Against Football Read Free Page B

the moral ambiguities and antagonisms of the era.
    Consider the one and only meeting between President Nixon and his counter-cultural bane, Hunter S. Thompson. The two spent most of the hour swapping game stories, afterwhich Thompson noted, with reluctant admiration, “Whatever else might be said about Nixon—and there is still serious doubt in my mind that he could pass for human—he is a goddamn stone fanatic on every facet of pro football.”
    The British writer James Lawton puts it this way: “If all sport is magnificent triviality, American football seems least tolerant of its limitations.”
    It is hard to imagine this today, but there was a time when interest in football was restricted to weekend afternoons in the autumn. Today, the amount of time that fans spend watching games is infinitesimal compared to the time we spend consuming what might be called the ancillary products: highlights, previews, updates on injuries, trades, arrests, contract negotiations, firings, and so on. This is to say nothing of the message boards and the endless chatter of sports pundits, the arias of wrath intended to fill the overnight hours of sports talk radio. Americans now give football more attention than any other cultural endeavor. It isn’t even close.
    The result (in sports, as in any other racket) is an obscene inflationary bubble. An errant comment on Twitter begets a national story and weeks of agitated kibitzing, and a player accused of something more serious—dogfighting or murder—commands the grave regard once reserved for a presidential scandal.
    The NFL and the networks that cover the college game have tapped into a bottomless hunger for which there is nooff-season. The moment the Super Bowl ends, draft speculation begins. The draft itself wasn’t even televised until a few years ago. More than 25 million people watched the first round last year. At Ohio State, where I happen to be teaching as I write this, more than 80,000 people will fill the stadium … for a spring scrimmage.
    If you are among the thousands of handicappers who make a living from gambling on football, or the millions who place bets, the desire for minute and esoteric bytes of football info strikes me as understandable.
    For the rest of us, I suspect, this data mongering has more to do with a dire search for meaning. Let me try to explain. Americans are being bombarded by facts at this point in our history. Sea levels rose 3.2 millimeters last year. The Nikkei average is down 6 percent. Dick Cheney remains sentient. The problem isn’t that these facts are bad, though most are. It’s that we have no larger context in which to place them. We don’t really know what they mean.
    The reason I’ll spend five minutes reading about whether the second-string running back for the Arizona Cardinals is going to show up for training camp is because that fact plugs into a system of loyalties I do understand. As absurd as this sounds, it
means
something to me. The Raiders play the Cardinals this year … if their first-string running back gets injured, perhaps their second-stringer will be ill-prepared … meaning our feeble defense might stymie him … and so forth.
    The glut of football news also feeds a kind of vicarious executive impulse. We live in an age of unfettered capitalism,and yet most of us know next to nothing about the true mechanisms of economic power. We can barely remember the PINs to our 401(k)s. When it comes to football, though, we have access to vast stores of financial and personnel data, scouting reports, statistical analyses, game tapes, the works. There is no way on earth we could run IBM or General Electric, nor would most of us want to. But we could sure as shit do a better job with the Dallas Cowboys than their jackass owner Jerry Jones. This is why so many millions of Americans spend so many billions of hours deliberating over whom to start each week