Against Football

by Steve Almond

  PRAISE FOR STEVE ALMOND’S

  MY LIFE IN HEAVY METAL

  “Almond’s language is rendered in precise strokes with metaphors so original and spot-on that they read like epiphanies.”

  —SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

  “Remarkably good … It will leave you feeling quite wonderful.”

  —THE GUARDIAN

  PRAISE FOR STEVE ALMOND’S

  CANDYFREAK

  “This book will, yes, make you hungry, but it will also make you grateful—for wit, for self-effacing humor, for joyful obsessiveness, for the precise and loving use of language to crack open and celebrate our oddness—in short, for a writer as funny and bighearted as Steve Almond. It’s about candy, yes, but also it’s about America, which seems to be Bigging itself towards mediocrity as it flees from the quirky virtuosic individuality on which it was founded, and of which this book is such a wonderful example.”

  —GEORGE SAUNDERS

  “I got a real sugar rush and cluster headache reading this bittersweet book by Steve Almond–joy, the sugar daddy himself. I won’t sugar coat it—this book is one sweet treat.”

  —AMY SEDARIS

  STEVE ALMOND spent seven years as a journalist in Texas and Florida before writing his first book, the short story collection My Life in Heavy Metal. His nonfiction book, Candyfreak, was a New York Times bestseller, a Booksense Adult Nonfiction Book of the Year, and an American Library Association Alex Award winner. His short fiction has been included in The Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize anthologies, and he writes commentary and journalism regularly for The New York Times Magazine. A former sports reporter and play-by-play man, Almond lives outside Boston with his wife and three children.

  AGAINST FOOTBALL

  Copyright © 2014 by Steve Almond

  First Melville House printing: September 2014

  Portions of this book originally appeared,

  in slightly altered form, in The New York Times Magazine.

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  and

  8 Blackstock Mews

  Islington

  London N4 2BT

  mhpbooks.com facebook.com/mhpbooks @melvillehouse

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-61219-416-5

  A catalog record for this title is available from the Library of Congress.

  Design by Christopher King

  v3.1

  For Peter O. Almond, uncle and hero

  “It’s a rough business. Because you like watching the game.”

  —Judah Almond, age five

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PREFACE

  I Wasn’t Out Cold, But I Was Out

  1. A Brief and Wildly Subjective History of Football

  2. A Deep and True Joy Penetrated My Being

  3. You Knock My Brains Out This Sunday and I Knock Your Brains Out the Next Time We Meet

  4. This Eager Violence of the Heart

  5. “Get Money!” on Three

  6. The Love Song of Richie Incognito

  7. The Blind Spot

  8. Their Sons Grow Suicidally Beautiful

  9. All Games Aspire to a Condition of War

  10. Bill Simmons Draws the Line

  EPILOGUE

  Stop Being a Fan, Start Being a Player

  Acknowledgments

  PREFACE

  I WASN’T OUT COLD, BUT I WAS OUT

  Among the motley artifacts taped to the walls of my office—tucked below the photo of the Bay City Rollers in snug tartan jumpsuits and the student evaluation that reads, “If writing were a part of my body, I would cut it off with an Exacto blade”—is a tiny yellowed clipping.

  It’s a grand total of two paragraphs, snipped from a Boston Globe recap of the New England Patriots’ 12–0 win over the Miami Dolphins on December 7, 2003. I’m almost certain I didn’t watch this contest, because I hate the Patriots, though oddly, if I’m honest (which I don’t like being in the context of my sports-viewing habits) I have watched a lot of Pats games over the years, so there’s a decent chance I caught a portion of this one, maybe just the third quarter at a friend’s house.

  The passage reads:

  With 13 minutes 50 seconds left in the game, running back Kevin Faulk hauled in a 15-yard pass from quarterback Tom Brady, then got leveled by Miami safety Brock Marion, who forced a fumble and left Faulk motionless on the ground.

  “I wasn’t out cold, but I was out,” said Faulk. Asked if he remembered lying on the ground, he said, “No, I don’t, so I must have been out. I knew that something was wrong with me. I knew that, like, it wasn’t normal. I didn’t have that same, normal feeling when I got up.”

  I have no idea how I came across this dispatch. I don’t subscribe to the Globe, so I probably found it on the subway. I do remember the strange buzz that accompanied the reading of these words. The first paragraph is standard sports reportage: game data, a stark description of collision and injury. But that second paragraph! It read more like a poignant existential monologue. Faulk seeks to minimize his injury, then, pressed, struggles to assimilate what happened to him, which most physicians would describe as a significant injury to the brain. What you’re hearing is the linguistic equivalent of a concussion.

  I thought it was funny.

  That would be the simplest way to explain why I brought this story home and cut out the section in question and taped it to my wall. I thought it said something elemental about athletic delusion, the absurd and pitiful way players hide from the truth of their vocation: that they earn ungodly sums of money and acclaim for demolishing each other.

