Against Football Read Free Page A

“old-fashioned.”
    Under the guidance of its young, media-savvy commissioner, Pete Rozelle, the league made several prescient decisions. It created a division called NFL Properties, which brought interests such as merchandising and promotions in-house. The league recognized, long before its competition, that America had become an information economy, and it flooded media outlets with stats and player profiles.
    Rozelle was essentially a PR man, and he understood the American lust for the mythic, the manner in which his fellow citizens yearned to feel part of some heroic past. In 1965, he convinced the owners to create NFL Films, which amounted to a ministry of propaganda. The highlight reels produced by this outfit were wildly ambitious cinematic productions that featured bloody linemen, frozen breath, and floating spirals, all set to a rousing score, and narrated by a voice actor whoseflair for gravitas fell somewhere between Captain Kirk and Darth Vader. It is virtually impossible to watch one of these films without feeling engorged by delirious notions of valor. They are football porn.
    Given the game’s appeal to traditional masculine values, it’s hardly surprising that men of power gravitated to the game, nor that the ad executives of the world understood its lucrative associations. What remains shocking is the vast reach of the game, the manner in which it united low and high culture, the egghead and the meathead, the radical and the reactionary, the proletariat and the President.
    Eisenhower played the game, as did Jack and Bobby Kennedy, rather famously. But it was Richard Nixon whose fanaticism was most blatant. In 1969, Nixon telephoned quarterback Len Dawson minutes after he led the Kansas City Chiefs to a startling win in Super Bowl IV. (Informed that he had a call from the President, Dawson responded, “The president of what?”) Nixon spiked his campaign speeches with football jargon. He used gridiron nomenclature to nickname military operations. He didn’t just go to games. He visited the
practices
of his favorite team, the Washington Redskins.
    The scene I can’t get out of my head is of Nixon milling around outside the broadcast booth at a 1971 pre-season game, waiting to do a brief televised chat with Frank Gifford, the former Giants star turned broadcaster. Nixon can’t stop talking about how he used to watch Gifford play, how he attended the Giff’s post-game cocktail parties. This is the most powerful man on earth, still three years from his appointeddisgrace, and he is unable to settle his nerves. “I know Frank Gifford,” he says. “I’m sure he’ll remember me.”
    The NFL marketed football as a traditional game, shaped by Establishment values. The league was both a friend to big business and a crucial partner. It had survived its precarious infancy largely by adopting the tactics of the emerging corporate culture.
    But it wasn’t just Nixon and the rest of the squares who loved football. Here’s what Abbie Hoffman, the most famous dissident of the sixties, had to say about football haters: “They’re a bunch of peacenik creeps. Watching a football game on television, in color, is fantastic.” This is to say nothing of the Black Panthers, who gathered on Sunday afternoons to watch at a bar owned by hall of famer Gene Upshaw, or George Plimpton, who devoted two books to the game.
    â€œFootball is not only the most popular sport, it is the most intellectual one. It is in fact the intellectuals’ secret vice,” the critic William Phillips observed in 1969. “Much of its popularity is due to the fact that it makes respectable the most primitive feelings about violence, patriotism, manhood.”
    A more generous way of saying this is that football provided a lingua franca by which men of vastly different beliefs and standing could speak to one another in an increasingly fragmented culture. It cut right through