TROUBL

This is the first edition of Down and Distance, a new weekly column here on TROUBL. It’s a place to consider the social, political, and cultural implications of professional football, because any game that hold’s a nation’s attention like NFL football has those implications. This is sports talk with a broad context.

Only in America do they look at rugby and say, “Fuck it, why don’t you just throw the ball all the way across the damn field?”

They call the game “American Football,” but it’s not a descriptor of where the game originated; it’s not a modifier like “Australian rules” is to explain that the game features a variation on the association rules. The game is American Football, and the American part of it is an adjective that describes the style of the game being played. It’s American Football, a game that exists because Americans like to take concepts that are brought to our shores and warp them into unrecognizable shapes, until they look like things that resemble what we see when we look in the mirror. Football is no exception.

It was once Rugby Football, of course, even in America. In the 1880’s, it started to change, because they wanted a higher-scoring, speed-based game, instead of a low-scoring game based on brute strength. This is when the line of scrimmage and snap were introduced, when you started having to work for a first down. Before the down-and-distance entered the game, it was possible to hold the ball by running for a few yards at a time and, after scoring, never give the opponent a chance to play. The rules were hammered out of failures–Teddy Roosevelt had to introduce the forward pass to keep people from dying on the field, because it kept happening and the alternative was to ban the game entirely, which was politically unviable. The game and politics have always been intertwined.

American Football exists in its current form because Americans have always liked wars, but haven’t see one on their own soil since the Civil War ended. A jones for war without the threat of our cities being bombed led to the development of a game with rules like warfare. Off-field generals make the calls for on-field actors to carry out. The game is about holding and maintaining territory, about aerial assault and ground attacks. It is a metaphor that only works properly in a country that has never been threatened by a foreign power the way most of the rest of the world has. The forward pass was introduced to the game under the first Roosevelt, but it didn’t start being an effective way to play the game until the 1920’s, after World War I started and warfare began taking place in the skies.

American Football is “football,” yeah, if you define football as whatever game is the most popular one among any given national identity–the Australians favor the game they call “football,” same as in South America and China and England. Pretty much everywhere but Canada football can consistently be defined as the game everyone cares about. In America, the game doesn’t matter much to anyone anywhere else, but that’s part of its charm. It’s not for anyone else. They’re welcome to it, but that’s not the point–it was devised by people looking to break apart something that worked for everybody else, just to see what would happen. It’s like jazz, like Coltrane busting through the confines of “My Favorite Things” to a new form of expression.

[That’s a lot of weighty talk for a game...] There are a lot of places to read post-game analysis and locker room gossip, but that’s not the sort of thing you come to TROUBL to read. Cool. Sports are a part of the same culture as Presidential campaigns, political activists, underground hip-hop, dog-whistle racism, hipsterism, etc, etc. All of these things exist on the forefront of American culture. They’re all interconnected. It’s like The Wire.

[Get to it, then...] To start with, this is week 1 of the NFL season. Opening kickoff for the season was on Thursday, at the exact moment John McCain delivered his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in St Paul. Before that was Gustav. Now? Who the hell knows what will happen. John McCain may take a charter plane down into New Orleans in a desperate pander to Saints fans. There is no pander that John McCain isn’t prepared to offer Americans, and that goes double when football is involved. Check out his line from July in a radio interview in Pittsburgh: “When I was first interrogated and really had to give some information because of the pressures, physical pressures on me, I named the starting lineup, defensive line of the Pittsburgh Steelers as my squadron mates.” It’s a moving line, sure, but it raised some flags for me—I remember reading that story years ago, but at the time, he claimed it was the offensive line of the Packers.

I’m a Chicago Bears fan, and I hate the cursed Green Bay Packers, so the story stuck out to me as yet another reason not to vote for McCain. But, the Steelers claim revealed a weird element of McCain’s character. This all seems like a very minor thing for anyone to care about, but we are a nation of football fans, and to people who identify with a specific team, the revelation is dramatic. These are arbitrary loyalties, basically irrelevant, and completely random, based on quirks of geography or aesthetics.

I am a Chicago Bears fan, and I loathe the Green Bay Packers, but even I will grudgingly admit that their fans come from all walks of life and consist of good people; similarly, I fucking hate eighty percent of the Bears fans I meet. These identifications mean nothing to anyone, reveal nothing about a person’s character, except that it is an important display of loyalty. Nothing is more pathetic than a fair-weather fan, only around for the good seasons. Dumping your team to score some cheap points is a sign that you can’t be trusted when it comes to even the truly irrelevant.

This becomes especially pointed when contrasted with this bit about Barack Obama. Do y’all remember the 2006 Saints? This was a year after Katrina, when they had just come home from playing in San Antonio after a 3-13 season, with a seriously injured Drew Brees in place as their starting quarterback and no expectations from anyone. Somehow, though, they managed to pull it together to make their first appearance in conference title game, capturing the imaginations of the entire Gulf Coast and becoming a symbol of renewal and the triumph of the human spirit, giving hope to people everywhere and inspiring pundits to refer to them as the United States’ Saints. Everyone was pulling for their fairytale season to continue with a win in the NFC Championship game over Chicago, to assuage the guilt they felt for watching while their city drowned…

Except Barack Obama. A week after he announced his run for President, the hometown boy insisted to anyone who asked his opinion about the game that “the fairytale ends when they come to Chicago.”

This outraged a bunch of really easily outraged sportswriters and conservative pundits. Rush Limbaugh lost his shit over it; Jeff Mariotti, a shithead sportswriter for the Sun-Times, went nuts. It seemed genuinely important, somehow, to root for the Saints that year; it was nice to do. Any politician who wanted an easy pander to the crowds just had to say that he believed we could all emerge stronger from adversity, why, look at the tale of the New Orleans Saints… It’s an easy script to launch into, and a lot of people, when asked about the game, went for it. But not Obama. He took the position of a football fan, and that’s a part of a man’s character, too.

[As for this year…] Another thing sports and politics have in common is that fans of both games love to prognosticate. One would be a fool this year to claim any insight into the potential success of the New Orleans Saints or any other team, except maybe a perennial like the Indianapolis Colts. Claiming that the Vikings are destined for a conference championship showdown against the Dallas Cowboys only reveals one to be as clueless as all the pundits preparing for a Clinton/Giuliani battle last December. Even trying to predict the executive decisions leaves a person stunned by major shake-ups, like the Arizona Cardinals’ decision to start ancient 37-year-old Kurt Warner instead of Matt Leinart at QB in San Francisco on Sunday, or the Arizona senator’s decision to select youthful and inexperienced 44-year-old Sarah Palin as his running mate.