Is Football a Sport or a Metaphor?

Given the interminable hype and gaudy excess that was Super Bowl XLIV (half-a-billion television viewers worldwide, a telephone-book-size media guide, 30-second commercials costing $3 million each, a halftime show featuring legendary rock group the Who), we almost forgot that what we were watching wasn’t a coronation or moon landing, but a football game.

Compare Sunday’s extravaganza with Super Bowl I, way back in 1967. This was before it was even called that, before Kansas City Chief owner Lamar Hunt coined the term “Super Bowl.” The first one was called simply, “The First AFL vs. NFL World Championship Game,” and featured the Green Bay Packers vs. the Chiefs. How small-scale was it? So small-scale that it was blacked-out in Los Angeles because the LA Memorial Coliseum had failed to sell out.

Super Bowl I drew fewer than 62,000 spectators (at $12 a ticket), which, in a venue as cavernous as the LA Coliseum, resembled a crowd for a big-time high school game. And instead of booking a rock-and-roll Hall of Fame act, the halftime show featured trumpeter Al Hirt and the marching bands from the University of Arizona and University of Michigan.

Pro football has come an astonishingly long way since then. Today, it’s recognized as America’s favorite sport, having surpassed baseball, our once revered and pastoral “national pastime.” Just as people can remember where they were and what they were doing when JFK was shot, or when the shuttle exploded, I can still remember where I was and what I was doing (in my kitchen eating a burrito) when I first heard, in 1984, that football had officially eclipsed baseball as America’s game.

It was disturbing news. After 80 years of dominance, the patrician elegance that was baseball had given way to the violent, sexually repressed exercise in mayhem that was pro football. Interestingly, football’s meteoric rise paralleled the resurgence of another violent spectacle—professional wrestling, a faux-sport that had long ago fallen into disrepute if not howling ridicule. Indeed, it was during the go-go 1980s that the WWF (World Wrestling Federation) and WrestleMania became a gargantuan successes.

Football’s ascendancy can be seen as part of the Great Masculinization of America, a phenomenon represented by the trifecta of Ronald Reagan, professional wrestling and the NFL. It also coincided with the final stage of America’s transformation into international and domestic bully. Oliver North and John Poindexter were football creatures, not baseball creatures. The invasion of Grenada and Reagan’s crushing the air-traffic controllers union were football moves, not baseball moves.

Football also speaks to three vaguely related, testosterone-driven pathologies—corporationism, military adventurism and steroid use—and reminds us of an observation by American philosopher Mortimer Adler, who once suggested that the scariest dystopian scenario imaginable would be a world that was governed by teenage boys.

Picture the lads in “Lord of the Flies.” Which spectator sport would they prefer? A leisurely contest played on a grassy meadow on a summer day, or a gladiatorial, bone-crunching match played inside a screaming arena? And which national institution would these young fellows most admire—a big workers’ collective (labor union) or a big army?

As for steroids, it’s puzzling why the sports Establishment has raked baseball players like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens over the coals, yet left football players virtually untouched. Especially when you examine the bodies of linemen in the NFL and realize that those freakishly large and disproportionately muscled specimens are screaming out one word: “steroids.” Other than quarterbacks and kickers, the whole League looks ‘roided-out.

As corny and retrograde as this will sound, professional football is a metaphor—the recreational manifestation of our country’s raw aggression and dark impulse toward imperialism. It wasn’t by coincidence or happenstance that the vulgar pigskin replaced the noble horsehide as our national pastime. It was destiny. And on the seventh day God punted.

David Macaray, a Los Angeles playwright and writer, is the author of “It’s Never Been Easy: Essays on Modern Labor.” He can be reached at dmacaray@earthlink.net.