In Defense of the XFL (sort of)

McMahon has always known — political correctness and feminism be damned — that people really do enjoy watching big, strong men sweating and grunting and violently throwing each other around, which is why he was able to turn the WWF into a billion-dollar empire. How big a fortune could you make, he must have wondered, if you combined all the hot elements in one, i.e., reality programming (Survivor, Temptation Island, etc.), with the outsized warrior characteristics of WWF wrestling? Such a grand project requires lots of money so he recruited Dick Ebersol as partner. Of course, when pro football is at its best (think of the 1985 Chicago Bears with the “Fridge,” the “Funky QB,” etc.), it does combine all those elements. Thus McMahon envisioned a football league that would play in the off-season. Sure, this meant running the ball into NFL territory, but the NFL, McMahon knew, is more vulnerable than people think.

The NFL still finds and grooms the greatest football players in the world, but over the decades its less-PC edges have been buffed away, and it’s become too smug and too bland. What can you say about an organization that banned crowd-pleasers like end-zone dancing and cheerleaders!

For many years, one of the great pleasures of football had been the moment when a besotted TV cameraman, flopped on his back, panned all the way up the long expanse of smooth, golden leg belonging to a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader. The blinding white of the hot pants set against the blue of the Texas sky produced a God Bless America/I Love This Game! moment more powerful than anything the NFL promotion team could dream up. But the NFL began to worry that men out there saw the cheerleaders as sex objects — rather than the wholesome, healthy, enthusiastic girls we knew them to be, and those long, loving pans became a relic of the past, fileable under ’70s excess. In 1985, for instance, Virginia McCaskey, daughter of Chicago Bears owner George Halas, abolished Chicago’s “Honey Bear” cheerleading squad because, as the front office put it, “the concept of cheerleading has outlived its time.” From there, it was probably just a short step to deciding that the concept of football has also outlived its time — that the game is too downmarket, too redneck, too old-fashioned. How else to explain ABC’s decision to put comedian Dennis Miller in the color commentator spot for Monday Night Football? It could only be a signal that, yes, it is hip to watch football — as long as one is sufficiently ironic about the “retrograde” macho of it.

So McMahon and Ebersol set out to showcase retrograde macho. With the XFL, they would present “reality programming wrapped in a sporting event.” As in Survivor, mikes and cameras are placed everywhere around “players,” who are supposed to ignore the attention and just “be real.” Selected XFL players (like the quarterbacks) have mikes in their helmets. So do the coaches and the cheerleaders, and there are innumerable mikes around the field to pick up ambient noise — especially all those thuds and grunts and howls of pain.

It is supposed to be a “you are there” kind of thing. One is supposed to be able to hear the coach talk strategy and berate his players and curse the other team. Commercials trumpet the XFL’s “unprecedented” “All-Access” locker room — yelling! crying! cortisone shots! Dating between players and cheerleaders is now supposed to be out in the open (even used as Temptation Island-style narrative), not swept under the rug as in the old days. Camera crews are to roam the field unimpeded. “When the quarterback fumbles or the wideout drops a pass — and we know who he’s dating — I want our reporters right back in her face on the sidelines demanding to know whether the two of them did the wild thing last night,” growled McMahon. Like professional wrestlers, players would have nicknames on their jerseys — to speed up the process of “character development.” McMahon decreed that XFL teams would not be named after animals — what genius in the NFL, for instance, decided to let so many teams to be named after birds (Ravens, Cardinals, Falcons, Eagles, Sea-hawks)? No, XFL teams would have names like the Las Vegas Outlaws, the New York/New Jersey Hitmen, the Memphis Maniax, and the Chicago Enforcers.

Early expensive-looking promotional commercials for the XFL promised too much, which is probably why TV ratings dropped about three quarters between the first weekend and the fourth. The spots made the XFL football look like something out of a Mad Max movie — a blasted, post-nuclear desert populated with what looked like extras from the film Conan the Barbarian wearing ominously darkened visors on their football helmets. But this bombastic publicity, plus the Girls! Girls! Girls! angle, and Vince McMahon’s press-baiting pre-season press conferences, did succeed in sending sportswriters and columnists from all parts of the paper into apocalypse-of-the-month mode.

George Will predicted “a further coarsening of the culture.” One sportswriter fretted about “cheerleaders who give lap-dances.” Much was made of the fact that the XFL was removing the player-protecting rules like the signal for a “fair catch” and the “in the grasp” rule for quarterbacks. Keith Elias, a running back for the New York/New Jersey Hitmen, predicted, “It’s going to be mass carnage.” Mariah Burton Nelson, author of a book titled The Stronger Women Get, the More Men Love Football, told the New York Times: “The XFL may become to sport what gangsta rap is to music. If there is going to be a training ground for athletes getting involved in domestic violence because of their sport, it is going to be the XFL.”

