WHY FOOTBALL? A Review of the New National Pastime, & Michael MacCambridge's "America's Game"

by Russell Cobb March 2005 When Jacques Barzun wrote in 1954 that, “whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better know baseball,” few Americans could have disagreed. As Michael MacCambridge writes in his new history of the NFL, America's Game: To say that baseball was the number one sport in America at the end of World War II is to imply a hierarchy where none existed. Baseball towered over the sporting landscape like a colossus, the unquestioned National Pastime, the only game that mattered. Most fans had come to accept baseball's primacy as something immutable, as much a part of the natural order of things as air and water. And what did baseball say about America? “Baseball is for leisurely summer afternoons and unchanging dreams,” Roger Kahn wrote in his 1973 classic Boys of Summer. Kahn's book, like Ken Burns's documentary, Baseball, chronicles the triumph of the Jackie Robinson-led Brooklyn Dodgers over segregation, an episode Burns calls “baseball's finest moment.” Even the most heady sports writers have predictably cast baseball in an optimistic, pastoral mode. No less a figure than Walt Whitman sung the sport's praises. “I see great things in baseball,” Whitman once wrote. “It's our game—the American game. It will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set. Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us.” So if baseball is America's Field of Dreams, what is football? For one thing, it is the nation's most popular sport—by far. Pro football fans outnumber baseball fans by a two-to-one margin, according to a 2003 Harris Poll. Last year's Super Bowl attracted more viewers than there were voters in the 2004 presidential election, and Janet Jackson's halftime “wardrobe malfunction” ignited perhaps the biggest culture war of the year, prompting FCC chairman Michael Powell to launch an investigation into “Nipplegate.” Which brings us to the other unique thing about football: the sport invites intractable polemics about all our hot topics. Racism, homophobia, domestic violence, drug abuse: all these social ills have been laid at the feet of football and its legions of fans, players and coaches. This is nothing new, of course. Teddy Roosevelt, a president not known for his bleeding heart, threatened to ban the nascent sport in the early part of the century after eighteen college players died from injuries sustained during the 1905 season. To this day, Europeans often cite American football as a symbol of a national bloodlust—even though soccer-related violence has claimed many more lives. For the sport's critics, football has always embodied and encouraged the worst tendencies of American society. As Jamie Williams, an ex-NFL tight end and consultant to Oliver Stone's dismal movie Any Given Sunday, once said: “Baseball is what we want to be, football is what we are.” Any Given Sunday, to be sure, paints an unequivocal portrait of corporate greed, racism and general moral decay through a season with the fictional Miami Sharks, coached by the hard-drinking curmudgeon Al Pacino. In Stone's world, football is a perfect metaphor for the debased world of American late capitalism. Players are dehumanized into one more piece of equipment, and all interpersonal relationships are subordinated to the franchise's bottom line. This theme has been taken up again recently in Robert Andrew Powell's We Own this Game: A Season in the Adult World of Youth Football. Powell is a Miami-based journalist who explores the cutthroat world of Pop Warner football, where drug dealers bet on games and parents assault one another over controversial calls by officials. Here, prepubescent boys are transformed into gladiators, and in turn become objects of desire for college scouts searching for the next crop of blue-chip talent. An aura of sleaze pervades the book, and no one—coaches, parents, officials—seems to escape the morass of dishonesty in youth football. As Powell writes: I also witnessed the corruption of the sport at its infancy. I saw the team's best wide receiver—an eight-year-old—recruited to play after starring the previous season at a different park. I saw a culture of winning so pervasive that fans assaulted the coaches after the team's only loss. I saw parents living through their kids, dreaming of NFL paychecks while their sons were flunking out of school ... I saw kids learn that stellar play can earn cash rewards from drug-dealing boosters. Powell's book chronicles two major powers in the world of Pop Warner football in South Florida, a hotbed of talent that fuels powerhouses like Miami and Florida State. Like Buzz Bissinger in Friday Night Lights—an account of one season with the Permian High Panthers in football-mad Odessa, Texas—Powell encounters in South Florida a community that has turned a sport into an obsession and ruined more than a few lives in the process. Unlike Bissinger's 1988 classic, however, Powell never finds a narrative poignant enough to carry his argument into the end zone. Apart from an episode in which a drug dealer fires some shots in the air at a football game and is quickly arrested, not much of note really happens in Powell's book. There are plenty of insalubrious characters who obsess over pre-pubescent boys' athletic prowess, and parents who force their kids to play a sport they don't even understand, but this material never comes together into a coherent storyline. Bissinger, meanwhile, is astute enough to understand the complex relationship between football and the American values—or indeed, the lack of values—the game is often presumed to embody. Friday Night Lights depicts this manipulation of football for political gain in a 1988 campaign stop by George H.W. Bush in Midland, Texas—the adopted hometown of our next President Bush. Bush Sr. tells a crowd of football fans, players and cheerleaders: “My values are values like everyone here that I think of: faith, family, and freedom, love of country and hope for the future. Texas values. Some just call it plain common sense.” But it falls to Tony Chavez, the father of the starting tight end on the Permian High football team, and the only truly redeemable character in Bissinger's book, to debunk Bush's rhetoric, marveling that “it was an amazing illusion, as contradictory as Reagan himself becoming a promoter of the family despite his own life as a divorcé and a father whose children hated him.” If there is a dominant rhetoric of football, however, it is evinced in Bush Sr.'s speech. Football—because its strategy and discourse so often resemble warfare—tends to glorify militarism. Furthermore, the politics of football figures—despite some notable exceptions like the Kennedy Democrat and football saint Vince Lombardi—tend