The New Yorker on 'The Unbeautiful Game'

You can fill a list of 10 with just the 80s Raiders and several decades of Cowboys.

 

Well, someone here with great resources just emailed the entire text to me....runs slightly more than 5000 words.

Would it be wrong to post it?

 

21 - I think it's fair use on a journalism message board.

 

Joe Namath is late. Promised for a twelve-thirty press "availability" in the lounge of the press box at Giants Stadium, in East Rutherford, New Jersey-that vital place where the fulcrum of the First Amendment, free food, is celebrated by reporters for hours on end every Sunday morning when the Giants or the Jets are in town--Namath finally wanders into the noiseless, sealed-glass press box around one-fifteen, when the Jets' game against the Houston Texans is already under way. The crowd in the press box has to decide whether to stick with the dullish game or go out and meet the greatest superstar (O.K., the only superstar) this hexed team has ever produced. A small line of reporters hisses out of the press box toward the lounge, like helium leaking from a balloon.

The tiny, intent circle gathers around Namath, who, at sixty-three, has aged into a cartoon version of his younger self. His schnoz, always notable, has become more so; he now looks weirdly like Joe Pepitone, that other, lesser New York swinger of the sixties. His salt-and-pepper hair is swept back, his face, after years in Florida, is leathery, and he wears oversized chestnut-tinted sunglasses, right out of a disco movie. His slouch has become a full question mark of a slump, but his genial, barracuda smile is intact, as are the elaborate schoolboy manners that lead him to refer to the men who mentored him by both their names and their nicknames. "I think that, after my family, Coach Paul 'Bear' Bryant was the biggest influence on me," he says, or, "I think the credit for creating that image"--of the quarterback as playboy--"has to go to Sonny Werblin. I mean, David A. 'Sonny' Werblin."

Joe talks for a bit about his new autobiography, one of two he has published. ("I certainly had help with it, but I wrote most of it myself this time.") But the reporters are looking elsewhere.

"What do you think of Eli?" one asks.

"Well, I think Eli has everything going for him except maybe his facial expressions and the way he carries himself," Namath jokes. (Eli Manning, the Giants' talented, inconsistent quarterback, has an unfortunate wide-eyed, golly-gee look for all occasions, like Opie, on the old Andy Griffith show, if he were to see Floyd the barber in a Halloween mask.)

"You don't think he has a leadership look?" the reporter says, leaning in eagerly.

"Now, I didn't say that." Namath laughs, seeing the approaching headline clearly and ducking it. "I think he's got all the talent--I just said maybe people misinterpret the way he looks."

I've been a Jets fan for forty years, and it's hard for me to believe this full hand of good fortune. Namath, beyond reason or even the bonds of fandom, got me through some bitter bits of my mixed-up adolescence. I loved him, we all loved him, not just for his famous upset win in Super Bowl III but for his slouch and his white shoes and his quick release--that upper body torquing around to shoot the ball out to George Sauer, Jr., never needing to have the back foot planted--and for the mildly Homeric drama of his career. Crippled early in his football life by bad knees of a kind the surgeons just don't make anymore, he would disappear for half a season, reappear to throw for four hundred yards and four or five touchdowns, and then disappear again into a welter of missed games and interceptions. As with Bobby Orr, his great on-ice contemporary, his fragility was part of his resonance.

Someone asks Namath if he believes that Chad Pennington is in a slump. Pennington, the Jets' current and gallant incumbent, is recovering from two shoulder surgeries and has had a couple of off games. Namath is suddenly intent. "No, he's a good quarterback," he says seriously. "I've only watched him this year as a fan, on television. I haven't had a chance to break down the passing game to see if Chad's going to the right spots or going to the wrong receiver." You sense that the distinction the old quarterback is making--between watching as a fan and actually watching--is, for him, larger than he can quite explain. It isn't just that he hasn't watched as attentively as he might have; watching "as a fan, on television," means that he hasn't really watched at all.

Pennington, it turns out, after everyone has traipsed back to the warm silence of the press box, is breaking out of his slump, courtesy of the slow-footed Houston secondary. Pennington throws--well, not strikes, exactly, but something like special-delivery messages, rising up on his toes to send them spinning nicely, dartlike, into his receivers' arms. The Jets pull out to a twenty-point lead.

