Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto

by Steve Almond Narrated by Peter Berkrot

Overview

In Against Football, Steve Almond details why, after forty years as a fan, he can no longer watch the game he still loves. Using a synthesis of memoir, reportage, and cultural critique, Almond asks a series of provocative questions:

• Does our addiction to football foster a tolerance for violence, greed, racism, and homophobia?


• What does it mean that our society has transmuted the intuitive physical joys of childhood-run, leap, throw, tackle-into a billion-dollar industry?


• How did a sport that causes brain damage become such an important emblem for our institutions of higher learning?

There has never been a book that exposes the dark underside of America's favorite game with such searing candor.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

Mr. Almond…is a shifty cornerback of a writer: rangy, sarcastic, offbeat. And every once in a while, he'll blindside you with a big hit.

Publishers Weekly

06/30/2014
Early on in this powerful polemic, before expanding on the numerous reasons spectators should more seriously consider the ramifications of the football, Almond (Candyfreak) declares that he’s been an avid, lifelong fan. Most of the arguments he espouses are familiar: football causes brain damage and lasting psychological conditions; football is largely unethical because it perpetuates a culture of bigotry and militant thought; and football perpetuates a manipulative system of crony capitalism that takes advantage of its players at the high-school, college, or professional levels. Further, Almond makes a convincing case for the theory that Americans have turned to football in order to meet spiritual needs that arose as a result of industrial and social progress. Perhaps the worst of it, Almond states bluntly, is that fans bear more responsible than they acknowledge, as they continue to watch greedily and passively despite being aware of these facts. Throughout, Almond anticipates his opponents’ responses, pointing out that many will take issue with his diatribe. Fortunately, Almond is drawing on his own experiences as a fan to illustrate how difficult the problem, which provides the book with an engaging personal angle that will lure readers who are mature enough to hear him out whether they agree with his conclusions.. An important read, even if as Almond concedes, it offers more questions than answers. (Sept.)

From the Publisher

Almond is dead serious: Supporting a spectacle that causes brain damage is immoral."
—New York Times Book Review

“[Almond] is a very good writer, and his analysis of problems confronting the game today is well done."
—Washington Post

“Almond is a shifty cornerback of a writer: rangy, sarcastic, offbeat. And every once in a while, he’ll blindside you with a big hit."
—New York Times 

“An unapologetic, frontal assault on the game's role in American culture."
—Los Angeles Times 

“Steve Almond's blistering book Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto is exactly what it advertises itself to be: an exasperated, frustrated, wide-ranging argument that the time has come to abandon football — particularly but not exclusively the NFL — as a sport built on violence, racism, economic exploitation of poor kids, corrupt dealmaking with local governments over stadiums, and a willingness to find it entertaining to watch people suffer brain damage."
—Linda Holmes, NPR

“A devastating multi-pronged attack."
—Newsweek 

“Powerful... Almond is a sympathetic narrator, his evidence incontrovertible, the moral authority firmly on his side."
—Harper's Magazine

“A passionate and elegantly written book that finally overpowered any rationalization I could come up with to justify watching more football."
—New York Times, Dealbook

“A helpful and thoughtful read that traces the criticisms of the game and the men who run it."
—Bitch Magazine

“In Steve Almond’s Against Football, a book filled with 'obnoxious opinions' by the writer’s own admittance—and they’re not that bad—Almond makes a case for the fact that football, and the NFL specifically, is at the root of a toxic, pernicious, deadly and deadening culture in America. The book came out on August 26th, and it’s taken a mere two weeks for Almond to be proven right on a national scale, in the ugliest of fashions."
—Flavorwire

“Against Football is a book that kicks and prods and fights with itself and ourselves. Almond is asking himself and us to drop the ironic distance, open our eyes, and truly look at the dangerous, vile, beautiful, fun, highly corrupted, and horrifically corrupting corporate behemoth we spend so much of our money and leisure time enraptured by, and know what it is that we are doing, and what we are supporting."
—The Millions

“Steve Almond’s slim but muscular broadside slams into the wall of sanctimonious hokum served up by the NCAA, NFL, and their sycophantic sportswriter enablers."
—PopMatters, Best Nonfiction Books of 2014

“[Almond's] persuasive book dares fans to consider how long they can continue to ignore football’s obvious flaws in order to preserve their weekend ritual."
—Barron's

“Almond doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, but sometimes it’s enough to raise the right questions at the right time. Against Football does that with disarming humor and humanity."
—National Memo

