Read The Football Fan's Manifesto Online
Authors: Michael Tunison
The Football Fan's Manifesto (2 page)
I.1 Other Major Sports Are Inherently Inferior to Pro Football and Therefore Unworthy of Our Time.
Professional football is the undisputed god-king of American sports. It always has been so, even back in the times when we hadn’t quite realized it yet. The mere existence of pro football obviates the need for all other contests of athletic skill, yet these other “sports” (parlor games, really) remain despite their complete and utter irrelevance. Why we abide by such unnecessary, quasi-athletic diversions when we have the game of football is a testament to our modern excess.
To be fair, these other “sports” do serve some minor purpose. And not only to give us something to mock. Because the NFL has yet to genetically produce elite athletes able to withstand the rigors of a year-round schedule (why the hold up?), we’re left with nearly seven desolate months of no meaningful football. During these dark times of despair, some of these lesser sports are all we have to stave off
the clammy hands of adult responsibilities and a social life. They’re passable, if barely adequate, distractions to fill the hours until the late summer rolls around. That’s all. Nothing more. Certainly nothing to get worked up about.
However—and it should come as a great shock—there are depraved individuals out there who maintain that some of these other “sports” can produce a level of enjoyment on par with the NFL. The sickest among these deviants even insist that others sports can provide a
preferable
viewing experience to professional football. As if such a thing were actually possible. Wrongheaded as this belief is, our permissive, increasingly soccer-tolerant culture has allowed it to propagate in certain circles with an air of acceptance. It’s high time we set the record straight. In doing so, hopefully we can reach these woefully misinformed souls before they do something unforgivable like purchase season tickets to the Red Sox.
Baseball
—In 1987,
Washington Post
columnist Thomas Boswell memorably attempted, and epically failed, to enumerate ninety-nine reasons why baseball is better than football. Of course it didn’t take him more than five to screw the whole thing up. Singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” at Wrigley Field is supposed to be a virtue? I guess that’s a possibility if one were to disregard the famously awful renditions by Ozzy Osbourne, Jeff Gordon, and dozens of other celebrity duffers. More to the point, the Major League
Baseball regular season lasts approximately two and a half lifetimes and feels at least three times that long. A
Lord of the Rings
movie doesn’t drag on as much. By the time it gets halfway interesting in September and October, football season has already begun. Poor timing on your part,
besuboru
. Half the players in the league now require the services of an interpreter to tell fans to fuck off (at least have the courtesy to cuss me out in my own language, Ichiro). The game falls back on its puffed-up long-gone era of cultural import; meanwhile, MLB
playoff
games draw about half the audience of an NFL regular season contest. And any sport that considers Bartolo Colon an athlete immediately gets bumped down to second-tier status. At least the fatties in football can block. Unless they play for the Rams.
Basketball
—Thanks, but I prefer to stick with sports that I know are only
probably
fixed. Not to mention those whose leagues aren’t teetering on the brink of insolvency. Contraction is a very real threat for several NBA teams, which figures to ruin the lives of nearly dozens of rabid hoop fans. Besides, the NBA Playoffs drag on about as long as the baseball regular season. The perennial powerhouse Spurs might be the most unlikeable team in all of sports. The most compelling story line in recent years is the never-ending drama surrounding LeBron James’s eventual departure from Cleveland, as though anyone found LeBron
even remotely likeable. And, okay, sure, college basketball is a hoot (for about a month, anyway), but anything that Duke excels at is ruined for all parties involved. Not to mention the disconcerting correlation between getting older and the creepiness of getting emotional about teenagers committing to a certain school.
College Football
—The bastard cousin of professional football exists solely as a refuge for aged frat boys and Southerners. Proponents will harangue you endlessly about its superiority to the pro game, claiming that the atmosphere at a college football game is far more raucous than its professional counterpart and that student athletes play for love, not money (okay, love, under-the-table gifts from the university, the promise of future riches, boylike adulation from boosters, and poon up to your hairline). All this is actually fairly accurate, but ultimately moot, because the NCAA refuses to implement a playoff system, opting to continue with its convoluted Bowl Championship Series, which leads to the annual screwing of more deserving teams in favor of USC and Ohio State. It may be true that the way college football conducts overtime is technically fairer, since each team is guaranteed at least one possession. Problem is, it takes goddamn forever. I will say in college football’s defense that at least Duke sucks at it.
Soccer
—Soccer fans will never fail to remind you
that there are more people around the globe who follow “the Beautiful Game” than what they dismissively refer to as “American football.” That’s all well and good, Ronaldinminihinho, but there are also more people around the world living in abject poverty than in America, so let’s all jump on that bandwagon too!
Rugby
—I’m not even sure rugby fans actually like their sport so much as they enjoy snottily explaining to you how much tougher rugby is than football because rugby players don’t wear helmets or pads. Rugby could actually be fun to watch, but you’ll get so tired of the bombardment of smug coming from the guy who spent a summer abroad in Australia that you’ll never actually bother to check it out. That, and their fans wear scarves. You know the other type of fans who love scarves? Harry Potterphiles. From this we can conclude that rugby is one step removed from Quidditch.
NASCAR
—Fess up, racing fans. This is just an excuse to spend an entire day getting plastered, isn’t it? Not that football isn’t, but at least football fans don’t make it quite so obvious. Nor do they need a hefty supply of OxyContin to make it through the sheer crushing repetition that is watching cars circle a track eight thousand times.
Formula One
—Like NASCAR, but for foreigners, meaning it’s even more boring and nobody is allowed to pass anyone else.
