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The Case against Football
 We
are deep in the season of peak football
fanaticism, of bowl games and playoffs. Even I sometimes get caught up in
the spirit of it,
though  I
disapprove of American football in principle.
The rest of the world reserves the
word football for a sport in which the ball is kicked constantly. That
makes sense to me. What I don’t understand is using the word for a
sport in which the ball is kicked only a few times per game; most of the time
it’s carried or thrown. With the almost total disappearance of the
quick kick and the drop kick, the name makes less sense than ever. Think
about it: the overwhelming majority of football players never kick the ball in
their entire careers! The average fan never ponders the implications of this
fact.
Worse, every so-called football
team is actually several teams, an offensive team and a defensive team,
plus “special” teams which do most of the actual kicking. So the
victory or loss of a given game depends on the independent performances of
all these teams.
When I was a kid, players were
expected, at least in college football, to play both offense and defense, just
as in other sports. That’s as it should be. In most sports, from chess
to boxing, offense and defense are inseparable. But football is perverse that
way, like baseball since the designated hitter ruined it, only worse. No player
plays an entire game anymore. This is not only regrettable but philosophically
unconscionable.
As I write, the Washington team,
whose official nickname I won’t repeat, since it is now regarded as an
ethnic slur, has just won a game in so ugly a fashion as to underline my point.
Its offensive unit chose to take the day off, and the defensive unit pretty
much won the game on flukes. This was all pretty much within the rules,
except when one of the Washington players spat in an opponent’s
face, he was ejected and later fined for this infraction, but it tells you the
kind of sport football has become. One of these days I expect every team to
have a special spitting unit too, so the essential players won’t have to
risk ejection.
![[Breaker quote for The Case against Football: A philosophical view]](2006breakers/060110.gif) But
the football obsession is so strong that at the end of
Sunday Mass the next day our pastor referred happily to the Washington
victory, and the congregation applauded. Somewhat unseemly conduct in the
house of the Lord, I thought. I could see clapping for the defensive unit,
maybe, but for the offense?
I admit that football can be fun to
watch, if you set your deepest beliefs aside for a couple of hours. I allow
myself to watch only a few games at this time of the year so I can keep up a
conversation with the clergy. Clergymen of all faiths have it tough, because
they can hear off-color jokes only from other clergymen, but football gives
them something they can talk about with the laity without shocking them.
This too must be counted a point in the game’s favor.
It’s been many years since
I’ve watched a college bowl game, so this year I decided to watch the
Rose Bowl and see the amazing Bush kid everyone, especially the clergy, is
talking about. I couldn’t have picked a better year. It turned out to be
one of the most exciting games ever played.
At least that’s the strong
impression I got from the papers the next morning. Unfortunately, I’d
forgotten to watch it. I’d gotten caught up in some hobby —
knitting booties for my new grandson, I think — and had lost track of
the time until it was too late. I felt a twinge of regret when I read that Texas
had come from behind to whip Southern Cal in the final minutes.
But when I read that the Texas
quarterback had not only passed for 267 yards but also run for another 200,
including the winning touchdown in the last few seconds, I figured it was all a
pack of lies. Journalism isn’t what it used to be either. In the old days
they’d have been ashamed to run a story like that. They had too much
respect for the reader’s intelligence. Nowadays they assume that
football fans will believe anything.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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