Yet, astonishing as that is, what is really astonishing is to be reminded again of how different this game looks depending on where you see it from, on where you're standing (or sitting) while you watch it. When you watch a pro football game from the Crimean War general's viewpoint of the press box, you can see what's going to happen. On television, the quarterback peers out into the distance within the narrowed frame of the midfield camera and for a moment everything seems possible; the viewer can't know if there's a wide-open man fifty yards deep or if there is nothing ahead of Pennington but despair--four men crowding two receivers, who aren't even bothering to wave their arms. The drama of the game on TV lies in finding out.

 

On the field, the quarterback backpedals, rolls right and takes a look, and what is available--or not--is, within haft a second, pitifully evident. If you're watching live, Namath's point comes home; on television you see free will instead of a series of forced choices, mostly bad. The quarterback, the gallant general, peering out, in command, becomes, in reality, a stitch in the pattern already woven, his fate nearly sealed before he gets to fiddle with it. (Which is why coaches always refer to heroic quarterbacks as though they were mere middle-management executives, making "good" and "bad" decisions in the pocket.)

The real excitement of the game on the field lies in the sudden moments of frenzied improvisation, most often by the linebackers and especially by the safeties, who on television mainly appear at the end of the play to make a hit or swipe vainly at a pass. The Jets' safety Kerry Rhodes, for instance, whose excellence is much cited but mostly invisible to one at home in front of the set, becomes the most entertaining player to watch--racing the width of the field to cover an open receiver, running like a man chasing his hat as it blows down the street on a windy day, not running in tandem but running to get there, before it's gone. Now, on a routine pass, Pennington is brought down hard, and writhes on the ground in agony. The entire stadium goes silent. But then he is bouncing up again, ready to go, and pumping his fists to excite the crowd.

After the game, which the Jets hold on to win, 26-11, there is relief in the locker room; Pennington is fine. The players, naked and semi-naked, hold forth on the game, a ritual that we normalize (gotta beat those deadlines) but in which any half-awake anthropologist would spot something significant: the reporters being put in their place by the players' sheer physicality, and the players being put in their place by the reporters' being able to enforce their availability. Pete Kendall, the Jets' left guard, is talking about Pennington's near-miss. "Let's say, he was intently verbalizing," he says, sumo wrestler's body jiggling and eyes ever so slightly alert. "Did I see it? No, I had no idea what was happening. That's good for an offensive lineman. If you can watch what's happening to your quarterback, you're not doing your job." He smiles, tightly and pointedly, and goes back to putting on his pants.


All sports change depending on your point of view, but perhaps none change so much as pro football. There is the familiar Sunday-afternoon television--quarterback-centered, replete with instant replays, each play a brief drama of courage and determination, a family entertainment, the original reality television. There is the actual game, seen on the field, where the offensive and defensive lines meet in a pit that is a kind of black hole of heaving, battling bodies-who knows exactly what's going on in there. Rumors of fingers broken and eyes gouged come back, and it is hard not to believe them. (In his new book about football, "The Blind Side," Michael Lewis explains that one of the most famous images in football memory--Lawrence Taylor's wild gesturing for help after breaking Joe Theismann's leg in two places--came about less from L.T.'s unexpected empathy for a stricken colleague than from his fear of getting caught in the pileup himself.) And there is the game as it has been presented, magnificently, by Ed Sabol and his family at N.F.L. Films, all caped Darth Vader-ish heroes, steam rising from mouths in the Green Bay winter; dramatic orchestral music and slow-motion long passes arcing lazily over and over in the midaftemoon sky before they come racing to earth in someone's outstretched, praying hands. (A moment that in the stadium would just whiz by, unmusically.)

