MISTER, WE COULD USE A MAN LIKE HERBERT HOOVER AGAIN
For a guy who hasn’t watched a football game in years (and doesn’t plan to start anytime soon), I sure am writing a lot about the game. The older I get, the less I care about sportsball in all its forms. But I have fond memories of bonding with my father in front of our old black and white Motorola in the late 50s and early 60s. There’s an atavistic pleasure in plopping down in a comfortable chair and just letting three hours go by watching athletes do their thing.
Nowadays, the National Football League sits atop the American sports pyramid. During the Afghanistan-Iraq wars, the Defense Department went beyond buying ad time (“Be all that you can be") and began funneling millions of dollars to teams for “promotions” that helped blur the boundaries between football and patriotism.
The NFL also fetishizes the role of coaches and quarterbacks. In a league that is 70% black, currently 75% of the NFL’s coaches and 80% of its quarterbacks are white. The guys who do the thinking and the leading are mostly white, and the guys who do the physical stuff – running and catching, blocking and tackling – are mostly black. Ex-coaches and ex-quarterbacks often wind up in the broadcast booth doing play-by-play and color commentary, where they help reinforce the meta-narrative of the game.
Every NFL game is a combination of a sporting event, a display of ritual nationalism, and a screen onto which each individual fan projects his own worldview, particularly about race. That’s an uncomfortable truth for a lot of fans, who resent the intrusion of reality into their consensual bubble. They tell anyone who tries to analyze the psychological or sociological aspects to stick to sports.
Anyone who says “stick to sports” doesn’t understand sports. They may know all the players and all the teams and all the rules, but they’re seeing the trees rather than the forest.
Back in the early 70s, I had a friend who was pursuing a graduate degree in American Studies. He wrote a term paper on “Sport as the American Religion.” He noted the rituals and functions of religious practices, and found similar rituals and functions in major American sports. His professor absolutely hated the paper, and my friend eventually dropped out of the program.
But I think my friend was onto something. It’s undeniable that in some parts of the American demographic, passions about religion, politics, and sports are often co-mingled. Automobile racing is probably the purest example – not your fancy-schmantzy European grand prix races, but the blue collar NASCAR circuit. NASCAR TV broadcasts don’t just open with the national anthem, they include an opening prayer as well. NASCAR fans like to wave the flag, although they’re likely as not to be confederate flags. In 2012, a pastor named Joe Nelms offered this pre-race prayer at the Nashville Speedway.
“Heavenly father, we thank you tonight for all your blessings you sent and in all things we give thanks. So we want to thank you tonight for these mighty machines that you brought before us. Thank you for the Dodges and the Toyotas. Thank you for the Fords. Most of all we thank you for Roush and Yates partnering to give us the power that we see before us tonight. Thank you for GM performance technology and RO7 engines. Thank you for Sunoco racing fuel and Goodyear tires that bring performance and power to the track. Lord, I want to thank you for my smokin’ hot wife tonight, Lisa. And my two children, Eli and Emma or as like to call ‘em, the little Es. Lord, I pray you bless the drivers and use them tonight. May they put on a performance worthy of this great track. In Jesus’s name, boogity boogity boogity, Amen.”
Don’t believe me? Check it out on YouTube (link below).
NASCAR originated in the hills and hollers of Appalachia, when moonshiners began racing the hopped up cars that they used to outrun G-Men and Revenuers on the back roads of Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina. Bootleggers and Baptists make odd bedfellows, but I’ll refer you back to Pastor Joe for confirmation that such cohabitation is real.
And that brings me to an article in last Thursday’s New York Times (link below) on a study by psychologist Peter J. Rentfrow called “Divided We Stand.” Rentfrow posits that America can be divided into three regions, according to the dominant personality type of each region. The essay and the article itself (link embedded in the article) make for interesting reading, not least because of the unconventional terms Rentfrow uses to describe the three regions.
Draw a line from Montana to Florida, and you have a region that Rentfrow calls Friendly & Conventional, covering 26 states, most of them Trump territory. The other two regions, which I won’t talk about much, are Relaxed & Creative (the Pacific and Mountain states, plus North Carolina), and Temperamental & Uninhibited (everything else – mostly the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern states, but also Ohio, West Virginia, and Texas).
Conventional and Friendly aren’t the first words that come to mind when I think of Trumplandia. But as the article suggests, one way to understand the two terms in tandem is to read them as “We’re Friendly as long as you’re Conventional.” The term “Conventional” describes folks who have a need for order (the traditional order) and a clear set of rules (the traditional rules) to follow. If you wanted to be harsh, you could call them Benign Authoritarians. It’s easy to be friendly when everyone you meet is pretty much like you. It gets harder when strangers move into town.
Neither the article nor the study talk about sports, but the concept that “We’re friendly as long as you’re conventional” helps explain the outrage that NFL fans feel when even one or two players kneel during the national anthem. It turns out that for a lot of people, professional football on Sunday afternoons occupies a niche not too much different than church on Sunday mornings. And if you don’t think adhering to tradition is important to that particular audience, remember the Catholic reaction to the introduction of the vernacular mass in the mid-60s, or the Episcopalian reaction to the revision of the Book of Common Prayer in 1979.
Now we see stories about fans burning their team paraphernalia and demanding refunds for their season tickets. Time will tell whether those responses are temporary tantrums, or long-term trends.
But maybe it doesn’t matter much. Bill Simmons, the Sports Guy and a lifelong NFL fan, thinks professional football is doomed – not by politics but by CTE. Those bone jarring hits that the networks love to show on instant replay cause brain damage – chronic traumatic encephalopathy. The damage starts as soon as the hitting starts, which means Pop Warner football for most kids.
Right now, the extent of the damage can only be measured once the player is dead. Lawyers can’t prove that this game or that play was when the problem started. But researchers are close to being able to perform CTE tests on live athletes. When that happens, we’ll know, and no one will have an excuse for risking their kids’ health. Will responsible parents let their kids play football? And where will they play, when high schools and colleges begin to drop the sport rather than risk expensive lawsuits?
This is what Simmons (link below) wrote: “You won’t see nearly as many protests this weekend. It’s bad for business. You won’t see Colin Kaepernick, either. But you’ll see a league heading for a reckoning – maybe not this weekend, but someday, and sooner than we think. Football is going down. So is Trump as soon as this Mueller investigation finishes. It’s actually perfect that they’re feuding. They can ride off the cliff together.”
Or as Pastor Joe put it, “In Jesus’s name, boogity boogity boogity, Amen.”