anointed course towards our boat, at the last second breaking off the requisite two feet to hit my fly. On the water as I am never without dreams, I am never without hope.
FOREWORD: A MEMOIR
From
The Gigantic Book of Fishing Stories
* * *
THE DAY THAT THE STRIPER—AND MEMORIES OF BOB FRANCIS—CAME BACK
From the Boston Globe, August 12, 1990
For two years I had heard reports that they had come back. At first it had been mere sightings and then gradually catches, small ones at first, and then larger ones. I was inclined to discount those early reports, for the departure of the striped bass from these waters had seemed to be fairly complete, and though I was not a dedicated striper fisherman, it was also true that I had not caught a striped bass in 10 years, and it had been more than 15 years since I had had a good day of striper fishing.
There had been times in the late ’60s, early ’70s of abundant catches. Like many fishermen here, I went with Bob Francis, a man who could catch stripers on days when no one else did.
He was a kind of genius, a brilliant, difficult man. But he knew these waters like no one else and he had stored up 40 years of accumulated knowledge of tides, water temperature, degree of wind, degree of gray in the sky. He taught those who went with him a good deal about how to read water. “Right there,” he would say, telling us precisely where to cast, and we would cast out and there would be a large swirl and a strike.
He was not a conservationist. He ran an ad for his charter service in our local paper and it said, “We Catch ’Em. Ask Around,” and there was a God-awful photo of him and some client with appalling numbers of large fish sprawled out in front of them. Even in those less sensitized days before we had a striper crisis, there was an uneasy feeling that came with looking at that photo.
His boat was named the Possessor, which fairly well explained his feelings about what existed in the sea. He was a tough, feral island man who had never known easy times, but who had ended making his living off the sea, chartering and selling the fish, particularly the stripers which he caught. Fishing and hunting were for him, as they were for many island men of his generation, not a key to a booming tourist industry but simply meat on the table.
He once told our mutual friend, Bill Pew, who runs a tackle shop here, that when he was a boy and hunted for ducks at Eel Point, his father gave him four shells, and that meant he was supposed to bring back four ducks. If he did not, he did not go hunting the next time.
He was by far the best, and he knew it. He wanted no one to know his secret spots.
He hated it when other fishermen tried to spot where his boat was and follow him. If he took too many stripers out of the sea, and he most assuredly did, it was in part for financial reasons, but it was also because he liked to catch fish: It was his way of showing that he was the best. It was almost personal between him and the fish.
I remember one day, probably around 1970, when I went out with him, and we had done well. Not in sheer numbers, but we had taken five fish over 30 pounds. Bob liked to fish with me, for in his opinion, I fished hard—that is, there was nothing of the dilettante in me as a fisherman. When we went out, I started casting and rarely took a break, and that pleased him; what he did not like was that I used light rods, Fenwick salmon rods under nine ounces, which meant that I played fish too long, thereby increasing the odds against boating them and in general wasting time. At the least I caught one fish when I might have caught two. That day, I had hooked the largest fish of the day, and, using my light rod had, after 25 very tough minutes, succeeded in moving it over to the boat. As I played the fish, Francis saw the size, and started cursing me for the lightness of my rod. When stripers finally come in, it is with considerable docility, and there alongside the boat, moving slowly in the water, was an exhausted fish that must have weighed at least 50 pounds. Just as Francis got the gaff ready, the hook pulled out
of my lure and the fish, slowly, as if to taunt me, swam away. I was devastated. It was the largest fish I had ever hooked. The sight of that fish swimming on is one I still clearly see; in addition I can still hear Bob cursing me for the lightness of my rods—the fault was clearly mine. No mention was made that it was his lure.
Those years of easy fishing for stripers ended long ago. The striper became an endangered species, and Bob Francis found that hard to accept. He did not come around to conservation. When it was clear that the schools were declining seriously, he would argue that it was not an ecological thing, that it was merely cyclical and that he had seen this happen before. It was almost a generational thing for him; he was an island kid who believed that what was in the water was rightfully his. He did not like to return smaller fish to the ocean, and he did not like the new laws governing the size of catches. The world was changing and he was not. A few years ago Bob took his life; he had been, few of us realized, a manic-depressive.
For a time the striper fishing continued to decline. It was as if we were reduced to one light sport fish, blues. But then gradually about two years ago, the sighting and the catches started again. Something had happened in the ecological system; protected by stronger laws, a fish whose schools had once been plentiful, and then had seemed badly depleted, was coming back.
But I had not gone after them. I fished less often now. Bob Francis was dead, and I missed our unlikely friendship and his shrewd sense of the island and the world, and my own pleasure in arguing with someone who was unalterably opposed to almost everything I believed in. My own life had also changed. For a time my daughter was too young to take on a fishing trip. When I went, I fished for blues.
Everything They Had Page 26
