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New NFL Season Brings Drama, Catharsis, Pummeling

by Adam Remsen
08/07/2006

With last night's Hall of Fame Game, the Oakland Raiders beat the Philadelphia Eagles 16-10, and the 2006 NFL preseason has begun. The annual thrill of watching millionaires beat the hell out of each other for our entertainment is underway, and I couldn't be happier. The advent of a new season means a couple of inevitabilities:

• I will be unable to have a one-minute conversation without mentioning the Atlanta Falcons at least twice;
• There will be screaming international headlines every time Terrell Owens says "boo"; and
• More than once I'll have to explain that, while I love NFL football, I can also define "irony" and identify the films of Antonioni by their visual style.

I cried at the end of Hamlet, and the end of Super Bowl XXXIII.

I run with a fairly intellectual crowd; I hear a lot of surprise, and even scorn, for my love of football. There's a popular notion in America that sports are for the anti-intellectual set; an unstated component of that is the idea that sports fans can't understand the loftier intellectual pursuits. "Art and philosophy," goes the received wisdom, "are good for you, while sports are just games."

This is pure shortsighted nonsense.

But the dramatic arts have catharsis! They have symbolism and themes and powerful messages and stuff!

And football doesn't? When I watched Chris Chandler, late in his career, his knees shot and ribs broken, step out onto the field and throw a touchdown to win the 1998 NFC Championship, that was catharsis as powerful as any I've ever experienced.

You want symbolism? Football is entirely about symbolism.

The power of symbols in art is the power to draw parallels with life as it is actually lived, to let us recognize the most private twitchings of our psyches as part of the common experience of being human. Football, by its very structure, mirrors life: Teamwork. Dedication. Talent. Justice, and its absence. Planning. Creativity.

Just as in life, some people are born with a talent for football, and some aren't. Anyone with marginal physical skills can become moderately proficient at the game, but to be a truly great player, there are required attributes that simply can't be learned. This goes against the "you can do it if you try" ethos we're taught as children, but it's a truism that we've all seen in action: Some people are naturally good at things, and some are not. It's not fair, but it's a fact.

Dick Butkus played for the Chicago Bears from 1965 to 1972. He was, and is, known as one of the toughest, nastiest, most single-minded players ever to step on the field; he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in the first year he was eligible. However, he played in an age of relatively primitive medicine, coupled with lax, nearly nonexistent regulation by the league. When his body began to break down, team doctors began giving him massive doses of painkillers to keep him moving, and after multiple knee injuries he retired in 1973. He filed a lawsuit against the team in 1975, alleging that team doctors put him on the field when his condition should have mandated bed rest. (The suit was settled out of court.)

I've seen NFL Films footage of Butkus during one of his last games, in 1973. He played a brief segment of the game, then went to the bench and stayed there; he was clearly in tremendous pain, and simply unable to keep playing.

But he wasn't done. He sat on the bench, obviously embarrassed to be there, and for the entire remainder of the game he shouted. He shouted at the other team, he shouted at their players and coaches, he shouted at his own teammates' performance on the field, he shouted at his teammates who were sitting on the bench with him. And at the end of the game, the look on his face was far from defeated; he looked like he'd gone out and scored a thousand touchdowns.

In Graham Greene's autobiography there is an anecdote that I never tire of retelling. Greene's father and uncle, two schoolteachers, were on vacation in the Riviera in 1900. They were sitting at a sidewalk café, having a drink and chatting, when a stranger came up and asked if he might sit at their table. They said of course, and the stranger sat and ordered a drink.

For the next hour, the stranger kept them marvelously entertained. He told wonderful stories, with a transporting wit and eloquence (a truly great conversationalist makes his audience feel witty). When he had finished his drink, the stranger thanked them for their time and left; and only then did they realize that he had never paid them for his drink.

After some discussion, they realized what had happened.

The stranger was Oscar Wilde. He was fresh out of prison and, having a then-infamous name, was unable to get any work at all produced; thus he had paid them for the drink with the only currency still in his possession: An hour of his scintillating company.

But art has heroes and villains and grand drama!

Football has heroes the way Goths have tattoos; it wouldn't be football without them. The names of great football players resound like the heroes of Wagnerian opera: Thorpe. Nagurski. Unitas. Sayers. Payton. Montana. Barry Sanders. Favre. (I've spent 15 minutes shortening my original list.)

I'd include Staubach and Aikman in that group, but I, like all sane people, hate the Dallas Cowboys. Every hero has a doppelganger, and the Cowboys have provided more than their share. Football has provided villains of Grinch-like stature over the decades.

Warren Sapp. Dick Butkus. And Terrell Owens.

Owens is the players fans love to hate, to borrow a cliché. His larger-than-life showboating and constant shooting his mouth off would make him a tiresome bore, except for one thing: He really is as good as he claims to be. A receiver as good as Owens is worth his weight in gold (literally: his salary in 2005 was 28% above the actual value of his 226 pounds in gold).

