They Call it a Game: Why Sports Matter
(Copyright 2014 by Lucius Asbury Hill)
A Fine, Slow Burn
An essay on football’s cultural significance has been permeating my brain these last few years like a fine, slow burn. Although a thesis never really ignited, the words were always there, simmering, waiting to come together… Or maybe I was just being indecisive.
Up until very recently I figured this indecisiveness was just as well. After all, my essay was always anchored in the NFL’s pending concussion crisis, the effects of which – and, really, this is why it’s not a crisis at all – won’t be known for another twenty or thirty years, when the current crop of high school talent eventually matriculates the game and retires from professional competition. By then there will be enough data to discern just how dangerous football really is – at all levels – and whether the safety measures instituted by the NCAA and the NFL are enough to mitigate the trauma that may well be the proximate cause of various neurological disorders, namely chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.
The cause célèbre that we know as “player safety,” though, has had to share the spotlight these many years with a string of other scandals and controversies, controversies that have at times transcended sports. Chief among them, the Penn State scandal. But to be fair, I don’t think that the child abuse that occurred in Happy Valley deserves to be wrangled into a discussion on football, which is tangential to the crimes and whatever institutional malfeasance occurred there. The same goes for Jameis Winston. Last year’s bounty scandal in New Orleans, however, remains a different matter, as does the present controversy swirling down in Miami, where Richie Incognito is said to have tortured Dolphins teammate Jonathan Martin so pervasively that Martin chose to quit the team.
Sans Penn State, these controversies all share something in common. The public’s collective reaction to them has displayed more than a little of what George Will is always calling our cognitive dissonance. On the one hand football is more popular and profitable than anything since Roman chariot racing. On the other hand, this mass popularity seems invariably inept at resisting not just change, but contempt. Increasingly, and without the irony, fans and pundits sound and look more than a little like Captain Renault who feigned shock and indignation that games of chance were being played at Rick’s Café Américain, all the while his pockets brimmed with spoils.
The thing is, a certain amount of cognitive dissonance in sports is and always has been common place, as engrained in them, perhaps, as our best traditions and our most heated of rivalries. For instance, though the NFL is a multi-billion dollar enterprise; though college football coaches make more than school presidents and, for that matter, more than some countries; though grown men often wear jerseys with the same frequency as their children; and though this kind of obsession has been steadily on the rise for going on six decades now, how often have you heard somebody turn around and tell you, It’s just a game, you know…?
It’s just a game. What does that even mean, exactly? I know it’s a game; that’s why it’s important. But most people don’t seem to get that… and there’s the rub. For, it was while contemplating this fact, as I was recently trying to sit through FRONTLINE’s League of Denial (the over-hyped hit piece which indicts the NFL, a la Big Tobacco, for covering up its relationship with neurological disorders) that I finally realized what this cognitive dissonance means. Finally, there it was – my thesis, staring at me right square in the face: Football matters for reasons unrelated to why most people care about football.
The interesting thing is that this is a lesson I’d already learned.
Courage and Beauty: Moving Men Against Their Will
Boxing is real. Put another way, boxing is boxing. Joyce Carol Oates once wrote that boxing was not a metaphor for anything, that it was not “a symbol for something beyond itself, as if its uniqueness were merely an abbreviation or iconographic… Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.” Boxing, you see, doesn’t represent anything other than what it is – two men opposing the other, endeavoring to beat the other into utter submission. It is, therefore, precisely what it holds itself out to be and that is why – as we become more and more progressive, enlightened, “better” – fewer and fewer people embrace it. The death of Duk Koo Kim. The tragedy of Muhammad Ali’s later years – our greatest athlete suffering physically, mentally. The death of Benny Paret. These are the natural consequences of combat in a ring, the specter that perpetually hovers over boxing. But because boxing does not pretend to be anything else, because boxing cannot pretend to be anything else, it can’t hide from its realities. Boxing embraces death because boxing can’t avoid it. Society, though, only deals in metaphor; society does not deal in realities. Norman Mailer:
“…the Establishment has no idea of death, no tolerance for Heaven or Hell, no comprehension of bloodshed. It sees no logic in pain. To the establishment these notions are a detritus from the past.”
Football, while inherently gladiatorial, has the modern advantage of being able to disguise its realities. It can hide under the aegis of society’s vanities. But when you strip it of all its flash; of all the fantasy points and rotisserie leagues; of the Super Bowl parties; and of half time shows and Jerry’s World; of the Raiderettes and the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders; and of all the pomp and circumstance of collegiate bowl games and their capricious national titles; when all is bare and stripped away, football is cut of the same cloth as boxing. Put another way:
The foundation of football has been, and always will be, blocking and tackling. No coach, from midgets to Gruden, has ever hypothesized anything different. That is to say, football at its foundation consists of two men opposing each other, endeavoring, as Russ Grimm once described it, to move the other against his will.