to lean rightward. (This seems especially true of players who leverage their stardom into careers in politics: Steve Largent, Tom Osbourne, J.C. Watts, Jack Kemp, Gerald Ford—Republicans all.) Sometimes, as in the case of Pat Tillman, the Arizona Cardinals linebacker who volunteered for the army and then died in combat in Afghanistan, football doesn't so much symbolize war as it anticipates and cultivates militarism. For Michael MacCambridge, a meticulous chronicler of the evolution of pro football from its humble post-World War II status to its current incarnation as “America's Game,” football speaks to a “modernistic urgency” in American society. “The same things that distinguished the American way of life in the postwar era—the explosion of technology and consumerism, the rise and refinement of a corporate mindset—also contributed to the ascendant fortunes of pro football.” MacCambridge isn't so concerned with prickly cultural issues as he is with the material conditions of the game. In the set piece that opens the book, he describes the 1958 NFL Championship Game (in an era before the Super Bowl), the game that turned Baltimore Colts quarterback Johnny Unitas into a national icon. With less than two minutes remaining in the game, and the Colts down 17-14, Unitas drove the Colts sixty yards, allowing them to kick a tying field goal as time expired. Then, with the Colts within field goal territory during sudden death overtime, Unitas surprised everyone by passing the ball deep in Giant territory. As the Colts closed in for a winning score, TV screens around the country went dead. Rollicking Colts fans unwittingly disconnected a cable, although a statistician for NBC managed to reconnect it before the winning touchdown. The statistician, MacCambridge remarks, “couldn't save the game for the Giants, [but] he had saved it for the rest of America.” TV, in other words, is football. The technological innovations and business maneuvers behind the scenes shape and even define our experience with the game. What makes football dominant, MacCambridge argues, is not some psychosocial connection to racist or homophobic tendencies attributed to the stereotypical fan, but business savvy. To argue that football is more exciting than baseball on TV is “to insist apples are better than oranges,” he writes. By the same token, MacCambridge debunks the interpretation that football satisfies “some deep-seated bloodlust of the American sports fan.” Boxing, to take one example, provides even more blood and violence than football, but has almost been destroyed by television. MacCambridge's answer isn't sexy, but it is compelling. Team owners, television networks, and league bosses collaborated with the government to create a megasport that was in no way foreordained by the Fates. A major development came in 1961, John F. Kennedy signed the Sports Broadcasting bill, essentially exempting pro football from anti-trust statutes. The $4.6 million CBS got for the rights to broadcast football games for two years may seem paltry now, but it laid the groundwork for the hegemony of the NFL oligarchy. Unlike many oligarchies, however, the NFL owners don't hesitate to redistribute wealth amongst themselves. The architect of pro football as we now know it, commissioner Peter Rozelle, called the revenue-sharing scheme he designed “a perfect model for socialism.” Rozelle's scheme—he also devised the college draft—ensured that no one team would achieve permanent dominance and that the NFL's own welfare would take precedence over individual teams. When flamboyant new owners got too many crazy ideas, Rozelle would pull them aside and remind them to “think league.” NFL Properties became a case study in “branding,” as “This Is the NFL” broadcaster John Facenda, whose dramatic baritone narrations enlivened game footage for NFL Films, became known as “the voice of God.” Cinematographic innovations we now take for granted turned a static, four-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust trench battle into a dynamic aerial game, showcased through close-ups, slow-motion replay, and microphones on individual players, so that the home audience can hear the likes of Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis calling for a quarterback's head. In short, MacCambridge believes it is the business of football—not innovations in the game or outstanding playmakers—that best accounts for the sport's ascendancy; the NFL is, after all, a professional league of corporations concerned with the bottom line. MacCambridge claims that by the time ABC's “Monday Night Football” became a national institution in the mid-1970s, football had developed a “narrative structure” that provided an “intimacy” with the teams by way of the colorful crew of Howard Cosell, Frank Gifford, and Don Meredith. Viewers now had a sense of football “as a performance rather than merely a game.” This meant that the “journalists” commenting on the game were no longer “just telling it like it is” (as Cosell liked to say), but turning sports commentary into a show in its own right, and one which often overshadowed the game itself. The banter between the phlegmatic, cerebral Cosell and Bubba-ish “Dandy Don” Meredith established a dynamic whose echoes are heard in the current Monday Night Michaels and Madden duo. As MacCambridge puts it: Monday Night Football's most lasting contribution was the unprecedented amalgam of journalism and entertainment. When “Telling It Like It Is” was crossed with “Turn Out the Lights” [a Willie Nelson song that served as the MNF anthem before Hank Williams Jr.'s rambunctious “All My Rowdy Friends”], sports began to change and the relationship between fans and athletes, never entirely innocent, grew much more complex, with a greater self-awareness on both sides. Forced to say something profound on the last page about the sport that has most transformed the American cultural landscape, MacCambridge concludes: “Pro football has become the perfect symbol for the country's bustling, modernistic urgency, a splendid entertainment ... and a meaningful metaphor for the most American pursuit of all, those seemingly mismatched but inextricably bound ideas of competition and community.” This torturous prose sullies an otherwise convincing account of football's ascendancy over baseball that underscores that material conditions that made it all possible. Football may indeed be a true barometer of the American heart and soul, but it's not because the sport reflects the nation's primordial urge for violence, but because football is inseparable from big business—the most American thing of all. Russell Cobb is comparative literature student at the University of Texas at Austin. He is working on the Great Oklahoma Novella. He played a season of semi-pro football in France.