A Super Bowl Sunday Syllabus
By David Swanson
Welcome back to Culture Club, the recurring feature where David and I discuss our preoccupations—what we’ve been thinking about, reading, watching or playing. Usually this is a feature for paid subscribers, but given the vast audience for the Super Bowl, we're making this installment available to all. —Talia
Tonight, over 100 million viewers will be tuning in to NBC to watch the Kansas City Chiefs battle the San Francisco 49ers at Super Bowl LVIII in Las Vegas. Tickets for the game cost up to $75,000.00 each, and if you want to buy a 30-second ad on the national network broadcast it'll set you back a cool $7 million. (This post about football history, on the other hand, will set you back zero dollars. Our Sunday columns are usually for premium subscribers, so if you want a weekly blast from the archival past, subscribe here!)
American football is booming. And also, in some ways, its prospects have never looked so bleak. (In a 2023 report on the decline in participation in the sport, the Washington Post wrote: "The NFL, which is among the most influential cultural institutions in the United States, has long viewed the slow decline in high school participation rates—beginning in 2006 and accelerating amid the avalanche of negative storylines in the 2010s regarding traumatic brain injuries—as an existential threat.") Still, while fewer and fewer Americans are playing football, more and more are watching it.
So, for this Sunday's archival deep dive, I've collected an array of articles that collectively tell the story of football's rise to cultural ubiquity, and confront the issues that may ultimately doom the sport. (Note: Whenever I take one these trips down the digital rabbit hole, I find all sorts of interesting pieces that are only tangentially related to the topic at hand, and are thus left on the cutting room floor. So you'll have to go elsewhere if you want to read about Super Bowl ads, NFL cheerleaders, National Anthem and halftime performances, Travis and Taylor, or the history of the six-foot Italian hero—and I'm not referring to Joe Montana.)
Instead, you'll find: Hunter S. Thompson and Don DeLillo on the Super Bowl; George Plimpton on suiting up with the Detroit Lions and Jack Kerouac on playing for Columbia; David Halberstam on Bill Belichik; Michael Lewis on the Manning family; Jimmy Breslin on hitting the town with Joe Namath. There are also more recent features on the tragic toll the game takes on the men who play it, and why we, as viewers, keep watching despite knowing this. As the for the rest of the selection, I make no apologies for the surfeit of material on Packers like Ray Nitschke and Giants like Lawrence Taylor: I prefer linebackers to quarterbacks; I'm a Green Bay fan by genetics, and a New Yorker by upbringing.
One theme you can't help but notice in these stories—and one evident in the list of bylines here—is the hypermasculine strain that runs through game (see "The Last Angry Men", below.) Another is that the media has been writing about football's inevitable (if not imminent) downfall for as long as it's been an American obsession. As Hunter S. Thompson wrote for Rolling Stone fifty years ago, in "Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl":
The ’73 Dolphins, I suspect, will be to pro football what the ’64 Yankees were to baseball, the final flower of an era whose time has come and gone. The long and ham-fisted shadow of Vince Lombardi will be on us for many more years. …But the crank is gone…
Should we end the bugger with that?
The Ghost of the Gridiron
By W. C. Heinz
True, November 1958
Red Grange was the most sensational, the most publicized, and, possibly, the most gifted football player and greatest broken field runner of all time. In high school, at Wheaton, Illinois, he averaged five touchdowns a game. In twenty games for the University of Illi- nois, he scored thirty-one touchdowns and ran for 3,637 yards, or, as it was translated at the time, two miles and 117 yards. His name and his pseudonyms—The Galloping Ghost and The Wheaton Iceman— became household words...
Grange is now fifty-five years old, his reddish brown hair marked with gray, but he was one with Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Bobby Jones, and Bill Tilden.
“I could carry a football well,” Grange was saying now, “but I’ve met hundreds of people who could do their thing better than I. I mean engineers, and writers, scientists, doctors—whatever."
