Greetings, friends. (XXIX)

Greetings, friends. Tomorrow brings that long-awaited and/or widely-detested American spectacle, the Super Bowl. I wrote a bit about American football a couple weeks ago, but, as usual, I have more to say.

The sport, like those other two uniquely American sports, baseball and basketball, dates back to the mid-late 19th Century. Its origins are rooted in rugby, and the sport didn’t really take on its modern recognizable form until the adoption of the forward pass in 1906. The sport’s premier professional association, the National Football League, was founded in 1920.

The modern rules of American football are famously Byzantine, and have been constantly in flux. The core of the current NFL rule book is 88 pages long, and with appendices and revision history included, the whole thing weighs in at a staggering 245 pages. All televised games have a special rules analyst to interpret the game’s finer points for the folks watching at home, whenever an uncommon situation or a disputed referee call occurs. Fans like to complain about the sheer inconsistency of refereeing in NFL games, and not without reason, but with a rule book like that, can you hardly blame the refs?

As an aside, American football is not the only type of gridiron football played professionally. The most notable is Canadian football, which like most things Canadian, is recognizably similar to its American counterpart, but stubbornly different in specific particulars. Examples include the field extending to 110 yards, yielding two 50 yard lines; offenses having three downs to gain ten yards instead of four; offenses being able to have two players in motion downfield at the snap; and a one-point scoring play from scrimmage that I still don’t understand. The overall effect, if you are an American watching a Canadian game, is as if you are looking through a funhouse lens at a football game being played in Bizarroland. The game is the same but somehow uncannily, disturbingly different.

Interesting, American football as we know it today was — surprise! — originally an import from Canada. So they really are sibling sports in a historical sense.

In spite of American football being these days an immensely profitable spectator sport, the NFL was an untaxed 501(c)(6) non-profit “business association” right up until 2015. Regardless, the NFL has been historically quite successful at quashing competing professional leagues, partly thanks to having engineered a statutory exemption to Federal anti-trust laws in the ‘60s. Good old fashioned politicking led to an NFL team being established in New Orleans as part of the deal, about whom more another time.

Only one professional league in American history resisted the NFL’s might, and for only a while. That was the American Football League, which hung on for 10 years, before the two leagues merged in 1970. The original composition of those leagues lives on today as the primary division of the NFL into two halves, the National Football Conference, and the American Football Conference.

The Super Bowl, that annual television carnival, is simply the final match-up of the respective champions of the NFC and AFC. Even Americans who never watch football still watch the Super Bowl, like Jews who only go to synagogue the week of Rosh Hashanah.

People I grew up with would probably be surprised to learn about my passionate attachment to the American football. I was, at least at certain times in my life, anti-athletic-culture and especially anti-spectator-sports.

But when one learns to follow the game, and see what is happening on the field, the coaches’ play-calling, and the disposition of the players, begins to resemble nothing so much as a game of chess... where the pieces are 300 pound ballerinas.

The true depth of the game is astonishing. There are opening gambits. There is thrust and parry, feint and counter-feint, on every play, and every sequence of plays. Disguise and deception. Which players are on the field for each. Precisely how they are lined up.

How many wide receivers are near the line of scrimmage? How spread apart are they? How many running backs in the backfield? Is the quarterback taking the snap directly from the center or is he in a shotgun formation? Is each defensive tackle lined up on the inside or outside shoulder of the the offensive guard? How many safeties and linebackers are waiting behind them?

And then the ball is snapped. The quarterback takes the ball. Will he hand it off, throw it, or try to run himself? Sometimes he can credibly fake one, and then do the other, so convincingly that even the TV cameraman is deceived. Can the offensive line shove aside enough defenders to make room for a running back to dash through the mass of bodies? Will the wide receivers run routes that tangle up the defensive backfield and leave them open for a pass?

Meanwhile, did the defense successfully disguise their coverage? Are they anticipating a run or a pass? Will they try to rush the quarterback and possibly sack him? If so, did they leave enough defenders downfield to protect against a passing play? Each offensive play and mix of players has the right counter, if the defense can figure it out quickly enough.

