Easterbrook - The king of sports : footballs impact on America

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

To Charles Peters

As an editor and man of letters,

equal in accomplishments to

Harold Ross, Arnold Gingrich and Philip Rahv

CONTENTS

Sports do not build character. They reveal it.

Heywood Hale Broun

PREFACE

We want football! We want football!

On a pleasant spring evening, a flash mob gathered at Radio City Music Hall to chant for the greatest sport of the greatest country in the world. Thousands were present to attend the 2011 National Football League draft, hoping to glimpse celebrity athletes, coaches and sportscasters. New York City police cordoned off an intersection to manage the crowd.

We want football, the boisterous assembly chanted. We want football! We want football!

An earthquake followed by a tsunami had just struck Japan, killing sixteen thousand and causing leaks at a nuclear reactor. Hundreds had perished as an apocalyptic wave of tornadoes hit Alabama. Unemployment was high, the national debt increasing at an alarming pace. United States aircraft were bombing Libya, while the Arab Spring revolutions swept Egypt and the Persian Gulf. In Afghanistan, special forces were completing rehearsals for a commando raid to kill Osama bin Laden.

But to the crowd in Manhattan, something really important was happeningthe National Football League had locked out its players. Come autumn, there might be no football on Sundays. The throng chanted, We want football! We want football!

The United States definitely wants football. Gridiron football is the king of sportsthe biggest game in the strongest and richest of nations. Football rolls in money and popularity, and has taken command of that American shared experience, television. NBCs Sunday Night Football is the number-one network show: not the number-one sport, the number-one show. ESPNs Monday Night Football is the number-one cable show: not the number-one sport, the number-one show. In recent years, either nine or ten of the ten highest-rated television events were NFL contests, with football besting even the Academy Awards. The 2012 Super Bowl between the Giants and the Patriots was the most watched television broadcast in American history. And of the twenty most watched television broadcasts ever, both in the United States and internationally, all twenty were Super Bowls.

Each season of high school, college and professional football builds up to the Super Bowl, which in its zany excesstestosterone-pumped gladiators clashing, rock music at earsplitting decibels, buff cheer-babes dancing, military flyovers, encampments of motor homes, thousands of journalists from around the globe including reporters from North Koreais the face the United States presents to the world.

I attend the Super Bowl annually. My first time, I arrived to find city streets packed with what seemed hundreds of thousands of revelers, far more than could possibly have tickets. Many did not, in fact, have tickets. Theyd made the trip simply to be in the Super Bowl city, soaking up the party atmosphere, later able to tell friends, I was at the Super Bowl, skipping that they watched on television from a hotel. When the Super Bowl was held in Dallas at the Cowboys billion-dollar new stadium, some five thousand people paid $200 each just to stand outside the facility and watch on video screens, so they could say theyd been there.

Is it coincidence that America is the strongest, richest and most vibrant society, and also the sole country whose national sport is gridiron football?

Considering footballs cost and over-the-top character, perhaps the United States is the only nation big enough, wealthy enough and crazy enough to have football as its national sport. But there is something deeper. Football both expresses the American spirit and plays a role in that spirit. Without football there would still be fifty stars on the flag and wed still all be real live nephews of our Uncle Sam. But America wouldnt be quite the same.

The game offers many pluses. Football is the most complex of all sports on the basis of tactics: its sense of being a living chessboard is one reason play is so engaging. Football teaches young people self-discipline and teamwork, helps promote colleges and universities, can set positive examples for society. One of my children benefited tremendously from his years of high school and NCAA football, the sport helping him mature and gain self-confidence, in addition to granting him the thrill of being recruited by an important college. And football is fantastic entertainment: a well-played game is both exciting and aesthetically beautiful.

That athletics can teach valuable lessons, and be a fine diversion, are reasons even really smart people become sports nuts. Political columnist George Will and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Sotomayor are addicted to baseball. Albert Camus, the archetype of the French intellectual, preferred soccer to attending the theater or visiting museums. Former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, now a professor at Stanford University, is an avid football fan and attends all Cardinal home games. Supreme Court justice Byron White, who died in 2002, was in youth a college football star and said of his lifelong love for athletics, I read the sports pages first because they chronicle achievements. The news pages chronicle failures.

The pluses of football must be weighed against many negatives. They include concussions and other kinds of injuries, which occur more commonly to youth and high school players than to well-off professionals; public subsidies for NFL stadiums converted into private profit; young men who spend four or five years at major universities generating revenue but receiving no education; abuse of painkillers and other drugs. An unseen aspect of football is troubling, too. For every one young athlete who becomes a celebrated star, perhaps a hundred gain nothing, being used up and tossed aside.

Its bad enough that many universities clear $50 million per year or more on their football programs, with head coaches paid up to $5 million per year, while players get only meal money. Did you know that the National Football League, annual revenue around $10 billion, claims to be a not-for-profit enterprise in order to evade taxes? If you think thats an outrageyoure right.

Because football is a deep part of the nations culture, its impact on the nation should be assessed. The two best books about football Friday Night Lights, by H. G. Bissinger, and The Blind Side, by Michael Lewiswere not concerned with who wins games, rather with how the sport touches lives. Neither was conventional sportswriting, and both found a broad audience. These fine volumes made me think the football book that had not yet been written is the book about how the sport touches the entire nation. So this book asks what overall impact football has on American society.

Why me as author? I bring a moderate combination of intellectual and athletic experience. My writing includes eight books, a thirty-year association with The Atlantic as national correspondent and then contributing editor, contributing-editor roles at Newsweek and The Washington Monthly, and a political-columnist post at Reuters. I have been a fellow in economics and in government studies at the Brookings Institution, and a fellow in international affairs at the Fulbright Foundation. I played football in high school and at the small-college level. I have many years of youth-coaching experience, including as head coach of the middle school affiliate team for a large public high school. I write the Tuesday Morning Quarterback column for ESPN.com, have been an on-air football commentator for ESPN and for NFL Network, and have appeared in football documentaries produced by PBS and by NFL Films.