In Defense of Football

By Crispin Sartwell

My friends Lynn and Glen are opposed to football.

Both of them consider themselves politically progressive. Both are feminists. And both, essentially, have the same objection: football is violent, militaristic, macho. Football is everything, in short, most objectionable about American culture.

Coaches try to conquer and control the field with their uniformed minions. Hitting people and dominating them are virtues of football players and spectacles for football fans. The sport rewards aggressive, arrogant personalities such as, um, Steve Spurrier.

But I am a fan, and I am unrepentant. My stepson Hayes - blessed with better genes than mine (I'm small, but I'm slow) - plays defensive end on a ninth-grade squad. That's Thursdays. I'll be spending Saturdays with the Terps and Sundays with the Skins again this year. I've plunked down my hard-earned cash to get hundreds of NFL games on my satellite dish.

And yet I must acknowledge that football is indeed violent and militaristic.

When they stop a game for ten minutes as they immobilize the injured player and stretcher him off as his teammates gather in a prayer circle, I feel a strange guilt that I am watching at all.

Back in the day, I once met Redskins greats Bill Brundige and Diron Talbert at a restaurant in southern Pennsylvania on a Sunday night in late autumn. They appeared to be in the final stages of rigor mortis, and literally groaned as they lifted the champagne to their lips. I hope they're moving better now, but if they are, it's probably because of advances in surgery.

I never played high school ball, perhaps because I was a shrimpy, long-haired pothead, and perhaps because my high school, Bonzo Ragamuffin Prep, located in a storefront in Adams-Morgan, had only sixteen students. But I played receiver on a sandlot team, the Fabulous Flying Freaks, a pathetic padless tackle team that periodically took the field at Lafayette School and got killed by the Guns, a vicious group of local jock thugs.

But I'll tell you this: if I could have played in the NFL, I would have, though it entailed orthopedic surgery and subsequent addiction to pain meds.

And not (just) for the cash, the glory, the groupies. I'd do it for the pain, both inflicted and suffered. I'd do it for the competition, which is primal, physical, pure. I'd do it in tribute to the testosterone that roars through my veins.

Sport, especially violent sport, is a compensation for civilization. In a situation where success is measured by your power tie and your spot within a bureaucratic hierarchy (or, in my case, the number of my fellow pinheads who read my latest treatise), creatures who evolved to hunt mastadons find themselves frustrated.

And so these creatures provide themselves with Doritos and gather on Sundays around the big screen to watch very large men grunt and slam into one another. And compared to invading Iraq, that is a relatively innocent pleasure. Very few people die.

Thus, autumn is a time to revel in our continued creatureliness. We haven't, yet, evolved into completely neutered milquetoasts. When Spurrier was coaching at Florida, I always thought he was a bastard, but now he's *my* bastard.

Football has a purity. It rewards strength, courage, and abandon, and gives them to us in glorious technicolor every Sunday. And so, Lynn and Glen, this year too I'll be perched before the big screen, basting in the glorious violence.

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Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at the Maryland Institute College of Art.