This makes pro football the original silly putty of the big media, reshaped each year to entice an ever-larger audience and at the same time sporadically mysterious, alluring, a weird mixture of violence, showman's calculation, and some kind of intense, medieval-tournament-like heraldry (those capes! those helmets! those cheerleaders!) and gallantry. Even when you try to be hardheaded about the game, some bit of color springs out. Alan Yost, a meat-and-potatoes financial journalist who writes most often for the Wall Street Journal, points out, in his new book about the finances of the sport, "Tailgating, Sacks and Salary Caps," and with magical correctness, that the success of "Monday Night Football" derived in part from its lighting: all those shadowless fields and gleaming helmets. But when you try to be romantic about pro football its reality comes back: the snapping sound of Theismann's fibula, the nearly parodic corporatism that infects the game. The N.F.L. actually employs a special squad of sidelines watchers--"clothes Nazis," the players call them--to be sure that no coach ever strays from wearing officially sanctioned merchandise, right down to the skin, at game time. (Coaches can no longer wear a suit on the sidelines.)

 

Geez - you can name 10 without even breaking a sweat. For starters any team that had John Riggins or Ted Hendricks. The 72 Dolphins were a very colorful team in their own way.

 

Anything this self-consciously dressed up is asking to be dressed down. And there was a time when pro football, seen from inside the locker room, offered the material for a kind of affable, blue-collar comedy, as an alternative to the nostalgic pieties of baseball and the urban realism that seems to halo basketball. It played the same role that its daddy sport, rugby, still plays throughout the world: the funny, dirty one. George Plimpton's 1966 "Paper Lion" and its even better sequel, "Mad Ducks and Bears," like Dan Jenkins's roughly contemporary novel "Semi-Tough," are not just funny. They are about being funny, about the N.F.L. as a place where one is able to be funny. It's the laughter and the conversation, Plimpton explains to a baffled friend at one point about his love for the company of pro football players.

There's no laughter now. John Feinstein's new book on Brian Billick and the Baltimore Ravens, "Next Man Up: A Year Behind the Lines in Today's NFL," employs the same premise as the best of all books about pro football, Roy Blount, Jr.'s "About Three Bricks Shy of a Load," an account of the 1973 season of the young Pittsburgh Steelers, the year after the Immaculate Reception game but before they won a Super Bowl. Feinstein takes the Ravens and their 2004 season as his subject, and the cast of characters is remarkably similar. There's an oppressed proletariat of special-teams players, a hard-pressed and overpaid first-round-draft-pick quarterback (Terry Bradshaw in Blount, Kyle Boller in Feinstein), a bunch of struggling linemen, and a tightlipped, humorless, defensive-minded coach (Chuck Noll for the Steelers).

Blount's account of a year within an N.F.L. team thirty years ago was essentially festive and high-spirited; Feinstein's is unrelievedly gloomy, tense, and depressing. "Next Man Up" refers to the cavalier cry of the coaches when yet another player goes down with a severe injury, and his tales are all of players belittled, bruised, and generally beleaguered, hoping to hang on long enough--five years is the run-up time to free agency these days--for a major payday. (And the paydays are major, twenty-five- and forty-million-dollar contracts come and go in his pages.) In part, of course, this difference in tone reflects a difference in taste. Blount saw what he wanted to see and didn't see what he didn't want to see; there are no prizes on Parnassus for fair play. By his own account, he missed the fact that "Jefferson Street" Joe Gilliam, the Steelers' third-string quarterback, was not a free spirit but a heroin addict, and that the Steelers, at least by retrospective legend, were pioneers in steroid abuse. Feinstein, on the other hand, sees what a diligent, intelligent, yet mainly humorless reporter is likely to see: a tangle of ambitions, injuries, and extremely short career expectancies, interrupted by sudden onsets of very big money. The closest thing to a hero in Feinstein's book is the offensive coördinator, Matt Cavanaugh, who, we know from almost the first page, is going to be fired at the end of the season for failing to do enough for the Ravens' offense, not that there is much he could have done. Cavanaugh is a sympathetic and unostentatious man, and, knowing his fate as we do, we wince with Feinstein every time this decent guy comes onstage to get kicked around one more time by the radio talk-show hosts and the owner and the other coaches.

