Everything They Had (32 page)

Instead of the controlled expansion of the past there was now a quantum jump in teams and in the number of games. Then a merger and a common draft. Which meant that overnight the quality of the N.F.L. roster was cut in half and the number of truly great players on any given team cut even more drastically: every great player lessens your chance of ever again drafting another great player. Where once there might have been six or eight great players on a team, now there will be two or three. The few interesting teams this year—Miami, New England, Buffalo—were, not surprisingly, the A.F.L. teams at the very bottom at the time of the combined draft.

I realize that I write this farewell to football as a resident of a city possessing two genuinely bad teams with little hope of any short-term improvement. But in the past that would not have mattered; the rest of the league would have been enticing. Now, by and large, the rest of the league is boring, more and more faceless, characterless teams with less and less identity; the chances of two interesting teams' playing on a given Sunday are very slim. The great strength of pro football a decade ago was that it was a national sport; now, with expansion, it has largely become a regional sport. Too many teams with too little talent, the quality eroding faster than the draft can replace it. There is a slow but inevitable convergence on competent, boring mediocrity. Eventually everyone will have a record of 7-5 except for a few teams which are 6-6 and a few more which are 5-7 (Curt Gowdy will just as inevitably hail this as a sign of improvement in the league, the fact that any team can beat any other team on a given Sunday).

It will get worse before it gets better. Two more teams are to be added this year: Tampa and Seattle. Which will dilute the excellence about 8 or 10 percent (if the W.F.L. functions next year, it will be equivalent to about two and a half to three N.F.L. teams and will dilute the talent another 10 percent). The people who run the N.F.L. are aware that what they are offering week by week is a diluted product—but they have a marvelous gimmick for getting around what might be a self-evidently boring schedule: increase the play-off schedule. A marvelous artificial hype. Two full seasons. The first one a boring season to eliminate the truly deadly teams and then a series of play-off games for the more interesting ones. More play-off games, more wild cards, a little something for everybody, a little nothing for everybody.

All this despite the self-evident law of common sense on the limits of too many play-off games and too long a season, that at a certain point each play-off game detracts from other play-off games and championship games (a good example is baseball, where the World Series had been seriously undercut as a championship because of artificial play-offism).

If part of the problem is the game, then, similarly, part of the problem is the fan. We must confess our own guilt. We have, for some fifteen years or so, simply seen too much. If there was a network greed which was matched by an owner's greed, then it was also matched by fan greed. Football was there every Sunday, it was free, or almost free, and so we watched it. One game was not enough and so they gave us two, and so we watched two. A pro football game at its best was something special. But if there are two games back to back they are no longer special. It is like seeing two great movies on the same afternoon; nothing is left defined or clear, they run into each other, become blurred, finally diminish each other. Not satisfied that two games on a given afternoon were enough, we were soon served a third, on Monday night. We gleefully accepted it. Somewhere in some network office there must have been someone looking at those Monday-night statistics and thinking, Friday, Friday night … perhaps against the late show on Friday....

In some ways I think even the networks realized that it was all too much and yet they were imprisoned by the sheer marvel of the economics of it all. People who make $100,000 a year selling what people want to buy do not readily hit the brakes, do not lower the register. One sign of their awareness of the problem is a rising level of gimmickry (CBS has just come up with a woman sportscaster who does interviews so genuinely awful that her work rivals—they said it couldn't be done—the work of Tony Kubek).

ABC, which came into the pro-football market last and at a moment when it was clearly saturated, has most deliberately, I think, put its hype into the broadcasting booth. It sells very consciously the idea that Monday-night football is not so much football, but something different. The ball, which historically takes funny bounces on Saturday and Sunday afternoons,
takes even funnier bounces on Monday night over at ABC
. To this end, ABC “cast” its broadcast booth. Cosell: city slicker, smartass, “controversial”; Meredith: country slicker—a little flaky, like all country slickers—more shrewd and knowing in the long run than city slickers; Gifford: churchgoing father, slightly bemused by his children's antics, ready to settle all squabbles.