Tennis
—If the argument in favor of tennis doesn’t begin and end with Ana Ivanovic, Serena Williams, and Maria Sharapova, then you’re wasting your breath. Your heaving, luscious breath. Whew. Excuse me.
Golf
—Mark Twain’s famed axiom that the game is “a good walk spoiled” doesn’t quite tell the whole story. It’s a waste of a lot of money too. Sure, Tiger Woods is amazing, but even when he plays injured, he still blows the field away. Where’s the drama in that? John Daly does tailgate like a pro, however.
Boxing
—Because the sweet science has been off the radar of the casual sports fan for such a long period of time, it’s mostly the purists that have hung on to keep this sport afloat. And my God, they’re fucking annoying.
Scripps National Spelling Bee
—Most viewers would not categorize a spelling bee as a sporting contest, but there it is on ESPN each spring. Worse than watching the Indian kid get screwed out of the title every year is observing all the twee Decemberist-listening pseudo-intellectual fans fetishizing a contest that requires inflexible rote memorization and no imagination while crowing about how they can spell “postlapsarian” off the top of their head. I hope they get run over by a newspaper truck.
Bowling
—Jerome Bettis once bowled a 300 game, which proves anyone can bowl their weight. It just so happens that this corresponds to a perfect game.
Billiards
—Difficult to back a sport where ads for instructional tapes on how to make trick shots are more entertaining than the sport itself.
World Series of Poker
—Two journalists have written captivating books about trying their hands at playing professional football. Though
Paper Lion
and
A Few Seconds of Panic
are thrilling accounts of the exploits of George Plimpton with the Detroit Lions and Stefan Fatsis with the Denver Broncos, it is clear they are overwhelmed by the level of competition that they face. Meanwhile, writer James Mc-Manus takes a crack at the World Series of Poker in
Positively Fifth Street
and damn near wins the whole tournament. Viz: If a journalist can do it well, it isn’t a sport.
Hockey
—I thought we were only covering major sports here. Okay, okay. Easy now, hockey fans. Don’t go pelting my house with squid. I know your sport is enjoying a minor resurgence in recent years. That’s gotta put you on pace to overtake the runaway freight train of popularity that is the rock paper scissors championship circuit any year now.
I.2 A People’s History of Football Fanaticism
It was back in the time of the ancients (sometime pre-merger, I believe) that God gave unto man His only begotten sport, that of the most holy game of football. Man, being mired in benighted acts of civilization-building and
fundamental scientific discovery, was not yet ready to accept this altogether amazing gift. Instead, humankind pissed away centuries occupying itself with the disgusting perversions of soccer and rugby before eventually coming to its collective senses. As with most things, the blame can be laid at the unwashed, hairy feet of the Europeans.
The figure responsible for humanity’s overdue crawl from the muck was a man named Walter Camp, a visionary American hero in the truest and most badassed sense, despite the fact that he attended Yale and was therefore probably a privileged asshole. Camp saw the flaws inherent in lesser football imitations and implemented critical changes, including establishing the line of scrimmage, down-and-distance rules, and the two-point safety, and making what can be considered a holding penalty as vague and open to arbitrary interpretation by referees as possible. Soon, a golden age was born.
In the generations since Camp laid these foundations of the game, professional football has supplanted baseball as our country’s most popular sport. Football accomplished this with the canny strategy of offering a spectacle that’s actually interesting and fun to watch. Somehow that seemed to resonate with people. This was not always the case. Long ago, the leather-headed greats of the past lined up in austere formations and dove into sloppy, sepiatoned piles. It was kind of like how the Tennessee Titans run their offense nowadays, sans LenDale White shedding fast-food wrappers as he waddles down the field.
Much has changed in the NFL’s roughly ninety years of operation. It’s a much more offensively oriented game now. A defender who even so much as thinks of hitting an opposing quarterback or receiver outside his league-mandated “contact zone” (a two-inch area located on the chest between the jersey numbers) stands to get penalized for roughing the passer or pass interference and likely charged with second-degree aggravated assault (first degree if they have the gall to tackle him).
One thing that has not changed is the endlessly intricate and nacho-intensive nature of football fandom. Even with modern game-neutering provisions (if you can’t horse-collar tackle, how is Roy Williams expected to play the game?), the visceral excitement of watching pro football is without equal. That is, unless you’re a fan of the Detroit Lions, in which case crocheting oven cozies is probably as engrossing and certainly more rewarding. In its ascension to the lofty heights of utterly ineffable awesomeness, the game has come to be littered with a multitude of arcane procedures, involved formations, and labyrinthine rules. For most players, the learning curve is measured in years and drunk-driving arrests. Football fandom has no fewer complexities, filled as it is with an endless supply of argued-over details, unspoken rules, and Byzantine game-day routines. Lacking an ironclad catechism for fandom, tons of NFL followers succumb to the pitfalls of face-painting, pink jerseys, and network pregame shows each year. This is a sad fate
to befall anyone, even the already unfortunate fans in Green Bay.
To be a truly hard-core fan, one must be inured to the highly regimented lifestyle that drives grown men to invest all of their emotional energy, lingering shreds of sanity, and disposable income to live vicariously through other, overgrown men they’ll probably never meet (and if they do, wish they hadn’t), who are paid handsomely by a corporation with yearly revenue in the billions. Other than their seven-figure salaries, extensive perks, and adulation, what do these athletes have to live for? Fans give these men purpose, and they in turn give fans a figure of worship. The circle of life, it twirls on. Will you, the fan, be asked to sacrifice to keep it moving? No, because asking implies that you have an option. Baseball fans ask. That’s why they fail.