It doesn't sound like fun, you figure out in the end, because it isn't fun. Where it seemed natural for Blount to identify with the players, and be warily sympathetic to the coach, Feinstein identifies with the owner and the coaches and is warily sympathetic to the players. He empathizes with them sufficiently to defend, at length, the linebacker Ray Lewis from the charge of murder, during a melee in Atlanta after the 2000 Superbowl, when in fact he was no more than a reluctant witness, but it's obvious that the culture of the players is alien to him, as it would be to most outsiders. The atmosphere is closed, guarded, and immensely knowing about the media; the artless charm with which Bradshaw or Dwight White confided in Blount would just not be possible now. With the best will in the world, there is very little you can squeeze out of the players that has not been pasteurized first by the agents and the league and the players' entourage, and by the players' understanding, essentially true, that the reporter is on nobody's side but his own. "Hangaround time," the old journalists' and sportswriters' favorite, is rarely part of the game now.

 

It is the owners, curiously, who are more eager to have their struggles and dramas narrated. Feinstein has the obnoxious Redskins' owner, Dan Snyder, drop into the narrative from time to time like Snidely Whiplash, to sneer and roll his mustache, while the Ravens' owner, Steve Bisciotti, who let Feinstein into the locker room, is very nearly made the hero of the book. Though Bisciotti does seem like a more levelheaded man than most N.F.L. owners, at one moment Feinstein relates a ritual and needless bit of humiliation that Bisciotti inflicted on Billick, shortly after he became the sole owner of the team. "You have some bad habits," he says to him. "For example, you always address me as 'young man' when you see me, and my wife as 'young lady.' … I'm about to become the owner of this team--your boss--and you greet me the same way you greet some kid coming up to you for an autograph. That's disrespectful." The insolence of wealth will creep out, as Dr. Johnson said.

The sour tone of so much of Feinstein's book isn't peculiar to Feinstein. Charles P. Pierce, a Boston sportswriter, who has the tools to pull a Blount, and the desire to do it, too, has written his own yearlong, hang-around account, this one about the Patriots and their star quarterback, Tom Brady--"Moving the Chains: Tom Brady and the Pursuit of Everything"--but his book, though better written, isn't much more fun than Feinstein's, mostly because Pierce has to write around his hero rather than through him. Brady is no Alex Karras. "I always figured that being a little dull was part of being a pro," Johnny Unitas is quoted as saying (in a new biography, "Johnny U.," by the former Time sportswriter Tom Callahan). "Win or lose, I never walked off a professional football field without first thinking of something boring to say." Brady resembles Unitas in this as in so much else. At one point, Pierce actually has to admit, "What Brady said reads more banal than it sounded at the time." The Patriots' coach, Bill Belichick, meanwhile, is so buttoned-up and closemouthed that he makes both Chuck Noll and Brian Billick sound like Shecky Greene. (Belichick on Brady: "He does a lot of things well. He makes a lot of good plays. He makes a lot of good throws.")

Even books not precisely about the N.F.L. but about the path to getting there have something strained and unhappy in them. In "The Blind Side," Michael Lewis, an expert storyteller, can stop telling stories long enough to make a case for a complicated point in a convincing way, and one of the points he is making here is about the narrowed focus that football demands. His protagonist, a poor black kid named Michael Oher, is discovered to have "ideal" left-tackle potential, and he's taken in by an evangelical family who help nurture him--the story is basically "Gigi" without Louis Jourdan or the songs: "Thank Heaven for Very Big Boys." But where, for this football-loving reader, Lewis's baseball book was enlivening and cheering, his football book--about the making of a behemoth who may or may not get to the N.F.L.-is oddly sad. (The story of Gigi, who probably wouldn't have made starting courtesan, either, is a pretty sad one, too.)

Partly what drains the joy from the inner game of pro football these days is the same as what drains the joy from much of American life: there's a lot of money to be made by a few people, and a lot less for everybody else. The money in pro football comes in two flavors: more than you can imagine and less than you might think. The base pay for players is much higher, of course, than it is in the real world--the minimum for a rookie is almost three hundred thousand dollars--but the disproportion is real, too, and though the players maybe ought to be grateful for having as much as they do, like the rest of us they can't help being resentful for not having as much as they might. For every Chris McAlister, a shut-down cornerback making eight million a year, there is a Mike Solwold, a long snapper who after three seasons in the N.F.L. has already been cut or waived six times by four teams, and who has the bad luck in the Ravens camp to recover from an injury before he gets cut. (If he had still been injured, the Ravens would have had to pay him compensation.)