This year's cast has been less successful. Fred Williamson has returned to Hollywood. Alex Karras, drafted from the late-night talk shows where he played the role of muscle man–comedian, is no Meredith. If the present problems remain, perhaps the network can draft Milton Berle to come in next year as the heavy, and recast Cosell as “lovable.” (Cosell's controversiality is still somewhat in doubt. In essence he is a comparison gainer. That is, he gains by comparison with Curt Gowdy, who is probably the worst broadcaster of all time, and whose ability to punctuate silence with both banality and inaccuracy is unmatched anywhere else in sports. His employers appear to know this and so he comes to us accompanied by Al DeRogatis, whose job it is to try to correct Curt as gently as possible without really implying that he is in fact wrong.) The significant thing about Cosell is that he is significant at all, that one is so aware of the broadcaster. In the great days of pro football, the game spoke for itself; the rise of the broadcaster is a sure sign of the decline on the field.

When I began this article I was doing it by instinct—my instincts and knowledge of my friends' viewing habits. We are fairly good specimens of the madness—men who were 21 or 22 and just out of college when the boom began, in our late thirties or early forties now. I knew that we do not watch as much, and—this is crucial and far more important—
we do not watch the same way, with the same passion
.

The decline in viewing began about two years ago—almost without our noticing it at first. A tendency to turn off a game in the middle, something unheard of in the old days. Then, gradually, a tendency to think of Sunday in nonfootball terms, that is, the ability to schedule events without first consulting the football schedule. And, finally, a tendency to turn on late, timed for the middle of the third quarter to find out if a given game is genuinely close. Equally significant: we do not gather anymore on Sundays for the game. It is just not that important, and it has lost its awesome pull. We still watch in different ways: an unusually good game, Buffalo against New England, might pull us. Or an unusual situation, Namath against a favored but vulnerable Buffalo. One friend watched the Minnesota–Los Angeles game because he is fascinated by the last battle of pro football, the coming of the black quarterback.

So when I began to write I thought it was a personal thing: I did not expect to find it in the statistics (indeed, if anything, I thought I was still part of the statistics: the demographics boys at NBC and CBS still saw the light go on at my house, envisioned my rushing out at half time to buy more shaving cream). But I checked around and, happily enough, the statistics are down: right before the dismal Sunday of December 1 (Jets against Chargers, Giants against Bears), ABC was down 5 percent, CBS down 14 percent (CBS is saddled with those old N.F.L. teams which show the erosion of the draft most noticeably), and NBC up 10 percent (NBC luckily has the A.F.C., which means that it has a good share of the few interesting teams around, the Miami Csonkas, the New England Plunketts, and the Buffalo Simpsons).

So there it is, bless it—even the numbers are down and perhaps if they keep coming down they will force the networks to force Rozelle to force the owners to merge rather than to expand. A sixteen-team league. In the meantime, farewell to you, Johnny Unitas, farewell to you, Bart Starr, and semi-farewell to you, Frank Gifford.

In the fall of 1949, When I was 15 years old and callow and unsure of myself, I visited my brother in Cambridge during the Harvard–Princeton weekend. Sometime late that Saturday morning, the Harvard University Band, more than 100 members strong, started playing a miniature concert in the middle of Harvard Yard. Then, neatly dressed in crimson blazers and dark gray slacks—but no pomp, no Ruritanian motorcycle-escort hats—they started marching through Harvard Square on their way to the Lars Anderson Bridge and Harvard stadium.

I fell in behind them, completely enchanted. They were wonderful; they radiated confidence that they were the best in the world at what they did (and they probably were). One manifestation of this high and exalted sense of their excellence was their individualism: they cared not one whit about being in step. That was what first struck me: they were brilliant at what they were doing, and they were all out of step.