Football's Taking Over
By Roger Kahn
Sport, 1960
In 1934, a franchise in the National Football League cost $10,000, today's going price for one fair offensive lineman. Teams traveled by bus, and whenever the Philadelphia Eagles had to play the Giants, they made the last leg of their trip to the Polo Grounds by subway, carrying uniforms, footballs and equipment on their backs. Pro football was a business of one-day stands, with no guarantee that fans would show up…
Baseball is still popular, as well it should be, but it is becoming a game rather than The Game. There are no super stars, less color, fewer fanatic fans. If baseball prospers in new territory, say, Los Angeles, it prospers as a carnival, not as baseball. Big-league games are new to LA, but what attracts most of the customers is not the quality of baseball, it's the novelty.
Professional football, meanwhile, has arrived.
Zero of the Lions
By George Plmpton
Sports Illustrated, September 7, 1964
"Hut one, hut two, hut three."
The ball slapped into my palm at "three." I turned and started back. I could feel my balance going, and two yards behind the line of scrimmage I fell down—absolutely flat, as if my feet had been pinned under a trip wire stretched across the field—not a hand laid on me. I heard a great roar go up from the crowd. Suffused as I had been with confidence, I could scarcely believe what had happened. Cleats catching in the grass? Slipped in the dew? I felt my jaw go ajar in my helmet. "Wha'? Wha'?"—the mortification beginning to come fast. I rose hurriedly to my knees, the referee's whistle bleating, and I could see my teammates' big silver helmets with the blue Lion decals turn toward me, some of the players rising from blocks they'd thrown to protect me, their faces masked, automatons, prognathous with the helmet bars protruding toward me, characterless, yet the dismay was in the set of their bodies as they loped back for the huddle.
I joined them, there being no alternative. "Sorry, sorry," I said.
"Call the play, man," came a voice from one of the helmets.
Battle of Pros: Violence Under Control
LIFE, October 4, 1966
The four professional football players stand at the line of scrimmage, muddied and mauled, waiting for the next enemy charge and evoking memories of troops in the trenches of World War I. They take part in weekly wars where assaults and defenses are as carefully plotted as any military operation. They fight with a delicate violence, using skills as precise as they are brutal and blunt. "Football is violence," says Green Bay Packers' coach Vince Lombardi. "There's nothing wrong with violence as long as it is controlled."
On these pages LIFE'S Arthur Rickerby captures on film the all-important element the pros call control. In most plays it is exercised by what is known as the "one-on-one" situation—one player on specific assignment to subdue, by force and guile, a specific opponent. In captions the pros themselves tell what happens in these highly charged individual duels, analyzing the meticulous processes of what seems like sheer chaos.
Super Sunday
By Herbert Warren Wind
The New Yorker, January 27, 1967
This past autumn, when the once lordly Giants were tottering from defeat to defeat, some friends of mine who follow the team reached the conclusion that the combined efforts of its coach and its general manager over the last three years added up to "the worst rebuilding job since Carthage." As their dressy reference may indicate, the members of this group pride themselves on being modern Renaissance men, pursuing a wide range of interests with a worldliness that permits them to be detached and amused at moments when ordinary people are swept up in emotion. Beneath it all, however, they are no different from the rest of us. Whenever I bumped into any of them, singly or collectively, in the days preceding the Super Bowl game in mid-January, their old sang-froid was missing; all they could talk about, as endlessly as you and I, was that long-awaited clash—the first ever between the champions of the National Football League and the champions of the American Football League. Well, the Super Bowl is behind us now. The decisive 35-10 victory of the Green Bay Packers, of the N.F.L., has consolidated the prestige of their league, and, all things considered, "the game of the century" came reasonably close to fulfilling the grandiose expectations it had raised—at least during the first half. It drew some sixty thousand fans to the Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles and was watched on television by an estimated sixty-five million—an all-time record audience for a sports event.