But when you deal with sports as metaphor, that’s when “perspective” tells you it is just a game. But football is not just a game, it is a game, the premise of which is a real and tangible feat, difficult and grueling perhaps, but real and tangible nonetheless. There is real, perceptible value in moving another man against his will, just as there is real, perceptible value in running faster than another man or jumping higher than another man or beating another man into submission. Conversely, have you ever wondered what real value there is in social security? Or Obamacare? Or compulsory public education? Or affirmative action? Or capitalism? If you are good at affirmative action, where does your skill lie? What does that sentence even mean? A society that is adept at information sharing is adept at what precisely? Social Security has importance – it exists in the first place – merely because a certain group of people attributed value to it. It does not exist in the real – authentic – world. Moving another man against his will, however, is an act that exists in the real world. When done well, when done with grace, it should be admired, for no other reason than that it was accomplished, than that it was even endeavored. But that’s the problem: People don’t see football as anything but metaphor. It represents their childhood, or the innocence of youth; or determinism; or doggedness; or perseverance; or the American Spirit or the American Dream or the American Experiment or whatever. Football is a vicarious pleasure for most people, but a vicarious pleasure only. And that, really, is why the concussion crisis and the rules changes and the awareness which stems from it are so saddening. For football to survive in popularity, for people to be able to marginalize the Richie Incognitos of the world, the masses will continue to mask the game’s true nature, to turn away from the contest, shocked, shocked! that brutal men play it, brutally, unrelentingly and that it is beautiful precisely because it is a sport and because it is difficult and because there is no incongruence between the two. George Will again: “Greek philosophers considered sport a religious and civic – in a word, moral – undertaking. Sport, they said, is morally serious because mankind’s noblest aim is the loving contemplation of worthy things, such as beauty and courage.”
But people don’t lovingly contemplate football (or boxing, or baseball – which Will was writing about – or our other great sports) for reasons like beauty and courage. Instead, they contemplate football for vicarious reasons; for fantasy points or as an excuse to imbibe or as a distraction from their boring, mundane, digitally-centered life, a life where the safety nets of the modern State protect us from anything real – like death; injury; pain; Heaven; Hell…
People will continue to obsess over their sports teams – and I too obsess over mine – but as they do so they will every so often – because they think of sport only as metaphor – turn to you when things get real and say It’s just a game you know. It is, to them, just a game and therefore not worth fatigue or death or dismemberment or great contemplation because we’re entitled to have others contemplate such things for us. The individual mandate can circumvent death; the SSA can guarantee retirement; the Supreme Court can undermine sexual inequality; school boards can guarantee knowledge. And we accept this is the way it is because our heads are stuck too far up our collective asses to even contemplate the possibility that the things we believe are civically important – the things we think we are entitled to – actually matter none. In this sense, people will not change. Which means football will. In fact, football has already changed, and some of the players, too. Where this leads – the extent of the change – I do not pretend to know; it will perhaps be incremental. But if the white middle class; and the enlightened liberals; and the entitled of America, even the so-called conservatives, never embrace football for football, then at some point I can’t help but wonder if, with their noses turned up, they leave football – because of its inherent dangers – to the inner cities or the inhabitants of our lower socio-economic classes, and to the blacks and the Hispanics, all the while they enjoy “their” team’s successes from afar, but for reasons unrelated to why football actually matters. Football is great fun, so long as it isn’t real.
The Existentialism of Diggin’ Ditches
A lawyer once slapped me on the back while we were waiting on an order to come down from the bench. It was late on a Friday afternoon; neither of us wanted to be there. In an attempt at consolation, he said to me, “Sure beats diggin’ ditches, though, don’t it?”
Well, no. Lawyering doesn’t beat digging ditches because there is something real and fine about digging ditches. Ditch diggers have my profound respect for the same reasons that Green Berets and offensive linemen and Ken Norton and midshipmen and Jake Scott have my respect. They did – and do – something real. Something authentic. Something that has actual value in and of itself, not value that has been attributed to it.
I’m sure that many who read this essay, now that it has finally come to fruition, will themselves want to dig a ditch and bury me in it, alive, along with my pretensions and condescension and whatever else they find objectionable about me. Their criticisms, even if valid, don’t make me wrong, though, and, honestly, I’d probably accept burial at this point with welcomed relief, because underneath all that earth I wouldn’t have to listen anymore to people who are shocked, shocked! that football is dangerous. I wouldn’t have to listen to the rayformers, as Mr. Dooley called them, constantly trying to reform that which doesn’t need reforming. And I’d be done dealing with metaphors on a daily basis. There are, after all, no legal fictions down there, in all that dirt, no affirmative action, or strict scrutiny, or targeting, or defenseless receivers, or individual mandate and none of that the-ground-can’t-cause-a-fumble-nonsense.