“What a perfect chance to take a breath, look around, and push the endeavor in a better direction."
—Open Letters Monthly

“This book is an important first step towards a more compassionate and educated discourse on what is, unfortunately, a game many of us are entertained by and deeply invested in."
—AskMen.com, Recommended Reading for September

“Against Football...makes a strong case that football, as presently practiced by the NFL and NCAA, should be reformed or abolished."
—Oregonian

“[Against Football] brilliantly states the case for radical change to save the sport."
—Albany Times-Union

“A book that’s part journalism, part memoir, part cultural harpooning."
—Kansas City Star, FYI Book Club selection

“Against Football is clearly the pick of the litter: funny, pained, profane and sharp as a November Saturday in Ann Arbor."
—Tampa Bay Times

“Almond covers all of the arguments against football...He has sworn off the game. Will anyone join him? As he notes, boxing was once this country’s top sport."
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Pitch-perfect… Against Football is, at bottom, a love letter from a heartbroken fan, notable for his eloquence and clarity. It’s easy to imagine that this pungent critique, with quotable passages on nearly every page, could be a much-needed game-changer. If that’s overly optimistic, then we’ll have to settle for a first-rate piece of journalism and a great read."
—Portland Press Herald

“Almond's book is slim but potent... Almond makes his case in a style that is conversational, self-deprecating, sharp and often laugh-out-loud funny."
—Plain Dealer

“There are no easy answers found in Almond’s book—and it’s an intentionally provocative argument being made, obviously—but what it surely does is get you to think about what you’re doing on Sundays, what you’re paying to watch and how we could possibly let children play the game."
—Las Vegas Weekly

“It's an indictment, a self-excoriation, and a provocative analysis of why so many Americans are hooked on this organized violence."
—Tampa Bay Times

“Almond makes it impossible for us to ignore our willing participation in this corrupt and destructive pastime... Against Football is one fan’s inflammatory, yet indispensable, voice in the current conversation about the state of football in America."
—Brooklyn Rail

“Those who don't care for the U.S.'s favorite fall sport might be inclined to pick up Steve Almond's Against Football, looking for validation of their position. Those who love the sport may be drawn in by its subtitle, One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto, for similar reasons. Almond's power lies in his ability to speak to both readers."
—Shelf Awareness, Great Reads Now in Paper

“If you want to continue to enjoy watching football as you have in the past...you should particularly never read Steve Almond’s Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto.”
—Utah Daily Herald

“As a gesture of respect to a genuine 'critical eye', I am donating my copy of Almond’s remarkable book to the Cascade Public Library, so anyone can witness a moral person making a painful, moral decision."
—Cascade Pioneer (Iowa)

“As coiled and sharp as a scorpion’s tail... A top-notch interrogation."
—Electric Literature

“Almond (a New York Times bestselling author and lifelong Raiders fan) writes beautifully and thought-provokingly about his decision to give up watching a game he loves because of all the bad stuff that goes along with it."
—Made Man

“Almond’s book is a tremendous read, as all of his work is, but more than that, it’s an important one, and one that leaves you slightly queasy the next time you set your fantasy football roster."
—Pop Culture Beast

Nonfiction November Picks, Entomology of a Bookworm

A Publishers Weekly Book of the Week

“A welcome addition to the conversation."
—Shelf Awareness

“Many fans of football will react to this book with derision, and many non-fans will consider his points self-evident: both are wrong. These are arguments that deserve to be considered deeply and grappled with, and teens—who have not yet devoted their lives or opinions to or against the sport—are in a perfect position to take Almond’s  manifesto seriously."
—School Library Journal

“Those who don't care for the U.S.'s favorite fall sport might be inclined to pick up Steve Almond's Against Football, looking for validation of their position. Those who love the sport may be drawn in by its subtitle, One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto, for similar reasons. Almond's power lies in his ability to speak to both readers."
—Shelf Awareness

“A brilliantly quotable, carefully constructed, emotionally vulnerable tract sure to anger as many as it convinces, he argues against the sport’s many sins even as he thoughtfully examines its hold on the souls of the faithful."
—Booklist, starred review

“A provocative, thoughtful examination of an ’astonishingly brutal’ sport… Comic, compassionate and thought-provoking.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Powerful… Almond is drawing on his own experiences as a fan to illustrate how difficult the problem, which provides the book with an engaging personal angle that will lure readers who are mature enough to hear him out whether they agree with his conclusions… An important read, even if as Almond concedes, it offers more questions than answers.”
—Publishers Weekly

