Two Perspectives on Sports as Prelude to the American Football Season

I gather from the excited background chatter of friends and acquaintances that the long American summer has finally come to a close, although not due to any change in the weather or calendar flipping after the national Labor Day observance. No, summer can truly be said to have expired when the National Football League begins airing televised coverage of the meetings between 11 men per side, 32 teams strong. Having disabled the cable box and packed away the antennae several years ago, such goings-on seem, at times, almost impossibly distant, and if I ever wish to drop in on an ongoing game to see how the San Diego Chargers are doing, the radio or Internet updates are usually my only chance (although during our stay in Ocean Beach, I could always rely on the echoing blaaaaattt of a nearby resident's industrial-strength airhorn, affixed to the side of their home and deployed during moments of celebration, to keep me in the game, so to speak). Wandering into bars or restaurants throughout the football season, I'll notice the wall-to-wall coverage of the Sunday games via literal wall-to-wall flat screen dominance, and after filing away a few notable nuggets of information - some scores, some matchups, a spectacular reception - it's time to move on to other things.

I realize that this sets me apart from many of my fellow citizens. All I can say is that it ultimately stems neither from snobbery nor masochism, but from a combination of childhood trauma and a greater desire to balance out the heightened attention given organized sports at this moment of history. The childhood trauma was nothing more than a rather typical immersion in NFL lore, common to nearly any sentient being born and raised in the great state of Wisconsin. Amid these rolling green hills and multisyllabic-named towns, the fall tradition of watching the green and gold suit up and slam it home over brats and Bud Lite is far more than mere activity or past time. It is the fabled "way of life," a phrase that gets tossed around by adherents to activities as varied as surfing and skateboarding to punk rock and cosplay. Try as they might, even the most earnest surfer or kosupure devotee cannot hope to rival the twelve-month immersion in NFL activity required by those of us lucky enough to have been born within a few hours' drive of Lambeau Field. The heightened fanaticism taking place over the seventeen-week stretch of the regular season is mere detail - true Packer Backers follow year-long off-season developments and player rumors the way Wall Street lifers track the S&P 500 ticker.

Add to this localized mania the generally national attitude that places professional athletics on a tier perhaps just below the First and Second Constitutional Amendments in terms of cultural and societal import, and you're left with somebody who admires feats of physical skill yet questions the infallibility of David Stern or Bud Selig, the way NBA draft coverage trumps updates from foreign battlefields, or the wisdom of rewarding Manny Pacquiano or Formula One drivers with $40 million in cold hard cash. And as somebody who grew up a mere forty-minute drive from the Frozen Tundra, it can be difficult to square the often-fickle nature of sports fans, who switch teams according to seasonal trades or office pools, with the fierce loyalty instilled in those of us beholden to the smallest community in professional football and the only team to remain blissfully free from the clutches of the corporate owner.

That's key - the manner in which professional sports have been wrestled away from a celebration of individual athletic ability and the nuances of a glorious game. In substitution, we witness a lolling behemoth of greed beholden to the advertising dollar, steroid juicing and weak domestic beer. If there remains somewhat more individuality at play among the September NFL lineups than are to be found on the drive-through menu at any McDonald's location, I'm sure the owners and official sponsors will soon find a way to sully and tarnish even that moderately silver lining.

Before howls of protest threaten to overwhelm the voice of Hank Williams, Jr., I should note that such sacrilegious thoughts are not solely my own. Actually, I was both pleased and surprised to note that the Roman author, lawyer and magistrate Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, better known as Pliny the Younger, had explored similar thoughts circa 109 AD in a grumbling letter to Calvisius. I reprint the pertinent section of his letter below in its entirety, as it really is too good to edit or paraphrase:

I have spent these several days past in reading and writing, with the most pleasing tranquility imaginable. You will ask, "How can that possibly be in the midst of Rome?" It was the time of celebrating the Circensian games, an entertainment for which I have not the least taste. They have no novelty, no variety to recommend them - nothing, in short, one would wish to see twice.

