by Steve Almond
The rise of football in this country isn’t just about entertainment or money. It’s a modern expression of what historian Richard Slotkin termed “regeneration through violence.” Slotkin’s interest was in the way British colonists crafted a mythology that reflected their desire for autonomy and territorial expansion in a strange and untamed landscape. Americans have always defined themselves by means of savage confrontation, from the heroics of the Revolutionary War through the ad hoc battles of the frontier and the mass carnage of the Civil War.
As military conflicts have migrated to foreign countries farther and farther away, and the visceral experience of war has grown more abstracted, football has stepped in to ritualize these forms of combat. It’s become the national pastime not just because it suits this age (frantic, competitive, data-saturated) but because it reflects the bloodthirsty id that’s always defined American identity.
Those holy moments before the Super Bowl—when a famous soprano sings about the rockets red glare and the Blue Angels perform a flyover and we see visions of our brave boys in blue (or red or white) weeping as they prepare to go to battle—represent a kind of national passion play.
Here’s how Paul “Tank” Younger, one of the first African-Americans to compete in the NFL, put it: “My inspirational speech was when they played the national anthem. That really got me fired up. It always fired me up and I wanted to go and hit somebody. Shit, when they sang o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave, I’m ready to go knock the hell out of somebody.”
Ron Kramer, one of Vince Lombardi’s, players, described the execution of the team’s signature play, the power sweep, like this: “It’s really all of life. We all have to do things together to make this thing we call America great. If we don’t, we’re fucked.”
As Americans, the thing we do together, more and more each year, is watch football. Fans tend to be less forthcoming than players about their hunger for violence. But the video feed tells the truth. The reason ferocious hits get broadcast over and over, often in slow motion, is because fans love to see them. Like all rubberneckers, we tell ourselves we’re watching out of concern for the injured party. (Who knows, maybe we could recommend a good neurologist?) But the TV people know our appetites.
That’s why they have those parabolic microphones stationed on the sidelines, so we can hear the crunch of impact. It’s why the Monday Night Football intro for years featured helmets ramming into each other and exploding and why the NFL Network airs shows promoting the league’s most feared tacklers. It’s why ESPN—in the pre-concussion era, anyway—aired a segment called Jacked Up that featured grown men (among them Steve Young, a man forced to retire from football owing to multiple concussions) chanting, “You just got … jacked up!” over clips of players being crushed.
It’s why the single most viewed football play of the past few years was not a game-winning touchdown, but a hit delivered by a college lineman named Jadeveon Clowney that was so pulverizing the runner’s helmet flew off his head as he himself flew backward. ESPN conducted an instant poll asking viewers if this tackle was “the best ever” and later awarded Clowney an ESPY—the Oscar of the sports world—for Best Play of the Year. In May, Clowney became the number one pick in the NFL draft.
Social scientists have conducted numerous studies to determine why male subjects enjoy violent hits so much. The reasons are many and overlapping. They represent a symbolic catharsis, a purging of violent emotion. They allow us to experience vicarious feelings of dominance. The physical risks create a higher grade of a drama.
But most fans hate to acknowledge these motives, so the football industry does lots to enable us. To begin with, there’s all that equipment to shield us from seeing the worst damage. Even more influential are the sportscasters, whom we perceive as strategic authorities, but who function mostly as damage-control experts. Hits that viewers might regard, objectively, as aggravated assaults are safely reinterpreted as “sanctioned violence” in the context of the game.
Good old Sean (who, if he has gotten this far in the book, already hates me) recently showed me a clip that could serve as a master class in how to normalize gratuitous violence for the viewer.
The play occurs in last year’s Sun Bowl, when Virginia Tech’s star quarterback, Logan Thomas, throws a screen pass and is—to use the athletic term of convenience—blown up by a UCLA linebacker named Jordan Zumwalt. The camera tracks the pass, so you don’t see the hit initially. But you hear a gruesome crack, followed by an Ohhhh from the sportscasters and the crowd, an involuntary exclamation endemic to football that combines shock, distress, and delight in about equal measures.
“Someone got even with Logan Thomas on that one!” whoops Gary Danielson, the color commentator. This is a reference to an earlier play in which Thomas, running in the open field, leveled a defender. By the code of the game, the shame Thomas visited upon the defense warranted this revenge.
But what emerges from subsequent replays of the hit (there are no fewer than ten in a three-minute span) is that this is rather like equating a demolition derby to a hit-and-run. Thomas, having just thrown the ball, is not braced for impact. He’s utterly helpless, doesn’t have the ball, and thereby should be off-limits to defenders. Zumwalt doesn’t veer away from Thomas or aim for the numbers. He launches the crown of his helmet at Logan’s head and winds up striking his faceguard—that’s the crack we heard—while his arms and shoulders transfer enough kinetic energy to knock Logan flat. From one angle Logan appears to have been vaporized. The hit scores a perfect ten on the Strahan Scale. Logan lies on the ground for more than two minutes, while medical personnel kneel over him. He appears, at one point, to be writhing in pain.