The Vanity on the Gridiron
By Jack Kerouac
Sports Illustrated, January 8, 1968
As Ma and Cousin talked in the kitchen, I daydreamed that I was now going to go back to Columbia for my sophomore year, with home in New Haven, maybe near Yale campus, with soft light in room and rain on the sill, mist on the pane, and go all the way in football and studies. I was going to be such a sensational runner that we'd win every game, against Dartmouth, Yale, Princeton, Har-vard, Georgia U., Michigan U., Cornell, the bloody lot, and wind up in the Rose Bowl. In the Rose Bowl, worse even than Cliff Montgomery, I was going to run wild. Uncle Lu Libble for the first time in his life would throw his arms around me and weep. Even his wife would do so. The boys on the team would raise me up in Rose Bowl's Pasadena stadium and march me to the showers singing. On returning to Columbia campus in January, having passed chemistry with an A, I would then idly turn my attention to winter indoor track and decide on the mile and run it in under 4 flat (that was fast in those days). So fast, indeed, that I'd be in the big meets at Madison Square Garden and beat the current great milers in final fantastic sprints bringing my time down to 3:50 flat. By this time everybody in the world is crying Duluoz! Du-luoz!
Namath All Night Long
By Jimmy Breslin
New York, April 7, 1969
They are trying to call this immensely likeable 25-year-old by the name of Broadway Joe. But Broadway as a street has been a busted-out whorehouse with orange juice stands for as long as I can recall, and now, as an expression, it is tired and represents nothing to me. And it certainly represents nothing to Joe Willie Namath’s people. His people are on First and Second Avenues, where young girls spill out of the buildings and into the bars crowded with guys and the world is made of long hair and tape cartridges and swirling color and military overcoats and the girls go home with guys or the guys go home with girls and nobody is too worried about any of it because life moves, it doesn’t stand still and whisper about what happened last night. It is out of these bars and apartment buildings and the life of them that Joe Willie Namath comes. He comes with a Scotch in his hand at night and a football in the daytime and last season he gave New York the only lift the city has had in so many years it is hard to think of a comparison.
One Season And One Injury With The Meanest Man Alive
By Arthur Kretchmer
Playboy, October 1971
Richard Marvin Butkus, 28 years old, 245 pounds, six feet, three inches tall, middle linebacker for the Chicago Bears football team, possibly the best man to ever play the position. To a fan, the story on Butkus is very simple. He's the meanest, angriest, toughest, dirtiest son of a bitch in football. An animal, a savage, subhuman. But as good at his game as Ty Cobb was at his, or Don Budge at his, or Joe Louis at his.
As one of the Bear linemen said to me, "When you try to pick the best offensive guard, there are about five guys who are really close; it's hard to pick one. The same thing's true about most positions. But Butkus is the best. He's superman. He's the greatest thing since popcorn."
Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl
Hunter S. Thompson
Rolling Stone, February 28, 1974
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
Who said that?
I suspect it was somebody from the Columbia Journalism Review, but I have no proof... and it makes no difference anyway. There is a bond, among pros, that needs no definition. Or at least it didn't on that Sunday morning in Houston, for reasons that require no further discussion at this point in time. because it suddenly occurred to me that I had already written the lead for this year's Super Bowl game; I wrote it last year in Los Angeles, and a quick rip through my fat manila folder of clips labeled "Football '73" turned it up as if by magic.
I jerked it out of the file, and retyped it on a fresh page slugged: "Super Bowl/Houston '74." The only change necessary was the substitution of "Minnesota Vikings" for "Washington Redskins." Except for that, the lead seemed just as adequate for the game that would begin in about six hours as it was for the one that I missed in Los Angeles in January of '73.
Is it the Super Bowl Yet?
