Return of the America Shield
“What could be more exciting than the savage ballet that is pro football?” - Lisa Simpson
Tomorrow night the great spectacle of the National Football League will once again begin to cut its annual swath of destruction through the culture and attention of America. Football is the American sport; it is ours in a way that other sports are not and that is reflected in its near universal popularity. Its highest expression, the NFL, is the lingua franca of the United States. Anywhere you are in America you can walk into a bar, or a post office, or a grocery store and have a conversation about professional football. The Xs and Os acumen of the conversation is going to vary, but everyone knows about the league in at least some basic way.
The American hunger for football can never be sated; airwaves, newspapers and websites are filled with season previews and prognostications because it has been 213 days since the Super Bowl and we are a nation starved. Basketball and baseball have been our chief exports to the sporting world, but it is football that captivates us and baffles everyone else.
Only in America can organized football find its proper expression. For one thing, it’s an expensive sport that requires enormous amounts of equipment even on its most childish levels. The same can be said for hockey and baseball, but those cannot be played year round at any sub-Arctic latitude. It also helps the sport’s popularity that is has grown more litigious over the years. The number of rules required to govern a game this fast, violent and chaotic is mind numbing, but no one cares. Hell, we want the contest to be as fair as possible and if that means referee signals that even hard core fans and announcers are unsure of, so be it.
We love this game enough that its absurdities have come to seem endearing. Take the chain measurement for example. The referee spots the ball as accurately he can, but it’s not humanly possible to make it precise to within a blade of grass of where the ball was when the runner went down. Nevertheless, once it’s on the ground if even the tiniest slice of the ball noses past the marker it’s a first down, and if need be they’ll measure it with lasers. It doesn’t make any sense, but we wouldn’t have it any other way.
And, of course, football is the most martial of games. War metaphors abound, they were briefly banished after Week 1 of the 2001 season (remember that?), but they returned quickly and with good reason. Detailed preparation goes into every piece of action, every situation must be thought out in advance. Middle school teams have playbooks so thick and complex they could be mistaken for invasion plans and that’s not a coincidence. Playing football, getting the right eleven guys on the field in the right configuration, requires military levels of organization and preparation. All that talent, training and preparation collide on the field, and a whole season can be decided in a fraction of a second by margins of less than an inch.
Unlike war though, football ends when scheduled to do so. It has a shorter season than all the other major sports leagues and each individual game really matters, something no other league can say. If your favorite baseball, basketball or hockey team wins or loses on any given night there isn’t much at stake. Even a game against a division rival or a marquee superstar doesn’t really matter all that much. If your NFL team loses just one game, that’s the equivalent of a ten game losing streak in baseball and a five game losing streak in basketball or hockey, and if they drop two or three in a row you can all but write off the campaign.
To end the season the NFL celebrates with the biggest possible orgy of Americana: Super Bowl week. Every year a major American city closes streets and holds a week long bacchanal. Cab drivers, cops and prostitutes work triple shifts; streets are closed; movie stars, celebrities and all the human detritus that comes with them swarm like moths to the flame. Media outlets from countries most of the players have never heard of send reporters and camera crews. It has little to do with the game to be played; it is celebration of another glorious year in the reign of football, an unequaled display of power, popularity and wealth.
The game itself, whether a compelling matchup or a blowout, causes the mighty behemoth of television to almost halt itself. That is a superhuman achievement in itself. Every non-Super Bowl channel has to find some quirky, niche oriented program to run against it because everyone will be watching the game. Waggish press releases will point out that only a few minutes of actual play take place and highlight the ridiculous cost of the commercials, but they’re missing the point. When ostentation is the order of the day the price of the commercials can never be too high; hype and popularity are self perpetuating.
You can see the NFL as a hypocritical and exploitative organization, one that proclaims itself a paragon of respect and integrity while chewing up and spitting out its own players even as it tacitly encourages them to sacrifice everything to the god of Sunday victory. You can see it as a league composed of fickle, petty and greedy franchises that expect unconditional love while demanding stadium deals, tax breaks and charging eight dollars for beer.
Or you can look at it as a great American success story, an institution that became a money factory through hard work, guile and risk (much of it forgotten today). You can see an employer, of players and support staff, one that has positive financial and social effects on communities, a highly visible example that lets talented, hard working people make more of themselves than they otherwise could.
Truthfully it is all of those things, business and pleasure, deadly serious work and frivolous entertainment rolled into one. I’m always leery of metaphors for America, they are usually inane and foolish and pointless, but the game of football and the National Football League might be the best we have. The game and the League reflect the best and worst about us, they are an unrestricted reflection of American money and culture and I can’t wait for kickoff.