They were marvelously hip, though one had not yet come upon the word
hip
. I was utterly drawn to their style, or perhaps even better, their antistyle. Other bands marched with precision, employing rigidly perfect moves, not an eyelash out of sync. The Harvard band by contrast was incoherent: there was at best a kind of communal shuffle. They broadcast by their style, by their body language (a phrase we did not have then), that they were very good and that they were irreverent about being very good. All we had to do, their body language seemed to say, was listen. Princeton crunched Harvard that day, and somewhere in my memory there is a small note that they scored more than 60 points. I remember little of the game; what I remember is the end and the fact that that was the moment I decided I wanted to go to Harvard.

If there is something that sets apart Ivy League football, it is that hip. In the world of hip the strong and powerful do not triumph—they are in fact doomed to fail. It is the cool and knowing who win. Thus almost everyone who opts for an Ivy League education, football player and regular student alike, makes a choice very early on in which football prowess and football success are somewhat peripheral. These are not football powers. The entire nation does not await the game on Saturday afternoon. Keith Jackson, stocked to the brim with cliches (“That big fella can really lay a hit on you”), is not in the broadcast booth. Yet the Ivy League has its own wondrous celebration, and Saturday is important. The football itself is good, better than most outsiders think. (The Ivy League schools, one Big Ten recruiter said, can kill you on a certain kind of bright and talented high school player you badly want. You offer them a chance to play on national television a few Saturdays a year, he added, but those damn Ivy League recruiters, who are the pillars of their communities, can offer them a place in their law firms.)

What makes the celebration special is not just that it is irrevocably linked to tradition (after all, Harvard started playing Yale some 115 years ago), but that those who celebrate are absolutely sure that they are going to run the country in 25 years. At many schools thousands cheer because their players are going to a bowl game. In the Ivy League fans cheer because they believe that they are going to the National Security Council. That defines the proportions. (In my senior year Dick Waldron, my roommate, was the head cheerleader. On the morning of the Yale game he woke my other roommate and me and said with great delight, “Do you know what day it is?” We admitted that we did not. “This is the last bleeping time I have to cheer, is what day it is,” he said.)

The game matters, the sport matters, but above all the celebration matters. It is an event and an occasion of bonding. If we are not that good at this, the unwritten code seemed to say, then it is only because we are so much better at things that truly matter.

No one would dare go to an Ivy League school and, at a rally, talk about the need for school spirit. Spirit is as spirit does, and the spirit is mostly free. (“How we will celebrate our victory/we will invite the whole team up for tea,” Tom Lehrer wrote in “Fight Fiercely Harvard.”) I have a classmate named Stan Katz, who is today the head of the American Council of Learned Societies, one of the most prestigious jobs in academe. While still an undergraduate, Katz proclaimed Katz's law: Princeton fans, he said, cheer loudly for a touchdown. Yale fans cheer loudly for a first down. But Harvard fans often cheer loudest over vantage points. That is, the people at the south end of the field would cheer wildly if Harvard or the other team (it seemed not to matter) had the ball within the 10-yard line at the north end of the field and the clock ran down at the end of the first or third quarter. They were cheering because the action was coming to their end of the stadium. It was Katz who reminded me of another Harvard cheer during a game when Dartmouth was ahead 28 to 14. The Crimson fans shouted out the score, “Two-Eight-One-Four!” and then in unison added in one great volley: “Now Tell Us Your SAT Scores!”

Mock it we might, but for the first time in our lives we were part of a wonderful pageant. It is almost 40 years since I was a freshman, and over the years those games have blended, scores have faded from memory, yet the colors of the Saturdays have become, if anything, sharper: the huge crowds across the field in blue (coats, jackets, sweaters, scarves) for Yale or orange and black for Princeton or green for Dartmouth. At the
Harvard Crimson
before each game, we had a Puncheon/Luncheon—a pregame lunch at which we ate and drank and to which the visiting editors of the other school's daily were duly invited. We did, though we did not admit it, show our style, our plumage and the plumage of the ladies with us, which was a critical part of our own plumage, though we were loathe to admit it. There is in all of it a wondrous early sense of belonging to something larger.