by Steve Almond
Owners of less prosperous teams routinely lost tens of thousands of dollars each year. Despite these setbacks, most stuck with the league. They understood that the popularity of the college game had created a market for the pros, along with a built-in labor pool that included national stars such as Red Grange. And they accepted that the NFL would survive only if all of its teams remained competitive and solvent. They worked together to outflank and eventually absorb rival startups, and approved a number of egalitarian innovations.
League schedules, for instance, pitted the weak against the weak and the strong against the strong early in the season—a scheme designed to keep teams in contention for as long as possible. Owners would later jigger with the college draft to achieve the same end, allowing the worst clubs to select first. Finally, the NFL, following the example of its erstwhile rivals in the AFL, eventually decided to structure its television deals so that all teams received an equal share.
To be clear: the owners who agreed to these measures were, as a rule, extraordinarily rich men intent on becoming more so. But they also knew that unleashing the hounds of capitalism would create a pigskin version of the New York Yankees, which would lead to poorer teams going under, which, in turn, would doom the whole endeavor.
Football enjoyed other crucial advantages in the emergent marketplace of American fandom. The pace and the temperament of the game resonated with a rapidly industrializing culture. Baseball, measured against its younger rival, felt meandering, pastoral, restrained.
It was football that managed to pluck at the American tension between violence and self-control, brains and brawn, ferocity and grace, individual stardom and communal achievement, between painstaking preparation and the instant of primal release. The action was simple enough to appeal to a child, the strategy dense enough to engage men of learning.
And, of course, television changed everything.
To say that TV has been good for football would be like saying that roads have been good for cars. Most Americans had never seen a football game until television showed them one. Games were rare, geographically isolated events (particularly in contrast to baseball, with its 162-game season and countless minor leagues).
Television proved the ideal medium for revealing the pleasures of football to a mass audience. Cameras framed and magnified the action. The complex mayhem of the game, the jarring collisions, all became simultaneously more intimate and abstract. Commentators helped make sense of what viewers were seeing. Intense bursts were followed by reflective lulls. Drives lent a dramatic structure to the game. But because a team could lose possession on any given play, there was a fluid quality to the action. Fans were subjected to what behavioral psychologists would recognize as a variable reinforcement schedule. There was always the chance that a play would break big, that a runner would slash into the open field, or that a receiver would nab a pass and head for daylight. Or, best of all, that some unforeseeable calamity—a blocked punt, an interception returned for a touchdown—would swing the momentum.
Football also managed to hit the Goldilocks zone when it came to scoring: there was enough to keep fans engaged, but not so much as to make it seem routine. The winding down of the clock served to ratchet up suspense in close games. There were even timeouts for snacks and bathroom breaks.
Perhaps most important, the sly handiwork of multiple cameramen and skilled editors intensified the visual impact of each contest, bringing into focus intricacies and eliciting emotional valences that might otherwise have been lost. Don DeLillo put it like this: “In slow motion the game’s violence became almost tender, a series of lovely and sensual assaults. The camera held on fallen men, on men about to be hit, on those who did the hitting. It was a loving relationship with just a trace of mockery; the camera lingered a bit too long, making poetic sport of the wounded.”
By the sixties, pro football had surpassed baseball as the nation’s top spectator sport. Not only did it flourish on television, but with the print media as well. “I’m developing a strong hunch that pro football is our sport,” noted André Laguerre, the managing editor of Sports Illustrated, in 1962. “We have grown with it, and each of us is a phenomenon of the times.” Laguerre deemed the college game “too diffuse and regionalized” and baseball “old-fashioned.”
Under the guidance of its young, media-savvy commissioner, Pete Rozelle, the league made several prescient decisions. It created a division called NFL Properties, which brought interests such as merchandising and promotions in-house. The league recognized, long before its competition, that America had become an information economy, and it flooded media outlets with stats and player profiles.
Rozelle was essentially a PR man, and he understood the American lust for the mythic, the manner in which his fellow citizens yearned to feel part of some heroic past. In 1965, he convinced the owners to create NFL Films, which amounted to a ministry of propaganda. The highlight reels produced by this outfit were wildly ambitious cinematic productions that featured bloody linemen, frozen breath, and floating spirals, all set to a rousing score, and narrated by a voice actor whose flair for gravitas fell somewhere between Captain Kirk and Darth Vader. It is virtually impossible to watch one of these films without feeling engorged by delirious notions of valor. They are football porn.
Given the game’s appeal to traditional masculine values, it’s hardly surprising that men of power gravitated to the game, nor that the ad executives of the world understood its lucrative associations. What remains shocking is the vast reach of the game, the manner in which it united low and high culture, the egghead and the meathead, the radical and the reactionary, the proletariat and the President.
Eisenhower played the game, as did Jack and Bobby Kennedy, rather famously. But it was Richard Nixon whose fanaticism was most blatant. In 1969, Nixon telephoned quarterback Len Dawson minutes after he led the Kansas City Chiefs to a startling win in Super Bowl IV. (Informed that he had a call from the President, Dawson responded, “The president of what?”) Nixon spiked his campaign speeches with football jargon. He used gridiron nomenclature to nickname military operations. He didn’t just go to games. He visited the practices of his favorite team, the Washington Redskins.
The scene I can’t get out of my head is of Nixon milling around outside the broadcast booth at a 1971 pre-season game, waiting to do a brief televised chat with Frank Gifford, the former Giants star turned broadcaster. Nixon can’t stop talking about how he used to watch Gifford play, how he attended the Giff’s post-game cocktail parties. This is the most powerful man on earth, still three years from his appointed disgrace, and he is unable to settle his nerves. “I know Frank Gifford,” he says. “I’m sure he’ll remember me.”
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?
2
A DEEP AND TRUE JOY PENETRATED MY BEING
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 lik
e 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.