Praise for Steve Almond’s Candy Freak:

“This book will, yes, make you hungry, but it will also make you grateful-for wit, for self-effacing humor, for joyful obsessiveness, for the precise and loving use of language to crack open and celebrate our oddness-in short, for a writer as funny and big-hearted as Steve Almond.”
—George Saunders

“I got a real sugar rush and cluster headache reading this bittersweet book by Steve Almond-joy, the sugar daddy himself.”
—Amy Sedaris

From the Publisher - AUDIO COMMENTARY

"Almond makes a convincing case for the theory that Americans have turned to football in order to meet spiritual needs that arose as a result of industrial and social progress." — Publishers Weekly

School Library Journal

02/01/2015
A longtime devoted football fan, Almond spends much of the first quarter of this book solidifying his football bona fides before beginning his onslaught of reasons that he feels he can no longer watch his favorite game. These arguments are familiar—concussions and sub-concussive hits; the game's twisted monetary incentives; its cult of violence; racism; and its vexed relationship with the American capitalism and patriotism. But the sheer weight of the evidence is impressive and hard to ignore. Even when Almond's arguments seem strained, he is able to put the burden of proof squarely on readers to disprove him with more than a simple dismissal. Particularly strong is his complete demolition of the argument that the mere popularity and fixity of the game somehow puts it above criticism. Many football fans will react with derision, and many non-fans will consider his points self-evident: both are wrong. These are arguments that deserve to be considered deeply and grappled with, and teens—who have not yet devoted their lives or opinions to or against the sport—are in a perfect position to take Almond's manifesto seriously.—Mark Flowers, John F. Kennedy Library, Vallejo, CA

MAY 2015 - AudioFile

The author breaks down the reasons that the game he once truly loved watching is slipping away from him. Narrator Peter Berkrot shapes the book with an emotional tone that reflects the author’s persuasive words. As Almond makes his best pitch to explain the problems in football—specifically, the promotion of violence and the long-term danger of traumatic brain injury—Berkrot conveys the author’s dilemma between his passion for the gridiron and the need to have a national conversation about its issues. It’s a tough sell, but through attentive narration Berkrot helps make Almond’s case a worthy argument for serious fans to hear. M.B. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2014-07-02
A provocative, thoughtful examination of an "astonishinglybrutal" sport.Almond's (God Bless America: Stories, 2011, etc.)lifelong devotion to football has never wavered, but he calls for its overhaulbecause he can no longer in good conscience ignore the cumulative andcatastrophic results of repetitive injuries to players' bodies or theprevalence of cognitive brain damage among NFL retirees. The author is not ascold or curmudgeon; he honors the sport and writes expressively that footballis "a faithful reenactment of our fundamental athletic impulses…to run, leap[and] catch." Football is astoundingly popular—"Americans now give footballmore attention than any other cultural endeavor"—andAlmond quotes critic William Phillips regarding its popularity, much of whichis "due to the fact that it makes respectable the most primitive feelingsabout violence, patriotism, manhood." Almond shares comical recollections offootball's role in his life and anecdotes of how fandom brings people(particularly parents and children) together. Two of his proposed remedies tothe current merciless state of football are a mandatory parental discretionwarning before games and the revoking of the NFL's nonprofit status, whichsoaks taxpayers for as much as 70 percent of the costs of new arenas while the multimillionaire (and some billionaire) team owners often pay little. Theauthor posits that fans are ethically obligated to push for change because "We're consumers.Our money and attention are what subsidize the game," and he presents acompelling argument that Americans' "allegiance to football legitimizes andeven fosters within us a tolerance for violence, greed, racism, andhomophobia." Almond rightfully anticipates significant push back for this book,which raises difficult, uncomfortable questions about fandom—e.g., "What doesit mean that millions of white fans cheer wildly for African-American men inthe context of a football game when, if they encountered these same men on adarkened street, they would reach for a cellphone?"Comic, compassionate and thought-provoking.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170602674
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	02/17/2015
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Against Football

One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto

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By Steve Almond

Melville House

Copyright © 2014 Steve Almond
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61219-415-8

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CHAPTER 1

A BRIEF AND WILDLY SUBJECTIVE HISTORY OF FOOTBALL

I believe in ... rough, manly sports. I do not feel any particular sympathy for the person who gets battered about a good deal so long as it is not fatal.

