Facemasking

He lived for lethal impact. He hit people so hard you could see their skeletons right through their skin, every joint and bone, like a cartoon. And when Tatum launched himself like a black bullet and cracked someone, the middle-aged white men on the sidelines who ran the game nodded, thrilled. They’d never seen a white boy who could hit like that, and here was urban black rage contained on the ball field, catharsis with a capital C.

Tatum’s persona reflected the uneasy fascination and dread with which a larger white audience experienced the urban black man, a fascination and dread later reflected in the rise of urban hip hop and its attendant mythologies. This complex, tragic, epically multi-levelled and self-contradictory obsession drew the white audience deeply into football. Tatum swaggered, and would happily blow his own coverage, give up a touchdown, for the chance to mutilate someone with a tackle.

It dawned on the league office that having guys get hit so hard their skeletons showed through their skin put a team’s short-term physical assets (the players) at risk. The teams that didn’t have a Jack Tatum complained. And nobody wanted a repeat of poor Darryl Stingley being taken off the field paralyzed after Tatum clobbered him, a reminder to the fans of the actual level of carnage being perpetrated for their kicks. Nor did the league want a brand dominated by black style or identity. So, after putting that style at the forefront of their marketing — House Negro O. J. Simpson and Field Negro Jack Tatum proved the Scylla and Charybdis of brand identity — the league fuelled its white fans’ love-hate relationship with black athleticism by suppressing its more flamboyant aspects.

Thus the nfl’s penchant for right-wing micromanagement began its inexorable march to tame the game’s aesthetic. After years of being celebrated, certain hits were outlawed. And so was black expression. Over the decades, every conceivable style point has been banned: personalized do-rags, prolonged end zone dances, elaborate post-touchdown stunts, and even players celebrating with unison dancing.

In suppressing the style, the league sought to suppress its underlying substance. That substance was specific racial identity expressed in ultra-violence, and public jubilation at its result. The league wanted the black genie back in the bottle. Jack Tatum didn’t mutilate in the name of black identity (as expressed by his hair, his headband, his don’t-give-a-shit-about-playbook freelancing); he now mutilated in the name of his team, the Oakland Raiders, which granted its players and fans an identity that transcended race and class. The league raced to market a key aspect of its identity — black and white men pummelling each other as equals, each trying the stereotypical virtues of their race in combat with The Other — before fans figured out that for them the game itself was secondary to the national identity crisis, a tableau of mutual racial loathing and admiration being played out on Sundays.

And yet what is the nfl afraid of? It’s not like the players, black or white, have any real power to affect the game, given their toothless union and injury-truncated careers. Few stick around long enough to generate bargaining power. So it’s not actual rebellion the league suppresses. It’s perceived brand damage — image rebellion. Brand control is a far more desperate struggle than a style or culture clash: it’s war over who controls perception. For all the nfl’s suppression of the putatively Bad Black Man and his excessive style, they heap praise and extra visual attention on the Good Negroes who celebrate Jesus with fingers thrust into the sky after every moderately decent play. The networks collude in this aspect of brand management by making sure those fingers fill the nightly roster of highlights. Here the league showcases racial unity: both black and white are encouraged to point to the Lord with no fines or sanctions.

The nfl of the early 1970s moved from a half-knowing metaphorical existence that poetically represented America’s dilemma of a genuine war and violent racial frustration, to a smoother, more harmonious 1990s America. In that harmonious fantasyland, black and white sportscasters stood side by side and smiled in harmless rivalry, as only true equals in a truly equal society might. And the style of the game echoed this new, bland paradigm.

The careful, slow winnowing of any style save that approved by the corporation is a stealth process that’s helped the nfl render itself tragic. By refusing to allow spontaneous outbursts or individual totems, the league has systematically culled the joy from the violence. The nfl wants to show only the nine-to-five of its brutality, never the ecstasy accomplishment brings. As with any individual who acknowledges only work and pain, the league is at war with itself. In removing decoration from the orderly game procession up and down the field, the league has slowly leached itself of metaphor. And a soul without metaphor has no poetry.

But if you close the doors, they’ll come in through the windows; however the league denies its own metaphors, they still rise to the surface. The most potent lie in the bodies of the players themselves and how the changes in their bodies have altered the game and their careers. nfl football players, through year-round training, diet, and steroids no doubt, have grown so large and so fast that the human body can no longer sustain the impacts they generate. The collisions are too destructive. By pursuing excellence, nfl players have sown the seeds for their own destruction in an age when injuries are increasingly severe. No wonder the league doesn’t want celebration when one player wipes out another. Yet even this produces a metaphor.

The new body image in the nfl is the natural end product of an obsession with size and the new gargantuanism on display at any shopping mall. It can also be read as another metaphor for America: its rabid consumption and growth to no purpose save self-injury. This new gargantuanism grew from America’s bodybuilding obsession. Rooted in that obsession is the death of the American Dream. Horatio Alger set the model: hard work brings success.