(WARNING: Fervent football fan(atic)s, be aware that the following essay is, most likely to your pigskin partial pupils, an exercise in blasphemy.)
Super Bowl tomorrow.
And here's an interesting slant on it.
Followed by my interesting slant on it.
On 3.
Ready...break.
Gene Seymour is a film critic who has written about music, movies and culture for The New York Times, Newsday, Entertainment Weekly and The Washington Post.
(CNN) -- As far as I'm concerned, John Matuszak said everything there is to say about professional football back in 1979 when he was playing the role of a bent lineman in "North Dallas Forty."
Matuszak, or "Tooz" as players and fans knew him, was something of a renegade individualist in the National Football League and the movie's script gave him the opportunity to unleash a rebel yell: Embittered by his team's tough loss, and by an assistant coach's lame scolding, his character goes off on the coach, shouting at one point, "Every time I call it a game, you call it a business. Every time I call it a business, you call it a game."
And it's that very dichotomy that looms even larger during Super Bowl week. The media keep insisting there's a game being played Sunday night in New Jersey. But all anybody really cares about is the Business -- as in, the torrents of revenue being raked in from advertising (have you seen that there are now trailers---for the commercials?), the marketing, the gambling and, of course, the partying that goes on not only in New York and New Jersey in the lead-up to the Ultimate Game, but from sea to shining sea Sunday night.
Players know it, for sure—and it continues to embody my own ambivalence about American tackle football. I get caught up in the game's drama, its unexpected twists, its ongoing tension between best-laid game plans and the ever-looming potential for their disruptions. I get caught up, too, with the sideline rants, growls, collisions and screw-ups caught at varied speeds by the wizardry of NFL Films.
But while football's orchestrated aggression and violence may entertain me, my family and friends--and the rest of Living Room America—we're all newly alive to the physical and mental risks these players are taking. How does one stay passionate about football in the face of the grim, steadily mounting number of cases involving ex-players undergoing physical and mental injury and anguish over the sport's long-term effects?
In last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, author Steve Almond wondered whether it was immoral to watch and enjoy the Super Bowl while knowing full well that playing the game has caused "catastrophic brain injury ... not as a rare and unintended consequence, but as a routine byproduct of how the game is played." I've expressed similar misgivings here about the flood of disclosures about long-term injury and the manner in which the NFL tried at first to either disregard or demean this peril.
It's not just the dementia, memory loss and other symptoms that cast shadows over the NFL's gaudy, golden image. This seems the right place to mention that Matuszak, who was so physically imposing as a player that he seemed invincible, died 10 years after "North Dallas Forty" was made. He was only 39 years old and his death was attributed to an overdose of prescription pain medication. Gregg Easterbrook, who publishes the weekly Tuesday Morning Quarterback column for ESPN.com, wrote this week that painkiller abuse "may be pro football's next scandal." Over time, watching these players run into each other at top speed while imagining what their minds and lives will be like 20 years afterward could finish me off as a fan.
So could the sheer fatigue of witnessing, year after year, the NFL's seemingly inexhaustible capacity for inhaling money, which only compounds its overbearing corporate culture. I already have little patience with the game's ethos as articulated in such bromides as "Doing Whatever It Takes to Win" or that deathless line that the late, exalted Green Bay coach Vince Lombardi appropriated from a John Wayne movie, "Winning isn't everything, but it's the only thing," which even Lombardi, the man for whom the Super Bowl Trophy is named, came to believe was too simplistic. Such platitudes have made tackle football a useable, if not overused metaphor for what it's like to work, live and, above all, prevail in modern corporate society.
But it's not just a metaphor. Hard-working men such as my father found release, empathy and satisfaction watching the comparably hard work of his beloved New York Giants for decades. It used to be enough for he and millions of fans over the decades of professional football history to watch skilled craftsmen ply their trade, defy the odds, impose their wills, share their joy and passion. It'd be nice, too, if somewhere in the hype and hysteria, we could all calm down enough to see the Super Bowl in such elemental terms.
But as near as I can tell, it's the Business that now holds an overpowering edge over the Game. And what's worse: I can't tell how much longer the Game itself will hold out.
Thoughtful, insightful and, in my humble o, well articulated point of view, there, Gene.
Here's a thing, though.
Actually, a couple of three things.
First, while the public revelations and/or discussions about the potential for catastrophic physical damage in tackle football are relatively new, the results of such revelations and/or discussions are as predictable as what we can expect to be done about Bieber's spoiled, punk ass, law breaking behavior.
Three words.
Nada. Zip. Zero.
Because football's rock 'em, sock em', smash em' presentation is a huge part of what makes the game so attractive and popular in the first place.
Since some killjoy decided, back in our idyllic past, that that whole lions having their Christian friends for dinner pastime wasn't cool, watching grown men kick, punch, grab, knock, smack, smash, elbow, knee, fist and/or hurl each other to the cold hard ground (or dome temperature artificial surface, as the case may be) was the next best thing.
Well, next to WWE.
But football can claim credit for some sophistication that wrestling lacks, if only because it does, in fairness, take a little more precision to thread the needle with a pinpoint perfect pass to that WR in the red zone in the midst of a safety blitz than it does to smash the shit out of somebody with a folding chair.
But, still...
Second, there's really no way in hell that football fan(atic)s are going to rise up in a groundswell of unity, march lockstep to their vehicles in the tailgate party facility (non sports connoisseurs refer to these facilities as "parking lots") and drive away in mass, refusing to endorse or participate in any further NFL activities until the league promises to make the game a safer, saner, less violent and potentially physically damaging event.
Refer back to that lions and Christians thing.
And third, stop for a second and think about this.
If the slam, bam, romp em', stomp em' facet of the fracas known as football wasn't a major drawing card for those who marvel at the mayhem, then why is the Super Bowl, as Gene Seymour writes, such a huge event in so many ways that have absolutely nothing to do with the actual game of football being played there?
When's the last time you remember getting psyched about what new, innovative, water cooler chat worthy TV commercials you were going to see during the Wimbledon finals?
When's the last time you read in the financials that corporate sponsors were paying up to four million dollars for sixty seconds of commercial time during the Masters?
And when is the last time you were conflicted, but your kids were delighted, that Lady Gaga was going to perform during the seventh inning stretch of game seven of the World Series?
Exactly.
Wimbledon?
Bunch of prancers hitting a little ball back and forth over a net on somebody's lawn or something.
The Masters?
Bunch of guys who couldn't make varsity and had to settle for joining the high school Golf team.
World Series?
Like George Carlin brilliantly offered, a game of sacrifices and errors and grass and running for home, instead of a brutal contest of marching down the field, claiming the land yard by yard, launching aerial attacks, rushing and crushing the enemy, ever in danger of being charged with penalties.
Baseball?
Yawn.
Snooze.
Tennis, golf?
The sporting world's equivalent of those little finger sandwiches at foo foo wedding receptions.
Football?
It's what's for dinner, baby.
And a few broken bones, torn ligaments, hell, even a little brain damage seems like a small price to pay for such glorious victory.
I mean, come on.
It's not like they're out there getting bashed over the head with folding chairs.
And, with the exception of game days in Detroit, there's not a lion in sight.
