Football as Metaphor

Stories like these are enough to turn a person of good conscience against football, aren’t they? Or perhaps just to inspire an erstwhile fan to write a divorce petition called Against Football, which is what Steve Almond has done. Almond claims to have authored “a manifesto,” but that’s an insult to manifesto writers—including Karl Marx, whose work Almond brutalizes for the sake of making several wildly overstated points. What he’s actually written is a cliché-ridden, Dean-scream-volume screed whose belligerent tone undermines even the occasional smart observation he makes.

The National Football League, Almond claims to reveal, regards football as “a multi-billion dollar product.” No surprise, then, that when bad stuff happens, the league seeks “to obscure the most disturbing aspects of the game.” That’s capitalism for you, always trying to “distract the proletariat from the aims of the revolution.” Why, even his own former self, Almond confesses, “spent countless hours tracking the Oakland Raiders” rather than working to “enact my values, protest, [and] pursue my version of social justice.”  

In Almond’s cartoon-Marxism, the mere fact that the NFL is wealthy and privately owned means that its power is irresistible. As evidence, he cites, accurately, the league’s early efforts to discredit studies conducted by Ann McKee, M.D., the leading researcher on football-induced concussions. (These efforts, it’s worth mentioning, eventually failed because her accumulated evidence became both overwhelming and widely publicized.) Almond concedes that McKee’s Boston University-based lab is now “the league’s ‘preferred’ brain bank” and that the NFL is “granting her millions in funding,” no strings attached. Undeterred, he insists that football’s embrace of Dr. McKee is all part of the plutocrats’ plot—the “keep-your-enemies closer approach.”  

To anyone else, though, what better evidence could there be that the league’s command, like that of other powerhouse enterprises, is highly resistible? In a pluralistic society with First Amendment freedoms and an elected legislature, to seek is not the same as to succeed when it comes to avoiding unwelcome change. More recently, after a series of player-related domestic violence stories triggered critical public statements by corporate mega-sponsors (Anheuser-Busch, Mc-Donald’s, Procter & Gamble, etc.), commissioner Roger Goodell abandoned his initial attempts to mute the crisis and hired four prominent feminists to write new policies and create new programs for the league in time for the Super Bowl. 

Steve Almond’s authorial sins are numerous as well as grievous. Writing about Miami’s desolate Canyon district, he laments that, in the near-universal absence of fathers, football coaches provide the only noncriminal male influences on neighborhood boys. Martin Luther King, Almond writes, “would have been heart-broken at the notion that football is the dominant form of empowerment in communities like The Canyon.” Well, sure, it would be great if fathers acted like fathers; but in their absence, isn’t a coach’s influence a good thing? They “live in the ear,” James Dickey wrote of football coaches. “They want you better than you are.”

Invoking the 70 percent of NFL players who are African American, Almond asks, “What does it mean that football fever tends to run so hot in those states where slavery was legal?” Of course, it means nothing. Football fever ran just as hot in the South when all the players were white. Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson may be an expert on many things—drunk driving, fighting with police officers, child beating—but when Almond approvingly quotes him calling the NFL “modern-day slavery,” they both sound silly. Elsewhere in Against Football, Almond claims that the pre-Super Bowl singing of the national anthem and flyover by the Blue Angels “represent a kind of national passion play.” 

Does he know what a passion play is?

University of Virginia English professor Mark Edmundson, author of the literate, engaging Why Football Matters, is not blind to the darker side of the game: “Brutality, thoughtlessness, dull conformity, love for the herd mentality and the herd—these can be products of football,” he concedes. Edmundson writes from personal experience, vividly recalling the night, nearly a half-century ago, when he and some high school teammates roused each other to smash the windows of a local ice cream parlor—just because. Even now, he says, his “capacity for violence” is greater than he would like.  

On balance, however, Edmundson credits football with turning him from a large but “buttery, sensitive boy” into, well, a man. “Sports are an irony-free zone,” he observes, a major concession for an English professor. They are “maybe the only irony-free zone in our culture. Talking about sports, people can use terms like raw courage and dedication and loyalty without inflecting them with doubt.” Character, courage, teamwork, and resilience in the face of loss are the irony-free qualities that Edmundson, with considerable help from his coaches and (most of the time) his teammates, fostered in himself as a result of playing football.  

Character was the product of showing up for two-a-days even when the certain pain that awaited him meant he “cried in my sleep” in anticipation. “I simply never got very good,” he confesses. “But .  .  . I was able to show up every day and work hard at something that was extremely difficult for me and to improve little by little.” Courage came from taking to heart a coach’s rebuke—“You ain’t never gonna play”—and forcing himself to compete in physically challenging practice drills. Like Hector (“not a natural warrior,” Edmundson writes), he “learned how to step into the middle of the fray.” Like Achilles, he drew on his “hunger to redeem his humiliation and restore his lost manhood.” A child of the ’60s, Edmundson celebrates the handful of teammates in his strongly pro-military town who spoke out against the war in Vietnam: “What gave those three guys the wherewithal to part company from the group? .  .  . Part of their courage came from what football had given them.”

While Edmundson was playing, his 6-year-old sister died, and his family nearly came apart at the seams. But he hung in there. In football, “we get a chance to learn, to prepare ourselves and to grow, so that when the real losses come, as they will, we may be half-ready for them.” No sport requires more teamwork than football, if only because the team is so big and every player’s role so closely tied to every other player’s. “Not for nothing do so many Wall Street firms and high-powered law offices want to hire guys (and now women) who have played team sports,” Edmundson points out. “These people can get together and form a group and the group can make something happen.” Add to this football’s ability to act as leveler: It’s all performance, no matter who your parents are. “Football is God in its own way,” he writes. “It’s uncertain whether the God above is just, but the God of football tends to be.”

Edmundson credits (and slightly misquotes) “the poet,” who turns out to be William Wordsworth: Diversity of strength / Attends us, if but once we have been strong, wrote Wordsworth in The Prelude. Be resolute, courageous, resilient, and cooperative on the playing field, and there is a very good chance these qualities will be ours for life. Sports are important, Edmundson and Almond agree—and they’re right. Just think of Menelaos in Book XXIII of the Iliad: He has been a battlefield warrior for nearly 10 years but is driven to “relentless anger” only when he loses a chariot race for sport. Football is imperfect—again, no argument. But Edmundson is surely right that the good in the sport strongly outweighs the bad. And Almond is just as wrong in thinking the opposite.

Michael Nelson, Fulmer professor of political science at Rhodes College, is the author, most recently, of Resilient America: Electing Nixon in 1968, Channeling Dissent, and Dividing Government.