Danielson is duly troubled by what he’s seen. He can’t believe that Zumwalt has been flagged for unnecessary roughness. “I mean, what are you supposed to do if you’re a linebacker?” he implores.
The true victim here—does this sound familiar?—is the assailant. “I don’t know if they’re escorting Zumwalt off the field. I hope not, because that was a clean play.” A bit later, Danielson explains why the hit is not only justifiable, but laudable. Logan is “tough to bring down.” Defensive players “have to be physical with him.”
One hears in Danielson’s jargon the expected deployment of euphemism, and in his tone the kind of earnest exculpatory vigor so common among football analysts. He’s trying to reassure himself, as well as us fans, that the traumatic brain injury Logan just sustained (and sustains over and over in the replays) is, within the ethical borders of the game, permissible.
At a certain point, we see the hit at an especially grisly angle. Danielson is overcome by the sheer brutality. “Oh my goodness!” he exclaims. Then he collects himself and reverts to the company line. “I don’t know what the message is here. The defensive players are going, ‘What’s the rules? Are we supposed to hit him softly?’ ”
Danielson is careful to remind us that no one wants Thomas to get hurt, a statement that is both wishful and false. Wishful because what fans want, actually, is a kind of magic we must leave behind in childhood: collisions so extreme as to seem lethal that inflict no harm. And false, because Zumwalt did to Thomas precisely what he wanted to do, what he has been trained his whole life to do. And what his coaches and teammates and every UCLA fan on earth count on him to do. (To say nothing of the gamblers who laid money on UCLA.)
Attrition is a basic strategic goal in football: injuring the other team’s stars so badly they cannot compete. This is what distinguishes football from virtually every other major team sport, and brings it closer to war.
For the record, when Thomas left the game, the score was 7–7. Without him, Virginia Tech lost 42–12. After the game, Zumwalt, named co-MVP, had this to say to a national audience: “We played lights out.”
We choose to view sportscasters as impartial experts, because affording them this status allows us to cling to the notion of sanctioned violence. We get to consume savagery without feeling we are sa
vage. But what the sportscasters actually do is stage-manage our experience of watching football.
In this same way, we turn to sports pundits to provide us psychologically soothing interpretations of the sport’s ethical dilemmas. When the problem is brain trauma, for instance, the answer is enhanced safety measures.
For the most part, what pundits do is shift our focus away from the game’s inherent venality to a few convenient scapegoats: greedy players rather than a rapacious industry, a deviant individual rather than a culture that fosters criminal hubris, bad apples rather than a diseased orchard.
Pundits reserve the most bile for those players and coaches who expose the true nature of the game. That’s what happened to Gregg Williams, the former defensive coordinator of the New Orleans Saints, when it was revealed that he was offering bounty payments to players who injured opponents. “Kill the head, the body will die!” Williams told his players in a rather overheated pregame speech.
Williams was saying, in more brutish slang, what every defensive coach says. He might still be coaching for the Saints if he hadn’t offered his players money, and gotten caught on tape. (As Malcolm Gladwell has noted, the excoriation of Michael Vick for his involvement in dogfighting reeked of the same scapegoat fervor.)
The most chilling moments in football are ones in which the images can’t be reframed or rationalized. Last season, for instance, Packers tight end Jermichael Finley collided with George Iloka of the Cincinnati Bengals. Finley rose from the ground and staggered toward the sideline. It was clear he was severely concussed. Even as Finley flopped to the ground, another Bengal player ran past him to greet Iloka in jubilation.
So the question isn’t just why we dig the violence, but what it means and what it does to us. When we see plays like those described above, we are buying into a value system, making a tacit agreement that winning matters more than someone getting hurt. We consent to this premise over and over again until we no longer really have to consent. The psychic structures within us consent. Football valorizes courage and self-sacrifice. It enforces conformity and desensitizes us to violence. It militarizes the way we think and feel. Here’s how George Orwell put it back in 1945:
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules, and sadistic pleasure in violence. In other words, it is war without shooting.
To which we might add Cormac McCarthy’s more refined view:
Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.
This link has been obvious from the earliest days of the game. Teddy Roosevelt, who, as president, rescued football from its own caveman excess, nonetheless believed it prepared men for battle. He took as evidence the fact that many of his fellow Rough Riders had played. “In life, as in a football game, the principle to follow is: Hit the line hard; don’t foul and don’t shirk, but hit the line hard!”
Football is nowhere near as brutal as, say, boxing. But it is the one sport that most faithfully recreates our childhood fantasies of war as a winnable contest. And its evolution reflects the gradual absorption of military precepts: victory achieved by means of force, incremental seizure of territory, escalating violence, and so on.
The peace movement that arose in response to the Vietnam War put a spotlight on the ideological link between football and our Armed Forces. Ron Powers, the author of a history of television called Supertube, described the NFL’s primary network, CBS, as “a passive accomplice to another payload of values that refuted most of the social revolution’s aims. As seen on TV in the sixties, the National Football League leaped quickly from the status of fringe sport to a full-blown expression of America’s corporate and military ethos.”