—President Theodore Roosevelt

Football began, more or less, as a series of controlled riots. The earliest variations were staged in the 1820s at elite Eastern colleges, often as a class rush designed to visit harm upon incoming freshman. "Boys and young men knocked each other down," the New York Evening Post observed. "Eyes were bunged, faces blacked and bloody, and shorts and coats torn to rags." The brawls grew so destructive that both Yale and Harvard banned the game in 1860.

But restless student athletes continued to assemble teams, eventually challenging other schools to contests that combined elements of soccer and rugby. Representatives met to establish common rules. The line of scrimmage replaced the scrum, a crucial adjustment that granted one team uncontested possession of the ball. A set of downs followed, then a scoring system.

The game remained astonishingly brutal. The only way to advance the ball was for players to lock arms and smash their bare heads against an equally determined and unprotected opposition. In 1904, eighteen players died, most of them prep school boys. Scores more suffered gruesome in juries: wrenched spinal cords, fractured skulls, broken ribs. Editorialists decried football as an abomination unworthy of civil society.

When word reached Theodore Roosevelt in the Oval Office that his alma mater, Harvard, was again considering outlawing the game, he vowed to "minimize the danger," though not so much that the game would be played "on too ladylike a basis." Roosevelt, whose own son had his nose broken playing for Harvard, convened a summit of football authorities. Reforms followed forthwith.

The mass formations, essentially human battering rams, were prohibited. A neutral zone between offense and defense was established, along with a more sophisticated mechanism to advance the ball: a team had to gain 10 yards in three downs. The most radical change was the legalization of the forward pass. A game heretofore restricted to one thudding plane was suddenly, miraculously, bestowed a z-axis. The ball could be sent spiraling over a helpless opponent. In 1913, Norte Dame used its superior passing game to upset a heavily favored and much larger Army team, a contest regarded as the birth of the modern game.

In a spatial sense, football shifted from a mass of heaving bodies to an ornate and calibrated set of formations—double wing, split-T, wishbone, shotgun—that required a division of labor. A clear hierarchy emerged. The quarterback led the offense. He called the plays, took the snap, then handed off to bruising running backs or threw to wiry flankers, while hulking linemen cloistered him from assault. Defenses countered by diversifying into nose tackles, linebackers, safeties.

Speed, agility, and subterfuge took their places alongside brute strength as the game's abiding virtues. For teams to be successful, players had to move in concert, which meant practice, coordination, a growing sense of interdependence. They had to react to multiple contingencies on each play. These strategic demands soon required the introduction of a managerial figure, the coach.

Walter Camp, the game's most famous early champion, regarded football as a form of "purposeful work" that evolved from the chaotic play of rugby. It is easy enough to see the parallels to industrialization here. Football may be the most striking example of incremental innovation in American history.

But something more fundamental was going on as well: the creation of beauty and meaning from controlled violence. The anarchy of a folk game had been shaped into an organized sport, carefully refined, made more coherent and complex. The excessive savagery of football's origins became the engine of its transformation and thus its saving grace.

* * *

Much has been written about the uniquely American quality of football. It is the only major sport that proceeds as a series of marches into enemy territory. It combines ground and aerial assaults. It is the athletic equivalent of manifest destiny. And so on.

A lot of this stuff is hokum, a kind of overheated historiography meant to boil down the complicated origins and growth of this country, and its diverse population, into a single "American" mindset. But the fact remains: in the space of a century football grew from an obscure collegiate hazing ritual into the nation's most popular professional sport.

Why?

In Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle, his revelatory book about the early years of the game, cultural theorist and former NFL player Michael Oriard offers a set of interlocking theories:

"With industrialization, the closing of the frontier, and the migration to the cities, the American male was cut off from the physical demands of everyday outdoor life," Oriard writes. "Thrust into a new world where traditional masculine traits were no longer meaningful, he found vigorous outdoor sports such as football a compensating validation of his manhood."

Consider the plight of a young man born in Chicago or Pittsburgh or San Francisco at the turn of the century. His parents or grandparents were pioneers. Yet he's trapped in some sooty factory or office or slaughterhouse. Toward what diversion might he turn to feel his physical yearnings expressed, to banish the feeling of urban anonymity?

Oriard argues further that football's rich narrative structure allowed sportswriters to convey the thrill of the game, its suspense and artistry, to a mass audience. One such scribe, Heywood Broun, compared football to the stories of O. Henry. "First come the signals of the quarterback. This is the preliminary exposition," he explained. "Then the plot thickens, action becomes intense and a climax is reached whereby the mood of tragedy or comedy is established."