By Roy Blount
Esquire, January 1977
Here was an angle—the Super Bowl as a bunch of people thumping and wallowing and acting like they were trying to squeeze through a subway door. But what kind of angle was that? After the N.F.L. had gone to so much trouble. There I was amid all those still radiant Upwiths, feeling down and against. I watched as the game lurched and sprawled way off down to the other end of the field. I had to get a new fix.
And suddenly it came. Rocketing right back toward me. In the form of the aerial pigskin. The lofted spiraling ball. As the philosophizing coal miner in Beyond the Fringe says when he picks up the lump of coal, “The very thing we’re looking for.” Fifty-four yards on the fly.
The ball got bigger and bigger until it was close enough so that I could see its tip wobbling just slightly out of true, moving from side to side. It might fly over the Super Bowl forever.
New Troubles in the N.F.L,
By David Harris
New York Times, September 7, 1986
Founded in 1920 in a hupmobile showroom in Canton, Ohio, the National Football League is described by its constitution as an "unincorporated association." Each owner of one of the league's franchised teams has one vote, and all decisions require at least three-quarters agreement. The league's commissioner is both hired by those owners and officially charged with "full, complete and final jurisdiction and authority to resolve disputes between league members."
Despite the commissioner's regal authority, the league was decidedly a feudal enterprise, dominated by the personalities of the owners, until Pete Rozelle was hired in 1960 at the age of 33. Within 10 years, Rozelle, a California public relations man described by one of his employers as "endlessly patient," enforced centralization and standardization and produced so much income that, for a time at least, the owners' submission to the commissioner seemed emminently worthwhile. Rozelle's ability to handle his employers was legendary, and he ended up making himself and the N.F.L.'s monopoly virtually synonymous.
True Blue: From Giants to Supermen
By Eric Pooley
New York, January 26, 1987
[Lawrence Taylor] is six three, 243, and incredibly strong, quick, and graceful. Rushing the passer about 70 percent of the time this season, he set an NFC record with twenty and a half quarterback sacks. He was the NFL's Most Valuable Player, a Pro Bowl choice for the sixth time, and the NFL Defensive Player of the Year for the third. When he is on top of his game, he can single-handedly upend an offense, dictate a final score.
He does it with instinct and natural ability—he works with weights less than any other Giants defender. Parcells denies it, but others in the organization say that some of those Taylor blitzes surprise the Giants as well. He's impulsive, reckless as a falling rock, a throwback to the days before football became a science—and that's what makes him so much fun to watch.
"I guess that I'm just a plain wild dude," he said before the 49ers play-off game. "I live life wild. I play wild. I hang with the bums. I hang with the regular people. I make mistakes like everybody else. I'm just a blue-collar worker."
The Last Angry Men
By Rick Telander
Sports Illustrated, September 6, 1993
They are among the rare human beings who appreciate being called animals. How else can one describe a player who gets his greatest high from hitting an opposing quarterback, when, as New York Giant Lawrence Taylor said in his book, LT: Living on the Edge, "he doesn't see you coming and you drive your helmet into his back so hard, he blows a little snot bubble." Lovely. Linebackers all have their favorite moments. Former Lion Jimmy Williams used to speak of blindsiding a ballcarrier and hearing "that little moan"; the Houston Oilers' Wilber Marshall says simply. "I like to hear 'em gasp."
To each his own. As Dallas Cowboy hit man Ken Norton puts it, linebacker "is the most badass position on the field." Just repeat the names of the great ones and see if you don't feel like ducking: Ray Nitschke, Mike Curtis, Tommy Nobis, Bill George, Jack Ham, Sam Huff, Joe Schmidt, Lee Roy Jordan, Chuck Howley, Mike Singletary.
Frozen in Time
By Johnette Howard
Sports Illustrated, January 13, 1997
Football history isn't learned in Green Bay as much as it's lived and touched and felt. Linebacker Ray Nitschke, who played from 1958 to '72, isn't just one of the 19 members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame whose names form a ring at skybox level around the inside of Lambeau: Nitschke is in the Green Bay phone book, and he still attends home games, often eschewing a skybox for a seat in the stands. Call Nitschke at home and ask for an audience, and he's likely to reply, "Let's talk over the phone. I might scare ya in person."
