Football: Show Business with a Kick

By Stefan Kanfer

No sport stands to reason. Horsehide struck with a stick, a fuzzy object whacked over a net, an inflated sphere thrown into a metal loop -- any thinking child can see the absurdities of such games. A thinking adult, of course, is another matter. The intelligent, mature, reasonable fan can see no nonsense in his favorite game. On the contrary, the more ridiculous the better. This weekend some 70 million viewers will parse and analyze the most gripping, controversial absurdity of them all: professional football.

Twenty-two behemoths scrambling for possession of a ball that will not even bounce decently -- why should anyone care so passionately about such a scrimmage?

There are almost as many answers as there are fans. But essentially, the reasons fall into four broad categories:

1) THE SHAKESPEAREAN. In Henry IV, Prince Hal declares: "If all the year were playing holidays, to sport would be as tedious as to work." The sheer number of baseball and basketball contests tends to satiate all but the most avid fans.

Football, as rare and regular as weekends -- or Monday nights -- merely whets the appetite.

2) THE SPARTAN. As the international Olympics take on the tones of factionalism and hypocrisy, professional sport looks almost sanitary. There are no exotic pennants to salute, no speeches of sportsmanship or geopolitical ideals.

There is only the pitting of muscles and cerebrums, all under a single unifying principle: aggression.

3) THE MILITARY. Every athletic contest represents some sort of war, from the King-Riggs sexual skirmish to the bloody knockdowns of professional hockey. But the very terminology of football -- marches downfield, throwing the bomb, guards, strategies -- recalls the Von Clausewitz spirit. For the first time in ten years the viewer, accustomed to another living-room war, can watch these armies with no sense of unrest.

4) THE VIDEOLOGICAL. The man who has exercised the greatest influence on modern football is neither Vince Lombardi nor Don Shula. His name is Lee DeForrest, the inventor of the vacuum tube that, in turn, spawned television.

Football's first major concession to TV occurred back in 1967, when the Super Bowl featured two kickoffs for the second half; NBC had been in the middle of a commercial for the first boot. Today, time-outs are given for a sound athletic reason -- the sponsors need time to air their messages. (Those sponsors tackle each other for the privilege of paying up to $70,000 for a one-minute, Sunday afternoon commercial.) The networks, with their zeppelins and zoom lenses, their dreamlike instant replays of color and violence, have changed football watching from a remote college pastime to something very much like voyeurism.

Indeed, the recent congressional removal of the blackout on local games proves that, given a choice, onlookers now prefer a two-dimensional view of the game.

Pro-football's boss, Pete Rozelle, was not exaggerating when he predicted that without blackouts football might become a studio sport. As the "no shows" increase, it requires little imagination to foresee a time when the Miami Dolphins and the Jets might meet in a barren stadium with engineers supplying canned roars and electronic chants. Yet professional football cannot break free of video. Says Rozelle: "Without our television fees, we would not be able to attract some fine college athletes. They'd be working for General Electric -- and we'd be out some of the better players in our league."

On the foundation of this paradox, football has rapidly grown into an institution -- vast, contradictory, monolithic. But wait -- what are those graffiti crayoned at the base? "Inhuman conditions ... incredible racism ... violence and sadism" ... Some coaches and trainers "do more dealing in drugs than the average junkie," says ex-Linebacker Dave Meggysey. And here is ex-Wide Receiver George Sauer with his claim that football reflects American society's credo: "The way to do anything in the world, the way to get ahead is to aggress against somebody." Here is Merlin Olsen of the Los Angeles Rams: "We get so bruised and battered and tired, we wind up playing in a sort of coma.

By the end of the game you're an animal." Here are locker-room exposes, college-cheating scandals, psychiatric probes. In the findings of Psychologists Bruce Ogilvie and Thomas Tutko, athletes are shown to be heedless of others, severe in their reactions to stress. After a review of some 15,000 pro and amateur players, the doctors conclude, "competition doesn't seem to build character, and it is possible that competition doesn't even require much more than a minimally integrated personality."

Armed with these repellent data, the viewer -- and his set -- ought to be turned off. Surely no one wants to watch hopped-up automatons, degenerates with no sense of value or ethics. Instead. the U.S. now has about as many football widows as footballs, and the sport shows no signs of diminution. Is it because of cynicism -- a belief that all institutions and individuals are corrupt?

Or a fascination with controlled violence? Or simple lassitude, a willingness to watch anything that moves? It is all that -- and something more. The audience is not the naive set of zeroes that both networks and muckrakers imagine.

It has long been aware that football idols have cleats of clay, that the manic drive to succeed can be a moral solvent. Back in 1932 the Marx Brothers kidded football in Horse Feathers; the statue of the professional athlete was melted down by Ring Lardner a generation ago in such stories as Champion. In recent times the renegade jocks, the publicized vagaries of Joe Willie Namath, the Lance Rentzel scandal, the nasal ruckmaking of Howard Cosell have provided the nonfiction. If the viewer continues to make professional football his No. 1 spectator sport, it is not because he is full of illusions, but free of them.

In fact, the lofty claims of football sportsmanship went out with the Statue of Liberty Play. Today, the beauty and fascination of the game are strictly in the beholder of the eye -- the watcher of TV as it relentlessly patrols the field.

Without the camera, football would belong to the universities and the historians. With it, the game has become the most dependable branch of show business. Its cast of characters, its comedy and drama, are the envy of producers all over the world. At every performance, each player essays the impossible. He carries hundreds of detailed mental charts -- yet contrives to move through 2,000 lbs. of enemies. He shows individual prowess -- and attempts to mesh with the movements of ten other egomaniacs. He is battered, flattened, ridiculed -- and still plays on, as much for the audience as for himself. (After all, who ends up paying for those $70,000-a-minute commercials -- and those $100,000 bonuses?) In the process, the viewer receives a game of infinite hue and complexity, an amalgam of ballet, combat, chess and mugging. No matter how fine his TV reception, no beer-and-armchair quarterback can hope to see the true game. For all the paraphernalia, the tube rarely shows an overview; pass patterns and geometric variations are lost in a kaleidoscope of closeups and crunches.

Still, the sense of martial art is conveyed; in its limited way, television has made the game so rich -- in every sense of the word -- that its players portray villains, heroes and fools all in the same afternoon. Through TV, the sport has become a high ritual of bloodletting. It is also, as always, a morganatic wedding of cold mathematics and glorious physical achievement. It is, as well, a confused and pointless scramble across 100 yards of meaningless turf.

Thus radicals can charge it with promulgating colonialism and warmongering; thus Nixon and Agnew can view it as a test of moral vigor; thus sociologists can see in it a full-length portrait of America. The operative word is see. Like politics and pornography, football tends to yield a reflection of the onlooker who finds what he seeks. And there are more seekers all the time. This week, as the season picks up velocity, the words of Sonny Werblin, former owner of the Jets, take on a special autumnal tang. In the '60s, Werblin found his night flight stacked up over a large city. Gazing down at the twinkling lights he said hopefully: "Every light is a potential customer." Five years ago, that would have sounded like a half-time pep talk. Today it has the ring of an "audible" called on fourth down and goal to go. And why not? Football may no longer be sport. But, given the predictable onslaught of canned sitcoms, crime dramas and movies made for TV, it remains the greatest show in town.

-- Stefan Kanfer

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.