Loving Football

Fishing in Hoi An, Vietnam - photo by JoAnn Sturman

“--not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”  To this end, equal opportunity is essential, but not enough.”  
Lyndon Johnson 1965

by Scott Sturman

I grew up with football.  My father, the first native from Wyoming to earn All-American honors at the university, threw countless passes to me in the front yard.  I lacked his ability, strength, and size, but that did not keep me and my friends from playing sandlot tackle football everyday after school from September until the snow stopped us in December.

Football was different when dad went to college.  The players had to work for spending money and study to graduate, so if a professional career was not in the offing, they were prepared for life outside the gridiron and the wars looming in Europe and the Pacific.  Sometimes while watching a game, I think of my father buried on the wind swept prairie back home with his three Purple Hearts, Silver Star, three Bronze Stars, and Coeur de Guerre with Palm, and then my mind flashes to Ted Kennedy tucked safely away in Arlington–but enough of that. 

I love football, perhaps too much.  After the Super Bowl it will be another seven months until kick off time and nothing to watch on television.  It’s the quintessential sport: high risk, high reward, violent, totally optional, thousands of fans screaming, and a bevy of sportscasters wanting to know the players’ favorite color and song.  In the off season I’m afraid the do-gooders, who yearn for a risk free life for everyone, will continue ruining the game by banning kick off and punt returns, much like they are doing by eliminating those big hits across the middle when a safety puts a receiver in the cross hairs.  Before you know it, they’ll be playing two hand touch football.  Don’t they understand why the game is so popular and profitable or that it’s better to take one’s chances on a football team than in a street gang or in a man cave playing video games sixteen hours a day?

John Steinbeck, a Nobel Prize winner and leftist for much of his life, professed in Travels with Charley that it is the quality of life rather than the quantity that matters.  He was no hypocrite, when it came to practicing his credo.  If one enters voluntarily into a lawful activity, then its one’s choice to live life like a cheetah or tortoise, absent unwanted interference of Big Brother or Sister.  This testament to individualism, which aptly describes the allure of football, seems inconsistent with his progressive leanings, but celebrities are complicated by nature and a mishmash of contradictions.

Three years before his death in 1968 he must have heard his friend Lyndon Johnson proclaiming in a speech at Howard University that equal opportunity is an unsatisfactory condition.  This commonsensical measure of fairness was not enough; in Johnson’s view equal results were required, and if these results were not achieved then something was wrong with the system!   By this point was Steinbeck thinking the Nobel Committee should award a few extra thousand prizes each year to attain this goal?  I suspect not.  In addition to ability much of his success lay with the willingness to ignore his health and take chances his competitors were unwilling to entertain.   Rules insuring life’s utter sameness are not particularly appealing to anyone with ambition and talent, unless one is a politician, of course.  

This fall, when another NFL season is underway, I’ll turn on the Red Zone and escape to watch hours of uninterrupted, commercial free highlights. Hopefully, the players will be tackling and not pulling flags.  Worse yet, what if the politicians adopt Lyndon Johnson’s world view and mandate every game ends in a tie?  If these nightmares don’t come to pass, I’ll be just like one of the Roman mob watching the Gladiators in the Coliseum, swearing at referees, marveling at great plays, and wincing at the boners, all in my own little world.

Hookahs for Sale in Cairo - photo by JoAnn Sturman