It does the more surprise me therefore that so many thousand people should be possessed with the childish passion of desiring so often to see a parcel of horses gallop, and men standing upright in their chariots. If indeed it were the swiftness of the horses, or the skill of the men that attracted them, there might be some pretense of reason for it. But it is the dress they like; it is the dress that takes their fancy. And if, in the midst of the course and contest, the different parties were to change colors, their different partisans would change sides and instantly desert the very same men and horses whom just before they were eagerly following with their eyes, as far as they could see, and shouting out their names with all their might.

Such mighty charms, such wondrous power reside in the color of a paltry tunic! And this not only with the common crowd (more contemptible than the dress they espouse), but even with serious-thinking people.

When I observe such men thus insatiably fond of so silly, so low, so uninteresting, so common an entertainment, I congratulate myself on my indifference to these pleasures - and am glad to employ the leisure of this season upon my books, which others throw away upon the most idle occupations.

A little distancing from some of Pliny's more class-based assumptions is probably in order - I can't say I find the "common crowd" to be any more or less "contemptible" than supposedly "serious-thinking people," and suspect as much if not more loutish behavior occurs in private luxury boxes than among general admission. I also do my best never to "congratulate myself on my indifference" to anything, indifference often being a less than noble affectation. And yet, even allowing for such caveats, the general thrust of Pliny's kvetching seems about right.

But a little softening is perhaps in order, and to that, I'll turn to another voice from the past, one a little closer in both time and culture to our own. If Pliny found local professional athletics to be silly, low and uninteresting, he perhaps misses out on the fundamental pleasures of witnessing experts test the limits of the human body in a format both structured and free. Walt Whitman suffered no such apprehension, and in a brief article first published in 1846, he remarked upon the local phenomenon of Brooklyn youth playing "base," a "certain kind of ball". Far from an "idle occupation," Whitman sees these games of "base ball" as a nearly ordained form of recreation:

Has God made this beautiful earth - the sun to shine - all the sweet influences of nature to operate and planted in man a wish for their delights - and all for nothing? Let us leave our close rooms and the dust and corruption of stagnant places, and taste some of the good things Providence has scattered around so liberally.

We would that all the young fellows about Brooklyn were daily in the habit of spending an hour or two in some outdoor game or recreation. The body and mind would both be benefited by it. There would be fewer attenuated forms and shrunken limbs and pallid faces in our streets. The game of ball is glorious - so are leaping, running, and wrestling. To any person having the least knowledge of physiology, it were superfluous to enter into any argument to prove the use and benefit of exercise. We have far too little of it in this country, among the "genteel" classes. Both women and men should be careful to pass no day of their lives without a portion of outdoor exercise.

Now, Whitman may have his own reasons for wishing that all taut-bodied "young fellows about Brooklyn" spend an hour or two in daily outdoor physical recreation - one can easily imagine him finding a shaded spot, the better to watch the games go by. And certainly the current atmosphere in professional sports is far from any idealized glory in "outdoor exercise". We play most of our games inside or under domes these days, and it would be difficult indeed to imagine our earthy poet working up much enthusiasm for media-besotted press conferences, Gatorade tie-ins and Super Bowl halftime entertainment.

Yet I'm doing my best to take a page from Whitman's ground-level appreciation of the noble pleasures of sport, while simultaneously filing away Pliny the Younger's enjoyable screed as a kind of guilty pleasure. As the football season begins, and team colors start to saturate our suburban landscape, I'll recall Whitman's admonishment that we all "leave our close rooms and the dust and corruption of stagnant places" for the relatively brighter light of outdoor recreation. Looking around my desk, I do see some dust and sense more than a little stagnation. You'll forgive me if I suggest there's also plenty of dust and maybe a bit of corruption inside the equally stagnant interiors of the local sports bar.