And yet sometimes a great story can come out of such idiotic showboating. In 2004, when Keyshawn Johnson was a wide receiver for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, he shot his mouth off once too often, and was dealt a dramatic comeuppance.

Johnson was a terrific receiver, who was vocal in his dissatisfaction with nearly everything about the team. The Bucs' coach was Jon Gruden, the youngest head coach in NFL history, and he was equally displeased with Keyshawn's mouthing off. So Gruden did the unthinkable.

He benched Keyshawn.

Being benched is not the same as being cut. If Keyshawn had been cut from the team, he would have been eligible to go play for someone else; most likely, a struggling team with a terrible record would have picked him up in a desperate attempt to boost attendance.

But Keyshawn was benched. He still received his paychecks, he still put on the uniform and sat on the sidelines for every game; he just wasn't allowed to play.

This was an unheard-of move by the coach. To bench a player as good—as great—as Keyshawn Johnson was is to keep paying him for what he can add to the team, but not to take advantage of it. And Gruden decided that team unity and discipline were worth more than the points Keyshawn would score as a player.

From a purely statistical standpoint, this was a questionable decision; the Buccaneers, who had won the Super Bowl the year before, won five games and lost eleven that year. But it was immensely satisfying to the fans who were sick and tired of listening to Johnson; this is the kind of plot twist that's extraordinarily rare in real life, but is immensely satisfying when it happens. The villain gets his comeuppance, including public humiliation; the good guy, pure of heart and determination, sees to it that virtue prevails, at least in the realm under his control.

Football is nothing but drugs and corruption, showboating and prison sentences!

In an interview, Steve Sabol, the current head of NFL Films (and son of its founder, Ed Sabol) was asked about this. "Why do you ignore the ugliness, the seamy side of the NFL? The player strikes, the drug convictions, the highly publicized trials, the egotism, the narcissism, the stupidity, the wife-beating?"

Sabol's answer (paraphrased): "Because that's all common knowledge. There are plenty of news outfits that cover all of that to the utmost degree. We want to cover the other side of it: At the heart of all of it is a beautiful game, full of power and grace."

That's the best answer I can give: I know all that peripheral nonsense exists, and yet it's not there when I'm watching a game. When someone says "NFL," the image that leaps to mind is not Ray Lewis on trial for murder, but instead a green field with white markings and two teams lined up for a play. Specifically, it's two teams with the score tied, about 5:00 left in the fourth quarter, and the offense at the opposing team's 8-yard line. That's the greatest moment a football game can deliver.

In December of 2004, Peyton Manning, quarterback for the Indianapolis Colts, was on track to break the record for touchdown passes in one season. The former record was 48, set by the great Dan Marino. The Colts were playing the Baltimore Ravens (the only team in football with a literary name), and Peyton was one touchdown pass away from tying Marino's record. With a 10-point lead, Peyton and the Colts had the ball on the Ravens' 4-yard line. There was slightly under one minute on the clock.

Peyton took a knee, twice in a row, to end the game.

That's what football can do. He almost certainly could have thrown for a touchdown pass, but his team was already ahead by a safe margin; going for the score would have been self-aggrandizement, nothing more. Peyton did exactly what one would do in any game at all, taking the safest way to victory. I'd already admired him; this, in my estimation, was the moment he proved himself among the Greats.

But the players are terrible people; even the ones who don't have criminal records are those same rock-headed jocks I hated in high school.

Probably true. This occurs to me as well; frankly, it's my main hang-up about football. But you know what? It's the same with every single human endeavor.

I love films, but there are very few directors I'd want to spend any social time with. Same with painters (crazy), writers (drunk), actors (narcissistic), musicians (control freaks), politicians (sociopathic), and philosophers (all of the above).

And for that matter, I suspect the stereotype of the beer-drunk, date-raping jock is inaccurate, anyway. To be sure, in high school (the last time most of us had any interpersonal contact with competitive athletes) the jocks were generally lunkheaded and clueless, but then again, so were we all.

There are plenty of counter-examples; look at Warrick Dunn, running back for my beloved Atlanta Falcons. His Warrick Dunn Foundation builds houses for single mothers; he was raised by a single mother, a Baton Rouge police officer, who was killed during a robbery while working a second job as a security officer.

I suspect that a comprehensive survey of NFL players would find a meltdown of personality types that would pretty well match the American aggregate. The same cannot be said for writers, for example.

In short, the NFL provides us an ongoing drama that mirrors life in a way that few human endeavors can. The gut-wrenching spectacle, the small moments of telling humanity, the soul-crushing weight of defeat; all are available as we gear up for another year.

As an Atlanta Falcons fan, I've done my share of suffering over the last 34 seasons. But every August, when the preseason starts gearing up, the same old thrill starts building in me. This time of year, everyone is undefeated. Everyone has an equal shot. And when the season ends, and the Falcons have lost again, I've learned some humility; I've learned tranquility in the face of things out of my control.

And finally, I've learned hope; because there is always another August.

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