Then there is an overall strategy which unfolds over the span of three hours. And there is an endgame, which sometimes is nothing but “garbage time,” when a clear winner has long since emerged. But often a close game can turn into an absolute nail-biter, where the winner is in doubt until the very last second of regulation play.

One of the two things that people find thrilling about football, of course, is its lightning speed, and, in this, it differs from chess. The sheer athleticism on display is, in its fleeting best moments, a source of pure joy. Most plays are over in a matter of seconds. When shown on television, the announcers will review any play of consequence in slow-motion, and dissect it for the benefit of the audience. Otherwise most laypeople, me included, would miss half of what’s happening.

I could wax lyrical at great length about these aspects of the game, but I will spare you.

There’s another thing that Americans love about football. More so than any other American professional sport, football is violent. Hockey, boxing, and auto racing all have their share of brutality, but I believe these sports lack the sweep of grand strategy I mentioned. Only football combines both.

I could argue the merits of the violence of American football. I think it certainly reflects who we are as a nation. But more than that, I think we’re just not that far removed from our simian ancestry. We have limbic systems that become agitated and crave release. Some of us, me included, find violence in certain forms extremely satisfying. One of the two basic problems of civilization itself concerns how to control and channel and manage this urge into productive, or at least harmless, means. For this, we have football.

At least, in theory. In practice, American football is very far from harmless. Traumatic brain injury is common among players, and many players last only a few seasons, if that, before the game’s violence takes an overwhelming toll on their bodies. The professional sport, as a whole, chews players up and spits them out, leaving only the few who are both hardy and fortunate enough to emerge as enduringly memorable stars.

One player, Damar Hamlin, came within minutes of dying of cardiac arrest on the field this season, due to a freak hit on a routine play. Only the swift actions of trainers and medical staff saved his life. All while the national television broadcast cuts hastily to a commercial break. And yet we call this a game?

The violence, physical and social, extends down through the college leagues and into high schools. You can go read Friday Night Lights to see what I mean, if you didn’t grow up with it. People go literally apeshit with frenzied tribalism, chucking their town’s youth into the meat grinder for the spectacle of rivalry.

At the college level, the sheer amount of money, and the contortions that college leagues go through to maintain the illusion that football players are “students” in any meaningful sense, make a farce of the concept of higher education.

The tribalism of spectator sports is an interesting thing to me. I wonder if it also satisfies sublimated simian urges. I have seen at sports games how total strangers from radically different socioeconomic classes, who would never come into contact with or identify with one another under any other circumstances, can sit cheek-by-jowl wearing the same branded paraphernalia, and become fast friends, at least while the game is in progress.

This doesn’t really happen at modern NFL games, where the price of tickets more or less ensures that everyone in the stands is at least middle-class, if not wealthy.

There is also a profound racism baked into the heart of the NFL. Tomorrow’s will be the 57th — count ‘em, 57th — Super Bowl, but only the first in which both starting quarterbacks are African-American. A disproportionate number of coaches, and players in leadership roles in NFL teams are white, while a majority of the players in the league are Black. And yet not one NFL team, not one, is owned by a person of African-American descent.

I find all of this shocking, yet sadly unsurprising. As I said, of course our national obsession is a perfect mirror of who we are as a nation. Quick, hardy, and clever — but also brutally violent, and especially racist, all in the service of tribal identity and an all-devouring capitalism.

I suppose a more principled progressive Leftist than I am would reject the game on the basis of these obvious and considerable demerits. Anyone who has read, say, Zinn ought to be ready to do the same with the United States of America as a whole.

I know it is self-serving of me, but I prefer to engage with the awful, beautiful, ugly mess that are both America and its favorite sport. To praise the things I love about them both, and condemn those things which must be changed, for humanity’s sake. Sometimes I think we Leftists are too quick to throw out the baby and the bathwater.

I’m looking forward to a good game tomorrow. The Vegas bookies make the Philadelphia Eagles out to be a mere point and a half favorites over the Kansas City Chiefs. That means it’s anybody’s game. If you plan to watch, I hope you enjoy it.

If you’re reading this, I wish you a pleasant weekend, regardless of how you spend it. Ceterum censeo pro vigilum imperdiet cessandam est. GO BIRDS!