Starr and Kramer still come back to Lambeau for the Packers' annual fantasy camp, and numerous players return for alumni day and the opportunity to walk along the hash marks one more time as applause rains down, as it always has. Thurston, who has survived throat cancer and two hip replacements, still owns and operates Shenanigan's, a neighborhood bar on the southeast fringe of town. On one wall he has begun a collection of mostly out-of-state license plates given to him by patrons; all are vanity plates bearing some expression of support for the Packers (GO PACK, for example, or GBP FAN) "Forget Dallas," Thurston says. "The Green Bay Packers are America's Team."
The Eli Experiment
By Michael Lewis
New York Times, December 19, 2004
Archie and Olivia Manning raised their sons to be well-educated members of New Orleans' upper middle class—nice boys, good people. Archie never intended for them to make careers in football, and he made a big deal of steering as far from their ambitions as he could and still remain intimately involved in their lives. Whatever he contributed to his children's success, he contributed inadvertently. Archie had a phobia that someone might mistake him for one of those Little League dads whose idea of fatherhood is to holler at the umps. ("I've never been embarrassed by my dad," says Cooper Manning, a New Orleans investment analyst whose own promising football career ended for medical reasons. "Not a single time.") He actually made a point of not learning all the bewildering changes to the pro game since he quit playing, in 1985, so that his sons would be more reluctant to engage him in conversation about football, as opposed to something else.
The Making of a Coach
By David Halberstam
Sports Illustrated, October 2005
Bill Belichick was a star who did not want to be a star, a celebrity in search of privacy and the right to do his job without any public interference. He feared the celebrity culture, which was particularly dangerous to football, a sport based entirely on the concept of team, for which as many as 40 players might play important roles in any given victory but the television camera might celebrate the deeds of only one or two. Thus a great deal of time and energy in the world of the New England Patriots]went into selecting players who were not prone to displays of ego and self. This did not mean Belichick was without ego—far from it. His ego was exceptional, and it was reflected by his almost unique determination. He liked being the best and wanted credit for being the best. But his ego was about the doing, it was fused into a larger purpose, that of his team winning. It was never about the narcissistic celebration of self.
Does Football Have a Future?
By Ben McGrath
The New Yorker, January 11, 2011
How many of the men on the field in the Super Bowl will be playing with incipient dementia? “To me, twenty per cent seems conservative,” Nowinski said. C.T.E., as of now, can be observed only with an autopsy. The ability to detect it with brain scans of living people is at least a couple of years off. “It’s not going to be five per cent,” Nowinski went on. “The reality is we’ve already got three per cent of the brains of people who have died in the last two years confirmed, and that’s not alarming enough to people. What number is going to be the tipping point? People are O.K. with three per cent. They may look sideways at ten per cent. Maybe it needs to be fifty per cent.”
Football Is Dead. Long Live Football
J. R. Moehringer,
ESPN, August 2012
41. Television, which tells us who we are by showing us when we gather, proves football's cultural hegemony better than anything else. Nine of the 10 highest-rated single telecasts last year were football, including the Super Bowl, the most watched program of 2011, seen by 110 million people, or more than one-third of the populace. Four of the five most watched TV programs in American history have been Super Bowls. Thanksgiving Thursday and Super Bowl Sunday are the only two days when the entire American Family gathers in Rockwellian fashion around the dinner table, and let's be honest, both days are all about football.
42. Michael MacCambridge, author of America's Game, says we miss the point when we think of football as a man's game. It is and it isn't. "I think everybody knows that the TV show each year watched by the greatest number of men is the Super Bowl," he says. "But the TV show every year watched by the greatest number of women is the Super Bowl. That's true for African-Americans, Hispanics and so on—across the board."