  I assumed, in other words, a posture of ironic distance, which is what we Americans do to avoid the corruption of our spiritual arrangements. Ironic distance allows us to separate ourselves from the big, complicated moral systems around us (political, religious, familial), to sit in judgment of others rather than ourselves. It’s the reason, as we zoom into the twilight years of our imperial reign, that Reality TV has become our designated guilty pleasure.

  But here’s the thing: You can run from your own subtext for only so long. Those spray-tanned lunatics we happily revile are merely turned-out versions of our private selves, the whores we hide from public view.

  What I mean is that there’s a deeper reason I cut those paragraphs out of the paper a dozen years ago, and carried that little square of newsprint with me through three different moves, each time affixing it to a spot right over my desk.

  I told myself it was just a macabre little talisman, a window into the dissonant psyches of famous barbarians. Then, a few months ago, around the time my own mother suffered an acute and terrifying insult to her brain, the truth landed. The passage wasn’t about Faulk and his brethren. It was about me. It was about the forty years I’d spent as an ardent football fan, about my refusal to face the complicity of my own joy in seeing men like Kevin Faulk concussed.

  I knew that something was wrong with me.

  The game in which Faulk got hurt took place in the midst of an historic fifteen-game win streak that would carry the Patriots to their second Super Bowl in three seasons. The moment captured was, by the standards of gridiron lore, the zenith of that team’s fortunes. The only extant photo of the play shows Marion colliding with Faulk in helmet-to-helmet fashion. Both men are grimacing. Marion’s knee appears to be striking the helmet of a third figure, Miami linebacker Junior Seau, who is grasping at Faulk from the ground.

  In 2012, nine years after this play and two years into retirement, Seau would fire a .357 Magnum into his chest. Although never d
iagnosed with a concussion during his twenty-year career, an autopsy of his brain would reveal chronic brain damage.

  This little book is a manifesto. Its job is to be full of obnoxious opinions. For example, I happen to believe that our allegiance to football legitimizes and even fosters within us a tolerance for violence, greed, racism, and homophobia.

  I recognize that voicing these opinions will cause many fans to write off whatever else I might have to say on the subject as a load of horseshit, shoveled by someone who is probably wearing a French sailor’s suit and whistling the Soviet National Anthem.

  Before you do so, let me reiterate: I am one of you. If we ever have the awkward pleasure of meeting, we can, rather than debating my obnoxious opinions about football, happily muse over any of the hundreds of NFL players, past and present, whose names and career paths and highlight reels I have, pathetically, unintentionally, and yet lovingly, filed away in my hippocampal hard drive. Chances are I know all about your favorite team, what they did last year and last decade and whom they drafted (at least in the first round) and where they’re predicted to finish in their division, a subject I would prefer to take up, given the alternative, which would be to discuss my team, the wretched and moribund Oakland Raiders, who will finish this season—mark my words—no better than 3–13.

  So please, before you set this book down, or quietly remit it to the poor soul in your life who thought it might make an “interesting” gift, please consider one final obnoxious opinion: I happen to believe that football, in its exalted moments, is not just a sport but a lovely and intricate form of art.

  Mostly, this book is a personal attempt to connect the two disparate synapses that fire in my brain when I hear the word “football”: the one that calls out, Who’s playing? What channel?, and the one that murmurs, Shame on you. My hope is to honor the ethical complexities and the allure of the game. I’m trying to see football for what it truly is.

  What does it mean that the most popular and unifying form of entertainment in America circa 2014 features giant muscled men, mostly African-American, engaged in a sport that causes many of them to suffer brain damage? What does it mean that our society has transmuted the intuitive physical joys of childhood—run, leap, throw, tackle—into a corporatized form of simulated combat? That a collision sport has become the leading signifier of our institutions of higher learning, and the undisputed champ of our colossal Athletic Industrial Complex?

  I knew that, like, it wasn’t normal.

  So what was it?

  Steve Almond

  Arlington, Massachusetts

  April 2014

  1

  A BRIEF AND WILDLY SUBJECTIVE HISTORY OF FOOTBALL

  I believe in … rough, manly sports. I do not feel any particular sympathy for the person who gets battered about a good deal so long as it is not fatal.

  —President Theodore Roosevelt

  Football began, more or less, as a series of controlled riots. The earliest variations were staged in the 1820s at elite Eastern colleges, often as a class rush designed to visit harm upon incoming freshman. “Boys and young men knocked each other down,” the New York Evening Post observed. “Eyes were bunged, faces blacked and bloody, and shorts and coats torn to rags.” The brawls grew so destructive that both Yale and Harvard banned the game in 1860.

  But restless student athletes continued to assemble teams, eventually challenging other schools to contests that combined elements of soccer and rugby. Representatives met to establish common rules. The line of scrimmage replaced the scrum, a crucial adjustment that granted one team uncontested possession of the ball. A set of downs followed, then a scoring system.

  The game remained astonishingly brutal. The only way to advance the ball was for players to lock arms and smash their bare heads against an equally determined and unprotected opposition. In 1904, eighteen players died, most of them prep school boys. Scores more suffered gruesome injuries: wrenched spinal cords, fractured skulls, broken ribs. Editorialists decried football as an abomination unworthy of civil society.

