Our games mirror what we value.
Take football, for instance. Look, the game is violent. That is a large part of why we like it. It is a territorial struggle, something we adore. It is war. Apparently, we like war because we engage in it with such recurrent devotion. Football invites our tribal nature to whoop it up. We dance on the sidelines and in the stands. We pump our fists and scream. “We’re number one! We’re number one!” We take great joy in crushing our adversaries. It is all part of the game.
Ashamed of myself, I sometimes skip church so I can stay home and watch a crucial game. I cannot help it; our culture seduces me to join the mob. I try to put on an act of disinterest, but that is hard to do when the home team calls an audible in the red zone (a term that may have military origins for decimated areas of battle). When our gang of warriors fumbles, I groan. When the other gang of brutes scores a touchdown, I groan louder. When our battlers level their quarterback for a sack, I smile broadly and raise my glass. Sure, I admit it.
Professional football eventually will change its rules and expectations. The combatants keep growing larger, more powerful, and faster. Nutrition and training develop outsized athletes, and naturally, that leads to impactful injuries. The league owners may have to alter rules just to stay in business because players are simply too fast, too strong, and too prone to devastating injuries. Lately, concussions have been a media focus, but knee and back injuries are almost as worrisome. Ahem, it will happen that a player will die on the field bashing headlong into a behemoth. To date, only one NFL player has died during a game. That happened on October 24, 1971 when Chuck Hughes collapsed from a heart attack while playing for the Detroit Lions. His death resulted from a predisposition to coronary disease. But now the game has ratcheted up a few notches—it has become a spectacle much like the gladiators versus the lions. When one too many celebrated players die right there on the field, we’ll have to change the rules of the game because, once again, our culture, while favoring blood sports, will not countenance too many deaths between commercials on the flat screen.
Pro football brings out the ugly in all of us. Fans paint their bodies and festoon their heads with cheese wedges. They masquerade as hellhounds, Bigfoots, Vikings, zombies, and superheroes, not to mention getups so outlandish that words fall short of accurate description. Like primitives, these fans apply makeup to their faces and muss their hairdos into frightening displays savage haute couture. Pacifists clench their fists. Yahoos drink themselves silly. Disdainful spouses make an end run for the mall clutching American Express credit cards.
Those of us slouching in front of the wide-screen suffer psychological body blows when our team loses and endorphin highs when our team wins, but in either case the emotional condition amounts to a substitute for the real issues pressing our lives. We channel our animosities into something that does not matter. Eugene McCarthy once said, “Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it's important.” (Washington Post, 12 November 1967) This, to my way of thinking, says more about football than it does about politics.
And those well-practiced hip-thrusting celebrations only add to the atavistic displays of crudeness. Chest pounding, self-important Groucho slinking, and newly devised moves just for the camera and in-your-face moments flavor vanity with crushing humiliation. Trash talking is another garnish added to the humble pie that your opponents must choke down. Rare moments of sportsmanship almost bring tears to my eyes because they are, well, so rare.
Makes baseball a sport for ladies and gentlemen, does it not? That is why football has taken over as the national sport because in place of manners and humility, values no longer a big part of our culture, we have opted for the vicarious enjoyment of watching behemoths slam their bodies into one another. Our salvage selves find that appealing.
NFL games highlight what we are, what we have become.