The Search For Aaron Rodgers
By Mina Kimes
ESPN, July 2017
Rodgers, 33, isn't studiously bland, like many of his elite brethren, and he isn't evasive either. He's just ... cautious. Wary of being misunderstood or revealing too much. Over the years, as his celebrity exploded, he closed certain windows, sequestering his private life while he charmed the public with his dry wit and quirky hobbies. (He does crosswords! He likes Wes Anderson films!) He showed us everything and nothing at all. And for a while, that was enough.
But a few years ago, something shifted. As Rodgers kept himself swaddled in bubble wrap, others started to pound away: former teammates and anonymous sources who called him aloof, bloggers who reported on every development in his relationship with actress Olivia Munn. His name, once the province of the sports pages, started to appear with greater regularity in the tabloids, and last summer, when his younger brother, Jordan, revealed on The Bachelorette that Aaron no longer had a relationship with the family, those stories took on a new life. Throughout all of it, Rodgers said little.
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The Wood Chipper
By Rich Cohen
Harpers, August 2019
N.F.L. owners had been giving out championship rings since the 1930s. It was a way to remember, to save something from the experience. For players, it’s often the only valuable thing they have left when it all falls apart. Dave Meggett, who played for the Giants, put his Super Bowl ring up for sale on eBay, but he apparently did not go through with the sale. Green Bay’s Steve Wright did, selling his Super Bowl ring for $73,000. Ray Guy, the Hall of Fame Oakland punter, auctioned off three Super Bowl rings for $100,000. Lawrence Taylor, maybe the greatest Giant ever, gave his Super Bowl ring to his son, who sold it for $230,000. Walter Payton, the great running back known as Sweetness, loaned his ring to a high-school kid—he wanted to show the kid he trusted him—who lost it in a couch. It turned up later, but by then Payton was dead. Patriots owner Robert Kraft showed off one of his rings to Vladimir Putin in Moscow. Putin tried it on, then walked away. Kraft never saw it again.
The Silence
By Don DeLillo
LitHub.com, October 21, 2020
They sat waiting in front of the superscreen TV. Diane Lucas and Max Stenner. The man had a history of big bets on sporting events and this was the final game of the football season, American football, two teams, eleven players each team, rectangular field one hundred yards long, goal lines and goal posts at either end, the national anthem sung by a semi-celebrity, six U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds streaking over the stadium.
Max was accustomed to being sedentary, attached to a surface, his armchair, sitting, watching, cursing silently when the field goal fails or the fumble occurs. The curse was visible in his slit eyes, right eye nearly shut, but depending on the game situation and the size of the wager, it might become a full-face profanity, a life regret, lips tight, chin quivering slightly, the wrinkle near the nose tending to lengthen. Not a single word, just this tension, and the right hand moving to the left forearm to scratch anthropoidally, primate style, fingers digging into flesh.
On this day, Super Bowl LVI in the year 2022, Diane was seated in the rocker five feet from Max, and between and behind them was her former student Martin, early thirties, bent slightly forward in a kitchen chair.
Commercials, station breaks, pregame babble.
The Concussion Files
By Will Hobson
January 31, 2024
The lawsuits began in 2011. Seventy-five players sued the NFL in state court in California, then seven more in federal court in Philadelphia. Those lawsuits inspired hundreds more involving thousands of players, all accusing the league of deceiving them about the dangers of concussions. The federal court system consolidated the lawsuits and sent the case to Philadelphia, to be heard by U.S. District Judge Anita Brody.
Players blamed a long list of health problems on their NFL careers, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and ALS. But the main reason they sued was CTE, the once-obscure disease that had been discovered in the brains of dozens of former NFL players. The lawsuits sought financial damages as well as money for medical care, including for healthy players in case they developed problems later in life.
Publicly, the league dismissed the cases as baseless. But privately, the league’s top outside lawyer later acknowledged, he believed they posed a serious threat.