  When word reached Theodore Roosevelt in the Oval Office that his alma mater, Harvard, was again considering outlawing the game, he vowed to “minimize the danger,” though not so much that the game would be played “on too ladylike a basis.” Roosevelt, whose own son had his nose broken playing for Harvard, convened a summit of football authorities. Reforms followed forthwith.

  The mass formations, essentially human battering rams, were prohibited. A neutral zone between offense and defense was established, along with a more sophisticated mechanism to advance the ball: a team had to gain 10 yards in three downs. The most radical change was the legalization of the forward pass. A game heretofore restricted to one thudding plane was suddenly, miraculously, bestowed a z-axis. The ball could be sent spiraling over a helpless opponent. In 1913, Norte Dame used its superior passing game to upset a heavily favored and much larger Army team, a contest regarded as the birth of the modern game.

  In a spatial sense, football shifted from a mass of heaving bodies to an ornate and calibrated set of formations—double wing, split-T, wishbone, shotgun—that required a division of labor. A clear hierarchy emerged. The quarterback led the offense. He called the plays, took the snap, then handed off to bruising running backs or threw to wiry flankers, while hulking linemen cloistered him from assault. Defenses countered by diversifying into nose tackles, linebackers, safeties.

  Speed, agility, and subterfuge took their places alongside brute strength as the game’s abiding virtues. For teams to be successful, players had to move in concert, which meant practice, coordination, a growing sense of interdependence. They had to react to multiple contingencies on each play. These strategic demands soon required the introduction of a managerial figure, the coach.

  Walter Camp, the game’s most famous early champion, regarded football as a form of “purposeful work” that evolved from the chaotic play of rugby. It is easy enough to see the parallels to industrialization here. Football may be the most striking example of incremental innovation in American history.

  But something more fundamental was going on as well: the creation of beauty and meaning from controlled violence. The anarchy of a folk game had been shaped into an organized sport, carefully refined, made more coherent and complex. The excessive savagery of football’s origins became the engine of its transformation and thus its saving grace.

  Much has been written about the uniquely American quality of football. It is the only major sport that proceeds as a series of marches into enemy territory. It combines ground and aerial assaults. It is the athletic equivalent of manifest destiny. And so on.

  A lot of this stuff is hokum, a kind of overheated historiography meant to boil down the complicated origins and growth of this country, and its diverse population, into a single “American” mindset. But the fact remains: in the space of a century football grew from an obscure collegiate hazing ritual into the nation’s most popular professional sport.

  Why?

  In Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle, his revelatory book about the early years of the game, cultural theorist and former NFL player Michael Oriard offers a set of interlocking theories:

  “With industrialization, the closing of the frontier, and the migration to the cities, the American male was cut off from the physical demands of everyday outdoor life,” Oriard writes. “Thrust into a new world where traditional masculine traits were no longer meaningful, he found vigorous outdoor sports such as football a compensating validation of his manhood.”

  Consider the plight of a young man born in Chicago or Pittsburgh or San Francisco at the turn of the century. His parents or grandparents were pioneers. Yet he’s trapped in some sooty factory or office or slaughterhouse. Toward what diversion might he turn to feel his physical yearnings expressed, to banish the feeling of urban anonymity?

  Oriard argues further that football’s rich narrative structure allowed sportswriters to convey the t
hrill of the game, its suspense and artistry, to a mass audience. One such scribe, Heywood Broun, compared football to the stories of O. Henry. “First come the signals of the quarterback. This is the preliminary exposition,” he explained. “Then the plot thickens, action becomes intense and a climax is reached whereby the mood of tragedy or comedy is established.”

  Fans found in football an irresistible duality. It was at once mythic and visceral, liberating and lethal, Eros and Thanatos rolled into one compact drama.

  The size of live crowds swelled. By the 1890s, big games drew up to 40,000 fans. This being America, before long fans of means recognized that there was money to be made. Oriard puts it like this: “Football succeeded as spectacle because the games’ own structure made narrative drama possible, but also because these narrative possibilities were exploited by football’s promoters.”

  Football historians have a tendency to cite certain games as watersheds. The 1958 championship, in which the upstart Baltimore Colts, led by Johnny Unitas, beat the New York Giants in overtime, is known as “The Greatest Game Ever Played.” Or Broadway Joe Namath steering the New York Jets past the insurmountable Colts a decade later, in Super Bowl III. But a far more pivotal contest took place in 1925, when the Pottsville Maroons, champions of the fledgling NFL, upset a squad of Notre Dame all-stars and thus established the league’s legitimacy against the dominant college game. This was the crucial first step in transforming an extracurricular activity into a popular for-profit enterprise.

  People tend to overlook the fact that pro football entered the twentieth century as a heavy underdog to baseball and boxing, which dominated the sporting landscape. The NFL managed to survive these lean years for three key reasons.

  First, the owners, many of them former players, were intensely loyal to the game. Second, they were shrewd and (if necessary) pitiless businessmen. Third, and most surprising, they viewed the league as a collective endeavor that would require shared sacrifice, an attitude generally rare amongst men of privilege.