In the seventies, the hero of the Dallas Cowboys, “America’s Team,” was a Vietnam veteran named Roger Staubach, who became the embodiment of the league’s reverence for all things military. The alliance took on a cinematic flamboyance during the Reagan Administration.
A former player, sportscaster, and movie star, Ronald Reagan understood the optics of football as only a trained propagandist could. Without seeming the least bit “political,” he used the game to capture the virility and patriotism he wished to project as a leader. He routinely chucked footballs from his presidential podium, took his nickname, “The Gipper,” from All-American Notre Dame player George Gipp, whom he portrayed onscreen, and held his second inauguration on Super Bowl Sunday of 1985. (Never one to miss a photo op, Reagan ditched the inaugural ball to perform the coin toss via remote.)
It was Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, who initiated the era of overt collaboration between the NFL and the military. In January of 1991, eleven days before Super Bowl XXV, Bush the Elder ordered an attack on Iraq, initiating what became known as the First Gulf War. League officials, working with network executives and the White House, converted the game into a five-hour “infomercial for war,” as one critic put it. In addition to images of soldiers in the desert during the pregame show, President Bush addressed the nation at halftime, describing the war as his Super Bowl.
The Armed Forces, recognizing young football fans as the ideal target demographic for recruits, became a major sponsor of the game, while the League took an official position that “supporting the military is part of the fabric of the NFL.”
The terrorist attacks of 2001 saw the advent of what we might call Gridiron Agitprop. In cooperation with the second Bush administration, the NFL and Fox aired a three-hour pregame show called “Heroes, Hope, and Homeland” in 2002. When the Bush administration launched the second invasion of Iraq in 2003, the league held a kickoff concert at the National Mall and honored soldiers with an hourlong special. The NFL helped politicians and generals convince the public that the complex issue of going to war could be as emotionally simple as sending the home team overseas for a big game.
By now, fans have become habituated to the cloying tributes and flyovers and remote feeds from army bases, to the slick montages of soldiers played over NFL theme music, to the inexorable blending of gridiron and military iconography. We think nothing of the fact that a private industry intended to provide entertainment has become a publicity arm of the United States military. Our job is to chant “USA! USA!” at any mention of our brave men and women in uniform.
What the NFL has done, in other words, is to help mainstream war, to make it seem like a rational arrangement that young Americans are killing and being killed overseas in perpetuity.
Football has been a boon for the military. But the military has been a boon for football, too. Over the past dozen years, as Americans have sought a distraction from the moral incoherence of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the game itself has served as a loyal and dramatically satisfying proxy.
After all, the wars initiated by the Bush administration—scrubbed of any actual carnage by military censors—wound up looking less like warfare on television than some early-generation Atari game, or shapeless documentary. The disingenuous political justifications for the Iraq war, in particular, and the abject incompetence of both occupations, left many Americans with a kind of unrequited combat zeal. We wanted to cheer for the troops, but could find little authentic reason to. Football provided a morally acceptable and gratifying outlet for these patriotic energies, a clearly defined contest of will, a side to root for and against, a clear result, with no unsightly corpses.
Which is why the recent revelation that football can and does cause brain damage has cast such a long shadow.
The struggle playing out in living rooms across the country is that of a civilian leisure class that has created, for its own entertainment, a caste of warriors too big and strong
and fast to play a child’s game without grievously injuring one another. The very rules that govern our perceptions of them might well be applied to soldiers: Those who exhibit impulsive savagery on the field are heroes. Those who do so off the field are classified as criminals.
The civilian and the fan participate in the same system. We off-load the mortal burdens of combat, mostly to young men from the underclass, whom we send off to battle with hosannas and largely ignore when they return home disfigured in body or mind.
It is a paradoxical dynamic. After all, part of what it means to be a football fan is that we have a sophisticated appreciation for the game, and a deep respect for the players who compete at the highest level. The most rabid fans recognize, in a way others don’t, the miraculous gifts of courage and grace that athletes summon in the face of danger. You would think that such reverence would make us more concerned about the fate of such men.
But it turns out that our adulation for football players (for all athletes, really) is highly conditional. As soon as they no longer excel on the field, they become expendable. It is this same mindset that allows us, as a nation, to go to war under false pretenses and suffer so little distress at the resulting human ruin.
No single episode speaks to this culture of collusion more pointedly than the life and death of Pat Tillman, an idealistic NFL star who enlisted in the Army following the terrorist attacks of 2001. The military turned Tillman into a recruiting tool, while the sports media canonized him as a soldier saint who had forsaken a lucrative contract to serve his country. Here at last was a figure who embodied the psychic kinship between football and war. And though few paused to wonder why he was the only player to enlist in the “War on Terror,” no one doubted that he had taken manly virtue to the max.