 

Feinstein reminds the reader that this here-today, gone-tomorrow rule is part of life in the N.F.L.; there is no, or very little, "guaranteed" money in pro football--the players work, and can be fired, "at will"--and, while a few upper-crust performers get to keep their signing bonus, most players are a snapped knee ligament away from street clothes. (Pierce reports that seventy-eight per cent of N.F.L. players are unemployed, bankrupt, or divorced within two years of leaving the game, and those are the guys who make it.) Billick says grimly, about cutting players, "Whenever I have to make these cuts, I always think about what Clint Eastwood said in 'Unforgiven': 'When you kill a man, you not only are ending his life, you're taking away everything he ever had or is going to have.' "The unhappiness that you feel among the players in all these books is hardly the misery of the oppressed, but it is something more familiar these days, the rancor of the near-miss. Why them and not us? is a radical question. Why the guy at the next locker and not me? a bitter one.

One way of dealing with the difference between the players and their experience--and, occasionally, their income--and everyone else's is to advance into a world of abstract manipulation where the players are best appreciated as lines of numbers or as groupings of pixels. The kids do it through Electronic Arts Sports and its video games, where they make up their own teams and even their own players, and have as much allegiance to the dancing dots as we did to Joe Namath and Matt Snell. The grownups achieve the same effect, deep participation at a precarious distance, by becoming obsessed with the statistical analysis of sports. It is no accident, probably, that, as baseball salaries get bigger, a good deal of baseball writing has become more decorously removed from actual baseball into the numbers world (although Bill James, who started it all, has moved at last into management).

Pro football, however, has traditionally resisted statistical analysis. Again and again, someone, like the fine sportswriter Allen Barra, has tried to match Bill James and write a football abstract, and, again and again, the enterprise has failed. One might think that the betting interest in pro football--which Yost estimates at more than a billion dollars per season--would lead to an ever more avid appetite for numbers, but the kind of analysis that Barra et al. are able to do is, although powerfully suggestive, weakly predictive. Football analysis is trickier than the baseball kind because football really is a team sport: every baseball act is colored by the context in which it takes place the stadium and the situation--but football acts are the context in which they take place. A running back whose team wins every time he runs for a hundred yards is almost certainly busy running out the dock in the second half, he runs for a hundred yards because his team has already won. Unlike in baseball, all eleven guys on the field are involved in every play, and who deserves the credit or blame is harder to know than it looks.

Now, though, intricate analysis seems to have come to pro football, through the good offices of the Internet and its capacity for the micro-niche, and the Web site Footballoutsiders has thrown off a book, the annual "Pro Football Prospectus," which is apparently catching on. Football analysis has triumphed by combining the kind of detached statistical crunching that James pioneered with dose amateur breakdowns of Namath's "films." The two things taken together-the actual visual pattern of each play and the numerical representation of it--enable one to escape the contexts and "grade" the individual acts of the ballplayers to get a sense of who is doing what how well on every play.

The point of statistical analysis has never been to crunch numbers but to challenge the conventional wisdom about how teams win and lose, and the football analysts are doing that now. Their conviction (much simplified) is that in the N.F.L. you pass to win and run to sustain a victory--though the average running play nets four yards, the median nets only three--and that most of the more conservative, hardnosed football strategies, like the one-run, bunt-and-sacrifice strategies in baseball, look canny and play dumb. There is even a strong, heretical movement under way against automatically punting on fourth down. (The irony of sophisticated analysis is that, while it tends to run counter to what the shouting heads on television pontificate about, it tends, ultimately, to go along with what the ignorant fans in the stands are screaming for: swing for the fences, go for it on fourth, etc.)

 

People within the game, though, still talk about brute physical effort, and how much it matters. The two-yard runs, after all, are being played not in a video game but in a real world where the energy and will to get beaten up is a capital sum reduced by expenditure; those two-yard runs expend it. So the closeup view, emphasizing physical domination, isn't necessarily false, though it may be badly argued. The insiders may miss the pattern and still get the point. (Bill James himself has said--half as a joke, but only half--that he thought what brought the Red Sox back in 2004 was "veteran leadership." In the pure world of analysis, veteran leadership was long thought to be an explanatory principle on a par with water sprites and the rotation of the zodiac.)

