Sport, George Orwell once observed, is war minus the shooting. I suppose that’s true, but I can’t really know for sure. There’s certainly something warlike, or gladiatorial, about football. To be honest, I’m sort of out of my element here; the extent of my football knowledge begins with the movie Little Giants and ends with NFL Blitz, the Nintendo 64 game. I loved that game because you could tackle and tackle and tackle with impunity, which sated whatever bloodlust I had as a six-year-old.
Bloodlust, which reminds me of this guy I saw at a football game my freshman year. I don’t remember anything about the game itself, except that it was “the Halloween game” and we were playing against USC. Anyway, this guy: He was shouting some of the most luridly, wildly savage things I have ever heard, things one could do to the opposing team and its fans if one were so inclined and lived in the Dark Ages. Something about tearing out their hearts and stomping on them or whatever.
Of course, it’s not like he was a berserk maniac who really intended to do all this stuff. He didn’t mean to disembowel the Trojans literally, and neither did the students who joined his chants, worked up by the promise of bloodshed. This is just the sporting spirit, in glorious sanguinary detail.
To understand the appeal of football, and sports generally, as a spectator, it is necessary to understand this particular spirit. It is the allure of the macabre, the same thing that makes you turn and look when you drive past a car accident or made the Saw movies box-office successes. Young men crunching into each other and sacrificing their bodies for our amusement has been with us since time immemorial, an uncivilized impulse just under the surface of our civilization. We haven’t become more sophisticated, only the equipment has.
People who agitate to make the game safer through tighter regulations and better padding miss the point, and have been missing the point for a long, long time. At the turn of the last century, football was a scourge of American society. It was an arena of “mayhem and homicide,” and the players were variously called “young gladiators,” “thugs of society” and a “disgrace of the university that tolerates their presence on the team.” There was a movement to ban the sport entirely, which at one point included President Theodore Roosevelt (his threat to ban football led to the creation of the infrastructure — the NCAA and NFL — we have today). A New York Times editorial, headlined “Two Curable Evils,” pondered football’s malignant effect on the culture and what to do about it. The other “curable evil” discussed was lynching.
Saturday’s spring game was played in tribute to our men in uniform, by our other men in uniform, drawing more apt comparisons than perhaps the athletics department cares to realize. Sports are to a university what the military is to a nation. Both engender intense, frenzied loyalties and exhaust an inordinate amount of resources. Just as the wider American society can tend to feel like the civilian arm of the Pentagon, the modern university sometimes feel like the academic department of the sports program. And if that man I encountered at the Halloween football game is any indication, football might be war minus the shooting, but barely.