Fans found in football an irresistible duality. It was at once mythic and visceral, liberating and lethal, Eros and Thanatos rolled into one compact drama.

The size of live crowds swelled. By the 1890s, big games drew up to 40,000 fans. This being America, before long fans of means recognized that there was money to be made. Oriard puts it like this: "Football succeeded as spectacle because the games' own structure made narrative drama possible, but also because these narrative possibilities were exploited by football's promoters."

Football historians have a tendency to cite certain games as watersheds. The 1958 championship, in which the upstart Baltimore Colts, led by Johnny Unitas, beat the New York Giants in overtime, is known as "The Greatest Game Ever Played." Or Broadway Joe Namath steering the New York Jets past the insurmountable Colts a decade later, in Super Bowl III. But a far more pivotal contest took place in 1925, when the Pottsville Maroons, champions of the fledgling NFL, upset a squad of Notre Dame all-stars and thus established the league's legitimacy against the dominant college game. This was the crucial first step in transforming an extra curricular activity into a popular for-profit enterprise.

People tend to overlook the fact that pro football entered the twentieth century as a heavy underdog to baseball and boxing, which dominated the sporting landscape. The NFL managed to survive these lean years for three key reasons.

First, the owners, many of them former players, were intensely loyal to the game. Second, they were shrewd and (if necessary) pitiless businessmen. Third, and most surprising, they viewed the league as a collective endeavor that would require shared sacrifice, an attitude generally rare amongst men of privilege.

Owners of less prosperous teams routinely lost tens of thousands of dollars each year. Despite these setbacks, most stuck with the league. They understood that the popularity of the college game had created a market for the pros, along with a built-in labor pool that included national stars such as Red Grange. And they accepted that the NFL would survive only if all of its teams remained competitive and solvent. They worked together to outflank and eventually absorb rival startups, and approved a number of egalitarian innovations.

League schedules, for instance, pitted the weak against the weak and the strong against the strong early in the season—a scheme designed to keep teams in contention for as long as possible. Owners would later jigger with the college draft to achieve the same end, allowing the worst clubs to select first.

Finally, the NFL, following the example of its erstwhile rivals in the AFL, eventually decided to structure its television deals so that all teams received an equal share.

To be clear: the owners who agreed to these measures were, as a rule, extraordinarily rich men intent on becoming more so. But they also knew that unleashing the hounds of capitalism would create a pigskin version of the New York Yankees, which would lead to poorer teams going under, which, in turn, would doom the whole endeavor.

Football enjoyed other crucial advantages in the emergent marketplace of American fandom. The pace and the temperament of the game resonated with a rapidly industrializing culture. Baseball, measured against its younger rival, felt meandering, pastoral, restrained.

It was football that managed to pluck at the American tension between violence and self-control, brains and brawn, ferocity and grace, individual stardom and communal achievement, between painstaking preparation and the instant of primal release. The action was simple enough to appeal to a child, the strategy dense enough to engage men of learning.

And, of course, television changed everything.

To say that TV has been good for football would be like saying that roads have been good for cars. Most Americans had never seen a football game until television showed them one. Games were rare, geographically isolated events (particularly in contrast to baseball, with its 162-game season and countless minor leagues).

Television proved the ideal medium for revealing the pleasures of football to a mass audience. Cameras framed and magnified the action. The complex mayhem of the game, the jarring collisions, all became simultaneously more intimate and abstract. Commentators helped make sense of what viewers were seeing. Intense bursts were followed by reflective lulls. Drives lent a dramatic structure to the game. But because a team could lose possession on any given play, there was a fluid quality to the action. Fans were subjected to what behavioral psychologists would recognize as a variable reinforcement schedule. There was always the chance that a play would break big, that a runner would slash into the open field, or that a receiver would nab a pass and head for daylight. Or, best of all, that some unforeseeable calamity—a blocked punt, an interception returned for a touchdown— would swing the momentum.

Football also managed to hit the Goldilocks zone when it came to scoring: there was enough to keep fans engaged, but not so much as to make it seem routine. The winding down of the clock served to ratchet up suspense in close games. There were even timeouts for snacks and bathroom breaks.

