What Happened To Football? – by David Nacey

“Lombardi: A certain magic still lingers in the very name.  It speaks of duels in the snow and cold November mud.” – John Facenda, NFL Films

 

Legends of sport, like war heroes, or the protagonists of comic book stories, have an ability to fill our imaginations with wonder and awe. Superheroes are fantasy, though.  War heroes are ordinary men driven by circumstance to extraordinary feats of courage where life, country, and honor are at stake.

 

Legendary sports heroes, however, are not ordinary.  Most sporting legends are born, not made, with exceptional size, strength, dexterity, sensory acuity, an innate sense of positioning themselves, the courage to seize advantage of every opportunity of the moment, as well as other, more intangible qualities that are impossible to teach someone.  That talent has to be nurtured in youth, maintained and further developed during a professional career.

 

I used to make fun of people, especially other men, who told me they didn’t watch professional sports because the athletes were overpaid grown-up children earning several times what a teacher or nurse makes just by playing childrens’ games.  However, the growing wimpification of sports rules, the latest spectacle of woke athlete protests, and players kneeling for our national anthem have now finally convinced me to join their ranks.  I don’t miss watching quarterbacks throw touchdown passes only to have the play reversed by a referee who claimed he was “in the grasp”, or watching a player who just scored a winning touchdown be penalized for something they call “excessive celebration”. I certainly don’t miss football kickoffs at the 40 yard line, which are now almost assured to go sailing safely and predictably out of the back of the end zone just because kickoff runbacks carry “too much risk of injury”. I am tired of the endless expansion of the playoffs in most sports until teams with losing regular season records can still qualify.  I also don’t care to support with my viewership a system which, despite generating billions of dollars in revenues each year, still can’t produce a paradigm under which the average family of four can afford tickets to a game without mortgaging their firstborn.

 

Yet despite my misgivings about professional sports, I still miss the games of my youth.  I miss stories about players playing through the flu, like Rodney Peete in the Rose Bowl for USC, or playing through concussions, like Troy Aikman of the Cowboys, or having a broken finger amputated instead of missing a playoff game like Ronnie Lott of the 49ers (I'm told he still wears the bone on a gold necklace and sometimes puts his Super Bowl ring around it). I miss Dick Butkus lining up over center and spitting on the football.  I miss Sweetness and the Minister of Defense; the Nigerian Nightmare and the Refrigerator.  I miss Rockin’ Randall and Primetime, and even OJ.  Where have you gone, Joe Montana? 

 

I found a momentary outlet for my nostalgia.  I started to watch the old NFL Films series on YouTube recently, especially those narrated by the late Philadelphia television anchor and legendary voice-over man John Facenda.  You can still watch Fran Tarkenton running around, dodging defensive linemen twice his size trying to knock him into next week, before throwing a beautiful touchdown pass.  You can still watch Jim Brown grind out those extra yards, or Gale Sayers juke and twist and dance and stiff-arm eight different players on his way to the end zone.  You can still watch the Doomsday Defense, and see Roger Staubach passing to Drew Pearson.  You can see it all to the tone of martial music and the poetic baritone of Facenda reeling off his unforgettable lines. If I can’t have my old game back the way it was intended to be played, at least I can roll back in time and see the game being played at a time when steam rose off the players' heads, when the team doctor used cortisone shots and freeze spray to send players with minor injuries back on the field, because the players wanted to.  I should be recording them as I watch, because sure as I’m sitting here writing this, there are people out there who would love to cancel even the memory of the old NFL, as too patriotic, too triumphal, too fascistic for our age of golden mediocrity, where even losers make the playoffs, kids aren’t allowed to keep score, and everyone gets a medal for participation.  God bless you.  Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

 

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