A pro-football manifesto
Why can’t we get enough of the National Football League? Glad you asked. Jeremy Jaeger explains.
Okay, so. I’ve been writing about professional football for the last several months now, and to be honest, I’ve overdosed a bit. Sort of like when you eat too much pie, and your body tells you, by feeling weird, that it’s time to stop eating pie for awhile. Professional football is, after all, a fairly limited slice of the spectrum of life; sort of like, to unintentionally continue the analogy, how pie is a limited slice — pun intended — of the spectrum of food. And so the point is that I’m relieved by the approach of the closing bell of this professional football season, because I’m ready to hang up my football-writing spurs for awhile.
But rather than fade out quietly, I’d like to instead aim to hit some glory notes, to ride off into the football-sunset as the orchestra crescendos. Because giving my time and attention to the National Football League hasn’t just been an escape or an indulgence. I mean sure, yes it’s certainly been that in part, but it’s also been about giving my time and attention to something I actually love, and by which I’m fascinated. Yes, fascinated. Those of you already on the wagon know what I’m talking about; those of you who aren’t on the wagon, let me lay it out for you this way: professional football is the best and most important spectacle of living theater in modern American life. Yes, seriously. Stay with me here, I’m going to break it down.
Point #1
To begin with, let’s talk about men and war. I think we’ve gotten to the point where we pretty much all agree that war is bad, yes? The early part of the twentieth century, with its industrialized world wars and weapons of mass destruction, more or less put the nails in that coffin, in terms of turning the cultural tide from war-as-glory to war-as-terrible-waste-of-human-lives. But the urge to do battle is a biological imperative; testosterone is a powerful substance, and it creates a powerful drive in men that needs an outlet, a place to go.
Football is, in case you haven’t noticed, pretty much the exact same thing as war, only without the actually-killing-each-other part. Two groups of opponents square off on a field. Each group is organized according to a hierarchical command structure, and divided into separate specialized units. They wear uniforms, which involve a lot of specialized tactical gear related to the particulars of combat. The main principle involved in the combat is to advance into enemy territory and gain specific ground; to win particular battles, enough so that cumulatively, you win the overall engagement. Much of the battle is done “in the trenches,” but there are also special techniques used like “blitzes” and “bombs.” Oh, and also, the combatants get badly injured all the time.
Football is vicarious war. A field upon which men can engage in dramatically physical combat and thus arbitrate conflict; a sphere in which the impulse to compete, the drive to conquer and dominate, can be expressed without actually affecting the rest of the surrounding world. And this is true not just for the players themselves, but also for the millions of people watching; the spectators who invest themselves, on a number of different levels, in any given team’s fortunes, in the outcome of any particular game/conflict. And again, the fundamental, super-important difference, is that no one is actually trying to kill each other.
If you think about football this way, it becomes a lot more than just some big men in weird outfits smashing into each other. Instead, what it becomes is a pretty sophisticated instrument in the evolution of humankind.
Okay. Still with me? Let’s move on.
Point #2
Now, a lot of the points I made above can also be applied to sports in general, especially team sports, but none are as closely analogous to war as football is; in part because of the structure of the game, but also because of its super-violent nature.
First of all, the important thing to understand about the violence of football is the matter of its containment, namely within the parameters of the field and the rules of the game. For example, even though players are hell-bent on physically annihilating their opponents, all the action dies immediately as soon as a player crosses the out-of-bounds-line, or the referee blows the whistle. Breaking these rules is a major no-no; it brings penalties during the game, and offenders can expect fines and/or suspensions to be handed down by the league office afterwards. This close regulation and control of the game’s violence is crucially important, because the violence of football is what makes it special; it’s far and away the most important aspect of the game.
So when I was a kid, football was basically like a cartoon. And basically, it remained that way for me into adulthood, because I never really stopped to consider it any other way. But then came a period — my early 20s, more or less — when I stopped paying attention to football and sports in general.