Perhaps most important, the sly handiwork of multiple cameramen and skilled editors intensified the visual impact of each contest, bringing into focus intricacies and eliciting emotional valences that might otherwise have been lost. Don DeLillo put it like this: "In slow motion the game's violence became almost tender, a series of lovely and sensual assaults. The camera held on fallen men, on men about to be hit, on those who did the hitting. It was a loving relationship with just a trace of mockery; the camera lingered a bit too long, making poetic sport of the wounded."

By the sixties, pro football had surpassed baseball as the nation's top spectator sport. Not only did it flourish on television, but with the print media as well. "I'm developing a strong hunch that pro football is our sport," noted André Laguerre, the managing editor of Sports Illustrated, in 1962. "We have grown with it, and each of us is a phenomenon of the times." Laguerre deemed the college game "too diffuse and regionalized" and baseball "old-fashioned."

Under the guidance of its young, media-savvy commissioner, Pete Rozelle, the league made several prescient decisions. It created a division called NFL Properties, which brought interests such as merchandising and promotions in-house. The league recognized, long before its competition, that America had become an information economy, and it flooded media outlets with stats and player profiles.

Rozelle was essentially a PR man, and he understood the American lust for the mythic, the manner in which his fellow citizens yearned to feel part of some heroic past. In 1965, he convinced the owners to create NFL Films, which amounted to a ministry of propaganda. The highlight reels produced by this outfit were wildly ambitious cinematic productions that featured bloody linemen, frozen breath, and floating spirals, all set to a rousing score, and narrated by a voice actor whose flair for gravitas fell somewhere between Captain Kirk and Darth Vader. It is virtually impossible to watch one of these films without feeling engorged by delirious notions of valor. They are football porn.

Given the game's appeal to traditional masculine values, it's hardly surprising that men of power gravitated to the game, nor that the ad executives of the world understood its lucrative associations. What remains shocking is the vast reach of the game, the manner in which it united low and high culture, the egghead and the meathead, the radical and the reactionary, the proletariat and the President.

Eisenhower played the game, as did Jack and Bobby Kennedy, rather famously. But it was Richard Nixon whose fanaticism was most blatant. In 1969, Nixon telephoned quarterback Len Dawson minutes after he led the Kansas City Chiefs to a startling win in Super Bowl IV. (Informed that he had a call from the President, Dawson responded, "The president of what?") Nixon spiked his campaign speeches with football jargon. He used gridiron nomenclature to nickname military operations. He didn't just go to games. He visited the practices of his favorite team, the Washington Redskins.

The scene I can't get out of my head is of Nixon milling around outside the broadcast booth at a 1971 pre-season game, waiting to do a brief televised chat with Frank Gifford, the former Giants star turned broadcaster. Nixon can't stop talking about how he used to watch Gifford play, how he attended the Giff 's post-game cocktail parties. This is the most powerful man on earth, still three years from his appointed disgrace, and he is unable to settle his nerves. "I know Frank Gifford," he says. "I'm sure he'll remember me."

The NFL marketed football as a traditional game, shaped by Establishment values. The league was both a friend to big business and a crucial partner. It had survived its precarious infancy largely by adopting the tactics of the emerging corporate culture.

But it wasn't just Nixon and the rest of the squares who loved football. Here's what Abbie Hoffman, the most famous dissident of the sixties, had to say about football haters: "They're a bunch of peacenik creeps. Watching a football game on television, in color, is fantastic." This is to say nothing of the Black Panthers, who gathered on Sunday afternoons to watch at a bar owned by hall of famer Gene Upshaw, or George Plimpton, who devoted two books to the game.

"Football is not only the most popular sport, it is the most intellectual one. It is in fact the intellectuals' secret vice," the critic William Phillips observed in 1969. "Much of its popularity is due to the fact that it makes respectable the most primitive feelings about violence, patriotism, manhood."

A more generous way of saying this is that football provided a lingua franca by which men of vastly different beliefs and standing could speak to one another in an increasingly fragmented culture. It cut right through the moral ambiguities and antagonisms of the era.

Consider the one and only meeting between President Nixon and his counter-cultural bane, Hunter S. Thompson. The two spent most of the hour swapping game stories, after which Thompson noted, with reluctant admiration, "Whatever else might be said about Nixon—and there is still serious doubt in my mind that he could pass for human—he is a goddamn stone fanatic on every facet of pro football."

The British writer James Lawton puts it this way: "If all sport is magnificent triviality, American football seems least tolerant of its limitations."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Against Football by Steve Almond. Copyright © 2014 Steve Almond. Excerpted by permission of Melville House.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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