So it was with some queasiness that I tuned in the home-opener for “my” new team, the NY/NJ Hitmen, who were hosting the Birmingham (Alabama) Thunderbolts at Giants Stadium on what the announcers kept calling a “frigid” afternoon (30 degrees with a purported wind chill of minus six).

Just a few minutes into the broadcast, though, it was clear that this was not the fall of Rome; in fact for quite a long time it wasn’t quite clear what the hell was going on. On top of the hurtling chyrons, incessant music (used in the TV broadcasts, as in a movie, to tell you how you’re supposed to be feeling), and announcers baying like werewolves about “the spirit of violence” in the air, someone had apparently fallen asleep at the switch and was showing the video of one commercial combined with the audio of another, producing the discombobulating experience of watching a woman in workout clothes rolling an object around her living room floor while audio describing “The Beer Thermometer” played. It was an appropriately surreal introduction to the world of the XFL.

In fact this disconnect between audio and video was very much like what was going on in the game. Announcers Craig Minervini and Bob Golic, a huge ex-Oakland Raiders tackle, were in a near frenzy attempting to convince TV viewers that this was indeed the “smashmouth” football the ads had trumpeted. “Hah, Ha!” gloated Golic, as XFL star Keith Elias (who has been on a football hiatus, spending his time writing screenplays with his brother) walked stiffly to the frozen field. “You know he wants to hit!” Color commentary mostly consisted of, “Yeah, a lot of crunching going on,” “Man what a hit!” and, “The Hitmen Are Hitting!”

When action subsided for a time, play-by-play announcer Craig Minervini attempted a few minutes of relaxed badinage: “So,” he asked Golic, “we’ve heard a lot of crunching going on. What does it actually feel like from inside the helmet?” “Oh man,” Golic said dreamily, “that feeling when you land on him and you hear the air kind of going whoooooof out of his chest? That’s sweet.”

Lest we forget that this is the league that’s going to give us no-holds-barred tackles, there was an intermittent feature called “Big Hits” and a salute to the “Hit of the Day” at the end of the game. As the credits rolled, there was file footage — I’m not even sure if it was from that day’s game — of a player lying on the ground tossing violently from side to side as he moaned and clutched his leg.

But all this maniacal chortling over “hits” actually seems designed to distract the viewer, so he won’t realize that the play in general is not at all gratuitously violent — no more violent than your average football game. The play is, in fact, downright sportsmanlike — as when you tackle the guy just hard enough to stop him, then get off him fast and pass up the opportunity to get in that sly little extra bounce on his spine.

Some of the relatively tenuous quality could come from inexperience. But there also seems to be a sweet, simple determination to just play football — in defiance of management’s drooling about smashing mouths. These, as Hitmen coach Rusty Tillman put it, are all players with “something to prove” — to the guys that didn’t draft them out of college, to the NFL team that cut them after one season. Some are like the obviously talented Memphis Maniax player Rashaan Salaam, who won the Heisman trophy in 1994, was drafted in the first round by the Chicago Bears, and then choked — he had a weird first year marked by spectacular running followed by frequent fumbles. He now says the years of injuries and weight gain — and illness caused by dieting — were caused by his addiction to marijuana. Maybe Salaam is just a hopeless neurotic who will never let himself win; maybe he’s finally gained some emotional maturity. Who knows? But players with “something to prove” put energy on the field — sometimes more energy than a blase million-dollar NFL player.

NFL players make millions as compensation for the years of concussions and knee surgeries, but XFL players are making a much tougher gamble with their lives — especially the XFL quarterbacks, who are getting sacked on nearly every play because the league has taken away rules that would protect them. XFL teams are also much smaller, which means there’s very little time off. But the average XFL player earns $ 45,000, a quarterback only $ 50,000, and players on the practice squad, only $ 1,000 a week. The most draconian part is that the XFL is just one big company: Since NBC and McMahon own the entire league, it’s impossible get a higher salary by negotiating with another team.

There’s a soberness and seriousness about many of the XFL players. These are hard-knocks, hard-luck guys: Some are just out of college; a few hadn’t played since high school; most have knocked around the globe, going from the NFL, to the short-lived American Football League, to Arena Football League, to NFL Europe. The gaps have been filled in with . . . whatever. One young player with a good college record said his last job was at a Bed Bath & Beyond, and in a profile for TV he is seen lecturing a teammate about the low thread count in the hotel’s bedsheets. Another described his last job as “breaking bricks.” Quite a few are short. A quarter of the 45-man Hitmen roster are under 6 feet tall. The tenacity of the guys — usually elevated to star rank in the XFL — who have had seasons in the NFL before being cut and roaming the globe in search of more football work is quite poignant; when an older guy like Casey Weldon, the QB of the Birmingham Bolts, says he just loves to play football, you believe him.

