Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life.
Football begins in the fall, when everything's dying.
--George Carlin
I dread my beloved sister-in-law's annual Super Bowl Party. The dark day dawns, and I try to engineer a half-time arrival. When we do get there, I pull a quarterback sneak into the kitchen to see if I can "help," i.e. find the backup bag of Fritos and coffee or chardonnay or beer, and only dart in from that TV-free sanctuary when I can hear the more exuberant ads running.
Something about the whole we-are-one-today, America's Game, flagwaving, All-Hail-USA spirit kinda gags me. It's so...Patriotic™. And when the going gets Patriotic™, the hippies get nervous.
I think it has to do with two of the cuckoos in America's purported nest of Democracy. Money and Violence.
Here's the Money part:
Remember when Robert Karft alleged, in 2013, that Vladimir Putin boosted his Super Bowl ring back in 2005? At first I was simply bedazzled by the sublimely Putinesque style of the caper. What a Dr. Evil, what a Mr. Big, what a Dark-Night-Rises Joker that Vladimir is. Later, though, I started to wonder who this Kraft guy was, that he had a Super Bowl ring in the first place. Did he play on the Patriot's offensive line? He obviously wasn't all that nimble, at least during the Putin encounter, or he'd've intercepted the ring while Putin was passing it from his hand to his pocket and before the KGB blockers got there. Maybe he was a special teams guy.
Come to find out, he's the Patriot's owner. Oh. The owner gets a Super Bowl ring too, does he? What's the thinking there? That they made it possible for the team to play?
Then what about my ring? In 1997 I was living in Seattle, and we voters got to decide whether Paul Allen and the Seahawks needed a new stadium -- financed by the taxpayers -- which the team obviously couldn't afford because Paul Allen, who bought it that year, was only America's third richest man at the time and he obviously couldn't afford to pay for it all by himself. That would've been capitalism.
The measure passed. I think it passed because the voters were discouraged after they voted down funding the Seattle Mariners' new park in 1995 and the state legislature decided we didn't really mean it and declared a public emergency and we paid for it anyway AND they named it Safeco Field instead of Taxpayer Field.
At any rate, the taxpayers paid for Seahawk Stadium, later renamed Qwest Field, when Qwest "acquired" the "naming rights." A merger later and it was renamed again as CenturyLink Field. Evocative, no? The public allegedly owns the stadium but we didn't get a rebate after WE sold the naming rights, which I infer is how Qest/CenturyLink "acquired" them.
Okay. No rebates. But the Seahawks won the Superbowl last year. They wouldn't be the Seahawks, much less Super Bowl champions, if they didn't have that stadium. So where's my ring?
Not so fast, Citizen. The public only owns the stadium, not the team. No ring for you.
Well, what happens when the Green Bay Packers win the Super Bowl, as they did most recently in 2010? Even the NFL couldn't give all 360,584 shareholders a $25,000, diamond encrusted ring. So do they distribute maybe 10 or 20 to the shareholders? And everybody gets to take turns wearing one for a week and playing keep away with Vladimir Putin and other American betes noirs. You know Fidel's been plotting to get his hands on one ever since the revolution.
I doubt any of the shareholders ever see a ring. Green Bay's publicly owned nonprofit status is an embarrassing anomaly that the NFL wouldn't want to encourage. American football teams are rightly the property of the super rich. Their playthings. They kindly allow us to pay for the stadium, and to pay to watch the game -- in person, in the stadium we paid for, but only if we're pretty darn rich ourselves -- or on TV, and to absorb acres of advertising produced by their friends, more of the super rich, and spend a lot of money on snacks and memorabilia sold by -- you guessed it -- all leading to (praise Jesus!) more prosperity for the super rich!!! 18 of the NFL owners are billionaires, and the number goes up every year (sadly for them, they're all deeply unattractive).
The class of people who acquire football teams have spent their lives exploiting others and profiting from their pain. And then they buy football teams and make more money and profit from more pain (see below) and if their team wins, they get the ring.
Here's the Violence part:
I don't need to argue that war and football have a lot in common. George Carlin, mayherestinpeace, illustrated the parallels between war and football better than anyone else ever could:
In football the object is for the quarterback, also known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy's defensive line.
In baseball the object is to go home! And to be safe! - I hope I'll be safe at home!
(Full text is
here, but watch the video if you possibly can.)
They're nothing like the same thing, of course. Civilized nations like the US go to war only reluctantly and as a last resort. Right? Because we abhor the death and destruction they bring with them. You remember how sad and depressed the Bush administration and the media were when the US absolutely had to invade Iraq and visited "Shock and Awe" on the people of Baghdad in 2002. Wolf Blitzer was in tears, the sensitive soul.
Football, on the other hand, is played eagerly, for love of the game, for the athletic prowess and strategic skills of the players. It's not like war. Don't be silly. People get killed in war. People get permanently damaged. We aren't a mindless horde like the people in Rollerball. Americans wouldn't watch a "game" whose predictable consequence was permanent brain damage for many of the players. Would they?
As the NFL nears an end to its long-running legal battle over concussions, new data from the nation’s largest brain bank focused on traumatic brain injury has found evidence of a degenerative brain disease in 76 of the 79 former players it’s examined.
The findings represent a more than twofold increase in the number of cases of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, that have been reported by the Department of Veterans Affairs’ brain repository in Bedford, Mass.
Researchers there have now examined the brain tissue of 128 football players who, before their deaths, played the game professionally, semi-professionally, in college or in high school. Of that sample, 101 players, or just under 80 percent, tested positive for CTE.
Hell no, they wouldn't.
The National Football League, which for years disputed evidence that its players had a high rate of severe brain damage, has stated in federal court documents that it expects nearly a third of retired players to develop long-term cognitive problems and that the conditions are likely to emerge at “notably younger ages” than in the general population.
Well played football is a delight, a beautiful
thing to watch. Like anything that requires strength, agility, talent, judgment, courage. Like a good cross examination, like chess, like a violin concerto, quite a bit like dance.
It's different from those other things, though. Professional and college football, as they are played now, cost a hell of a lot of money. And football carries with it a one-third or higher risk to the mind of the player (that could be changed, and I hope it will be).
Money and violence.
There's no real comparison between football and war, of course. With football, the physical damage is confined to the participants, not spread over entire societies, and even the players don't actually die right there on the field. The comparison is absurd.
But you know what? Paul Allen can keep his Super Bowl ring. I don't want it after all.