As our efforts to explain and predict are baffled, we retreat into pure pleasure. Then the question becomes: Enjoy what, how? Fortunately, a new book helps lead us back to becoming the armchair aesthetes we were all along. "In Praise of Athletic Beauty," by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, who is a professor of comp lit at Stanford, is the book, and football the central game. Much of the book sounds like the kind of guide to the aesthetic of sports that would be written by someone named Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht; long passages improve by being read in a light German accent. "Looking at empty stadiums," he remarks of his love of Stanford Stadium, "I suspect that stadiums 'stage' or 'make present' what Martin Heidegger once identified as the most elementary philosophical question: why there is something at all, opposed to nothing? On many levels and in multiple settings stadiums materialize, and make us part of, this ultimate ontological contrast."

Nonetheless, Gumbrecht really is a fan, and he is trying to make sense of a fan's experience. Instead of focussing on the easy cases--everybody can admire divers and gymnasts and the lacier kind of ice skaters--he takes for his subject the aesthetic of ballgames, which, he points out, began to become central to Western life as spectator sports only a century ago. His central thesis, to round it out a little crudely, is that we watch sports not out of identification with the players but out of a kind of happy absorption in someone else's ability. "The euphoria of focused intensity seems to go hand in hand with a peculiar quietness. I am at peace with the impression that I cannot control and manipulate the world around me. So intensely quiet do I become and so quietly confident, at least during the seconds when my favorite football team is talking through its next play in the huddle, that I feel I can let go and let come (or not) the things that I desire to come."

In other words, when we watch Joe Namath or Chad Pennington or even Eli complete a pass what we feel isn't pathetic and vicarious but generous and authentic: we give up a bit of ourselves in order to admire another. We're broadened, not narrowed, by our random. Our connection with our heroes is through an act of imagination, and the act of imagination, not the connection, is what is worth savoring and saving. (Stephen Dubner, before he struck gold with "Freakonomics," wrote a book about going in search of the Steelers' star runner Franco Harris that made exactly this point; so did Frederick Exley's "A Fan's Notes," for that matter, where the narrator's obsession with Frank Gifford helped him discover himself.)

These sentiments are what our grandfathers would have called noble and manly, and certainly have something to do with what makes us fans, whether the kind who tailgate in the cold or the kind who compile stats in the overheated apartment. But is it possible to divorce, or elevate, our aesthetic and imaginative interest so entirely from our tribal and roofing interest? We can't be aesthetes without also being fans. Even in the press box, many of us aren't really football fans; at least some of the time we're Jets fans or Giants fans or Seahawks fans, and the connection between the team's fate and the fan's fate isn't quite so beautifully disinterested as the formula suggests. My ideal game is not one in which the Jets and the Patriots are engaged in a sterling contest where Pennington and Brady trade coups and the final score is determined in overtime by an inspired play. It's one in which the Jets pull ahead, 35-0, in the first quarter and then coast to victory on a muddy field, as Brady slips and falls. This may be many things, some of them forgivable, but generous and broadening it isn't.

What makes the bald rooting interest forgivable, maybe, is the near-certainty that the ideal game is never, or almost never, going to happen. The essential experience of watching sports is experiencing loss; anyone who has consoled a twelve-year-old after a Jets loss, or been a twelve-year-old in need of consolation, knows this. Since loss and disappointment are the only fixed points in life, maybe the best we can say is that pro football, like anything else we like to watch, gives us a chance to organize those emotions into a pattern, a season, while occasionally giving us the hope of something more. The Jets don't always lose--just nearly always. When they do better, we feel better. That's the margin, or sideline, on which we live.

 

Another regular dose of the forced metaphysical from The New Yorker, such as it can be associated with . . . soccer.

 

The game is boring? No kidding. Tagliabue's socialistic masterpiece is a real piece of shit. Look at last year's Super Bowl. Nobody knows the damn rules, not even the refs. There aren't 'great teams' anymore, just salary cap restricted fantasy squads that can go from 10-6 to 4-12 with one injury.