On the one hand, a rising political consciousness led to a sense of disgust with the hyper-corporate and commercial nature of the business of sports in America, at all levels; and on the other hand, my sense of the world was growing and expanding at a rapid pace, and so I was just interested in a bunch of other, non-sports things. Especially, in terms of how it pertains to the discussion at hand, I was learning a lot about different modes of art; most specifically and especially about performance.
I came back to football in 2006, due to a close friend of mine in Colorado discovering a latent deep and abiding Denver Bronco-love, and a routine that developed of Sunday afternoon Bronco-watching at his godfather’s house. And what I discovered was that my time spent away from football had given me an entirely new perspective from which to view the game.
The quality of a performance is determined by:
- Practice: the knowledge of the requirements of a particular role, and
- Attention: the ability to bring your focus to bear on the requirements of any given moment. And what I became focused on in my return to football-watching was the reality of the game as a live performance, and the special manner in which that was linked, inextricably, with the game’s violence.
Bodies contorting in space, under specific constraints and according to a predetermined set of objectives. Meanwhile there are upwards of 70,000 screaming people surrounding you and watching your every move, and also millions more watching you on tv screens. And your performance is entirely dictated by the very real threat of serious bodily injury:
- Body parts being pulled and dislocated.
- Ligaments and muscles and bones being torn and broken.
- Heads being smashed into the turf.
What became clear to me was that the best players weren’t the best athletes, necessarily, but were rather the players who were on the most intimate terms with the reality of the violence.
It’s an important thing to see, to contact. Most of us in modern America live in a pretty sanitized existence. We watch these football games on our big TV screens while sitting on our comfortable couches in our climate-controlled buildings filled with all kinds of food. But that thing we’re watching on our big TV screens, serves as a reminder of both our animal nature and our human possibility. Sheer Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest violence, channeled into a fluid, performative art.
Okay! Still with me? Think I’m crazy? Well, maybe I am. Which brings me to the third and final point here, as we come down the homestretch to the finish line.
Point #3
The best thing about football isn’t that it serves as a way to sublimate the masculine impulse to make war, or that it gives us contact with the thin line dividing us between our human and animal selves. The best thing about football, its true beauty and glory, is that it is in fact totally insane.
The best thing about football is that it is totally insane.
These huge men get together and put on these ridiculous outfits and then run around smashing into each other, and upwards of 70,000 people gather together to watch them and scream and roar and get very emotional, and at the same time millions more people also do this in rooms very far away, and these millions of other people also scream and jump around and yell at the box they’re staring at, in which the large men with the ridiculous outfits are running around and smashing into each other.
And none of it matters. It’s this self-contained world, that only affects itself. War changes the face of the world, totally re-arranges it. But a football game doesn’t change anything at all, not an iota, not a single mote.
And yet, despite that, it’s still something we care deeply about. In part, I think that’s because of the fact that it doesn’t matter. That fact makes it a relatively safe place in which to invest emotion. I can love the Broncos as much as I do because the stakes are so comparatively low. Because if they lose on Sunday, yeah, I’ll be in mild agony for awhile; but y’know, not really. But if they win, I’ll be full of joy; I’ll be shimmying to the left, and to the right, and to the left, and to the right, spin move, shake it out, high fives all-around.
Look, we as humans need these representations. These works and forms that help us interpret this crazy world we live in. Football is a theatrical spectacle that helps us to consider the meaning of concepts like glory and power; what it means to fight for something, what it means to work together as a team, what it means to overcome adversity. What it means to win, and what it means to lose. Football allows us to not just think about all those things, but to actually see them, writ large, playing out across this enormous stage.
And the fact that football does all this, within this tightly-controlled and well-adjudicated conceptual framework, that’s clearly understood by such a wide swath of humanity, is what makes it awesome. It’s theater for the people — something that crosses all the boundaries of race and class. It’s something we can all get together on.
And in the end, we all need indulgences and escapes. My friend and I sit down to watch the Broncos, and for those three hours all the rest of our cares and worries fade into the background. I love football for a lot of different reasons; but above all, because I know that it’s ridiculous that I love football. Go Broncos! Amen.
© Jeremy Jaeger
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