Lest anybody chicken out, or come on the field without the proper “rip ’em to bits” spirit, the XFL has thrown in what it is supposed to be an extra incentive. If a player wins the game, the announcer relentlessly crows, he’s “going to win $ 100,000.” Actually that’s tricky wording. It’s the team that wins $ 100,000, and that is divided up among the, say, 40-man roster, boiling down to $ 2,500 a man. During the game the announcers attempt to build tension over the Who-Will-Walk-Home-With-That-Cash drama with a little break in which players are asked what they’d “Do With That Money?!!” In the Hitmen opener at Giants Stadium, players said things like “pay my bills,” “pay my ’98 tax return,” “buy a whole lot of diapers for my newborn kid,” and “buy a whole lot of sandwiches.”

In general the potentially murderous game of football is played in a sportsmanlike way. Football players from the NFL on down are mercenaries — they get shuffled from team to team, and they often find themselves playing opposite guys they used to stand next to in the huddle. This kind of fellow feeling — and reluctance to give another guy a career-ending injury — seems especially strong in the XFL. If they are reluctant to blow the other guy’s knee out, it may be because they know how he must feel about getting a break, and what it would be like to end this big break by dealing a career-ending injury.

In fact there seems to be a general player rebellion under way, directed at all of the XFL’s gimmickry: the announcers’ heavy breathing about the money; the promises of “blood on the field”; the idea that players will develop outsized WWF-like personalities. A number of teams have not put nicknames on their jerseys. As one player pointed out, “If they don’t know your name, you want them to know your name first; nicknames come later; other players give them to you.”

Here in fact is the crux of the WWF/NBC’s problem. There is an inherent conflict between “reality programming” and sports. Serious, watchable players are not entertainers; in fact, trying to be an entertainer distracts them from a game that, like combat, calls for one’s complete attention. Rusty Tillman, who came from the Seattle Seahawks where he was an assistant coach, has in fact stated on the XFL pre-game show that “if management wants actors, they can call Al Pacino. . . . As far as I’m concerned, it’s real football. . . . I’m just a football coach. That’s all I ever was and will be. I don’t want to be a TV star; I’m not at home in that element.”

I suggested to Tillman that if management wanted more drama and violence on the field, they could start by smacking down the roving reporters who dog coaches and players, asking inane questions. In fact this has been the real drama — watching Tillman, players, and other coaches in their small rebellion against the reporters determined to get histrionics out of them. By the time the Hitmen opened in their home stadium, players had begun turning their backs and simply walking away from the roving camera teams. Coaches had begun covering their playbooks when wandering cameras happened by. At the end of game three, after being badgered about what it felt like to lose the game, Tillman shoved a cameraman and told him to “get out of my face.” The announcers kept trumpeting the XFL’s all-access locker rooms, but it seemed to take longer and longer for coaches to let cameramen in.

But if it’s sport and not entertainment, will there be an audience? In its first month, the new league has gone from 14 million to 4 million viewers. Can the XFL survive? It’s quite clear that the Roman carnival version proffered by WWF/NBC management will not, unless they decide to burn through players like dry kindling and resupply teams with the “40,000 bricklayers, plumbers, and cops” who showed up hoping to try out. Under the hyperactive screen graphics, the bombastic music, and the frenetic announcers, however, is something small and brave that could survive and should.

As one sports analyst pointed out, the XFL’s target demographic is “disaffected. . . . They’re not happy with their lives. . . . They like the WWF because it’s a release, they know it’s fake but they don’t care; they know the XFL isn’t as good as the NFL but they won’t care about that either.” What’s not to like when you can get a great seat for $ 25, when you can hang out with your friends in the stands and act goofy and not get shut down, when you have commentators like Brian Bosworth who like to diss quarterbacks? What’s not to like, when you can actually talk back to your quarterback: At the end of the Hitmen’s second losing game at home, the only fans left, the ones who’d stripped off their shirts and jackets in the below zero windchill and stuck beer cans in their pants, began to chant, “Puleri, you suck.” Puleri, who was once quarterback for Lehman High School in the Bronx, started to answer a reporter’s question but roared into the mike to address the crowd over the Jumbotron: “You can keep booin.’ I love it, baby. I’ll be back next week and the week afta.” That’s reality TV when it works.

What I’m hoping is that coaches will continue to demand the conditions they need to field a good team, that the players will tune out the persistent demand to act like WWF wrestlers, and that management will lose the Rocky Horror Picture Show cheerleader get-ups (long sinister black leather coats, platform boots, and garter belts). Basically guys are happy if they can just see pretty girls jumping up and down. It would also help if the announcers calmed down and stopped the relentless shilling. Then we might have a less pretentious, shaggier, more accessible alternative to the overbearing NFL — as New York Post sports columnist Wallace Matthews put it, “football as it oughta be.”

Stephanie Gutmann is the author of The Kinder, Gentler, Military (Scribner).