The smooth corporate face of the National Football League can be best seen in the machinelike perfection of the New England Patriots. Their silky quarterback looks like a model, dates supermodels, and commands the most efficient offence in the league with a relentless, minimalist style. His unmarked, preternaturally blank face shows little response to the violence swirling around him. His dominant blandness seems the very paradigm of the modern game. But for all his winning ways, the quarterback and his on-field campaign have become only the tail that wags the dog of the nfl. The real action lies elsewhere.
As the American empire experienced its comeuppance in the jungles of Southeast Asia, American professional football was coming into its own, taking over television, magazine covers, and the national consciousness. The nfl was a metaphor festival on cleats, and the first metaphor out of everyone’s mouth was that it was America’s game, America incarnate: knock the other guy on his ass and take his land. Underlying that was the more primal metaphor: war. The game was so perceived as America’s sublimation of war that novelist Don DeLillo took on the culture of football in his early-1970s novel, End Zone. His protagonist studied nuclear megadeath as he played college ball on scholarship. As one professor said, “I reject the notion of football as warfare. Warfare is warfare. We don’t need substitutes because we’ve got the real thing.”
Only America didn’t have the real thing. Vietnam — the war being fought and ending as the nfl rose to dominate American sports consciousness — offered no component of knocking the other guy on his ass and taking his land. The war for which the nfl was a metaphor was the only war America dreamed about or trained for, a showdown with the Russians on the plains of Europe, tank on tank, grunt on grunt. In that longed-for war, you could actually see a guy to knock down, and that guy had land you could actually take. It would be just like football.
In Oliver Stone’s nfl film, Any Given Sunday, the war has been internalized. Coaches are depicted doing battle with their own dicks; impotence is presented as a consequence of wresting wills with younger, indestructible Hectors and Herculeses. For the warriors, the game seems merely a hiatus in the non-stop orgy of sex, drugs, and weightlifting that comprises a modern player’s life. But not even Stone, always fascinated by the glamour of violence, can capture the visceral, deranged action on the field.
The barbarity, the carnage of pro football, is so addictive on your TV because it was perfectly scaled to fit there, courtesy of PR genius Pete Rozelle, the nfl commissioner who built the game through an iron-fisted branding strategy. One of Rozelle’s strongest legacies was sizing the coverage to the parameters of a TV screen and making the networks do it his way. You couldn’t disconnect from an nfl game if you were on heroin. The camera is in a better position than all but the very best seats, and when it’s time for action there are few fans visible: it’s just you and your game. Yet watching a game is not unlike being on heroin. The action passes by in a haze, moments are undifferentiated, a narcotic gloss seems to lie between you and the onscreen experience.
The league, recognizing that a younger generation suffers from a kind of ennui, has now hung cameras on wires that traverse the game at swooping angles. The shots offer initial excitement, but after a few games it becomes clear that the nfl severely limits the use of its one cool technology. The overhead wire-flying camera only shoots from angles that perfectly mimic the composition of the nfl video games. The league has so little faith in its own product it deliberately presents the reality of football as equal to an artificial, fan-manipulated fantasy.
We watch football, however narcotized, mostly for three reasons: the beauty and grace of the long pass and reception, the thrill of seeing a well-paid genetic freak get his brains knocked out, and to visit or witness a final frontier, which was just being revealed to a broader America as the nfl broke large. It is a frontier so seductive and esoteric that when Don DeLillo sought to capture it he wrote about “the mystery of black speed.” African-American receivers of extraordinary grace and strength were bringing the long ball to the game by blazing past white defensive backs as if they were standing still. Speed seemed to be a talent no white player, no matter how hard he worked, could match. It seemed a gift from the gods, like physical beauty. Of course, the black speed demons worked their asses off to be fast, but in its first appearance, and in the colonial language used by sportscasters and the league to describe it, that speed was not presented as earned in the grind of weightlifting and running stadium stairs. DeLillo captured the awe and reverence pure speed could induce: “But mostly [a black running back] could fly . . . Speed is the last excitement left, the one thing we haven’t used up, still naked in its potential, the mysterious black gift that thrills the millions.”
O. J. Simpson proved the most easily digestible icon of black speed — the least threatening to a white mainstream. His enormous face alight, O. J. moved with a magical grace. His acceleration from a dead stop seemed barely human, and he slipped past defenders as if they were ghosts. Unlike Jim Brown, the nfl’s first angry, unrepentant black god, O. J. smiled every time he knocked someone on his ass. And, unlike Brown, O. J. did not seek to cream anybody; he would rather evade, rather dance, rather elide than initiate collision. His team’s management colluded in the spectacle. They almost never fielded a team around O. J. that could win. Instead they built an offence that encouraged him to shine regardless of the outcome of the game. O. J. was a black yuppie, using his skills to move up as he consistently tried to prove he never really meant to hurt anybody. He became a sideshow, a kind of minstrel act: a smiling, contented, unthreatening black Superman, happy to show off, make pals, and never taste victory.
The nfl marketers had need of a minstrel show, a black yuppie, because, along with blazing black speed, post-Vietnam the nfl saw black anger surface with a sanction it had in no other sport, because the nfl thrives on anger, masochism, and the will to hurt.
Psycho star safety Jack Tatum of the Oakland Raiders embodied a new black street presence — the man home from Vietnam and from the civil rights movement who, in the lyrics of Townes Van Zandt, wore his attitude “outside his pants, for all the honest world to feel.” Tatum was the embodiment of the Black Panthers: snaggle-toothed, with a scraggly, outrageous Afro and heavy-lidded mack-daddy eyes.
