“Why We Love Football,” the latest book by my friend Joe Posnanski, came out this fall.
As is the case with all of Joe’s work, it’s a great read. But in recent football seasons — and this one in particular — I’ve been thinking something I know will be blasphemy in these parts: I don’t love football. Or at least not like I used to.
Ever since I was a kid, I guess I’ve had a love-hate relationship with football. When I was 10, it was probably 95 percent love and 5 percent hate. I’ll explain more later. But while I still love some things about football — particularly the way it can bring people and communities together — that love-hate ratio has shifted. I don’t love the rising communal cost of having an NFL team, the money-driven shakeup of college conferences, the concussions during games, the scenes after games that feel ripped from the scripts of pro wrestling.
This past weekend was a particularly ugly one.
Saturday was full of college “rivalry” games from Michigan-Ohio State to Florida-Florida State that ended with flag plantings at midfield, fights and — in the case of Ohio State — pepper spray.
I’m not going to get into who was right or wrong in any of these. That seems to inevitably lead to what has become a staple in so many debates today: What about when the other team did this or that? I’ll just say that when football games keep ending with more punches than a Mike Tyson boxing match, something is wrong.
It made me think about when I was at the University of Missouri and went to some games at Nebraska.
It wasn’t unusual for Cornhusker fans to approach opposing fans, shake their hands, thank them for coming and wish them luck. And then after the game, win or lose, Nebraska fans would applaud the visiting team as it left the field.
Of course, this was when Nebraska was routinely destroying opponents, especially Mizzou. So you might say that makes it easy to be a gracious winner.
But that’s hardly a given today. These days we have plenty of examples of sore winners and losers. And maybe even “Nebraska Nice” isn’t what it used to be.
This weekend the Nebraska captains refused to shake the hands of Iowa’s captains before the coin toss. The Nebraska players said that this was a reaction to what Iowa had done in the past. I don’t know enough to say who is right or who is wrong. I just know that this feels like a sign of the times. And that was only Saturday.
On Sunday, here in Jacksonville, there was a clear wrong. A brutal hit left Jaguars quarterback Trevor Lawrence on the field, his body reacting in a way that was frighteningly reminiscent of when Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa suffered another head injury earlier this year.
While Houston Texans linebacker Azeez Al-Shaair was roundly condemned for the hit and suspended for three games, football is an inherently violent game. And that isn’t something new. It is something that has long been embraced, applauded, marketed.
In the foreword to “Why We Love Football,” Posnanski tells a story about Bears linebacker Dick Butkus surprising people by being mild-mannered as an actor. But as a player, defensive end Deacon Jones said, “Dick Butkus hated everybody. I think he even hated himself.”
To this, Butkus protested: “I never set out to hurt anybody deliberately. Unless it was, you know, important, like a league game or something.”
Here’s the thing: We don’t love football in spite of how Butkus played. We love it because of it.
Tommy Tomlinson — a lifelong Georgia Bulldogs fan who has written books about, among other things, actual dogs in “Dogland” — wrote a Substack post about “Why We Love Football,” trying to explain why, despite all of the sport’s complications and contradictions, he still does.
“There is so much you have to sweep under the rug, so much you have to rationalize, in order to enjoy football,” he wrote. “We all, I suspect, are hypocrites about some things. Football is one of my things.”
When I was 10, my dad took a job as a pastor at a church in a small town about 40 miles south of Green Bay and I think, by Wisconsin law, we became football and, specifically, Packers fans.
Up until that time, I only had eyes for baseball and particularly the Detroit Tigers. And I think that’s the one reason why when I fell for football, it wasn’t 100 percent love. I didn’t want to cheat on baseball. And I didn’t like that in the early 1970s, just a few years after the first Super Bowl, you could feel football blowing past what was considered America’s pastime.
But ultimately I did fall hard for football. And not because the Packers were good. They were awful. This was after the Lombardi years and before Brett Favre, Aaron Rodgers or Jordan Love. This was the era of John Hadl, Lynn Dickey and Randy Wright; part of a 20-year stretch with just one playoff victory.
Still, we watched the Packers every Sunday. Everybody did.
I’ve told this story before, but during football season my dad would promise to keep his sermons short, so everyone could make it home in time for the noon kickoff. Once I was old enough to drive, I’d drive our second car to church, leave immediately after the service, get home and start making lunch — so that by noon, we could be sitting in the living room, watching a small black-and-white TV with a rabbit-ears antenna.
Even though I eventually covered a dozen Super Bowls, watching those games with my dad remain my favorite football memories.
I never went to a game at Lambeau Field as a kid. Couldn’t get tickets. It wasn’t until I was a sportswriter that I went there to cover a game (and got tickets for my parents and wife). I covered hundreds of NFL and college games, all over the country. I loved a lot of it, particularly the atmosphere of a big game in a place full of tradition.
Only at some point I realized that I didn’t love it nearly as much as most fans did.
I’ll readily admit to some hypocrisy here. I love some of the absurdity of sports. I even enjoy some of the celebrations that have earned scorn (going back to baseball, Jose Bautista’s bat flip comes to mind). And I do still love football — but these days particularly international football, or soccer as we call it in America, and Liverpool FC.
And that version of football obviously has had plenty of its own problematic moments.
Roger Bennett, host of the “Men In Blazers” soccer podcast and author of a book largely about his love of America (including the Chicago Bears), says of international football: “It’s just a mirror that’s held up to the society that surrounds it.”
American football feels like that today. We not only have become more tribal, we have become more angry. We’re itching for a proverbial fight. And we’re finding one everywhere, including actual ones on football fields.
If you’ve watched football this season, you’ve probably seen the “Love Your Enemies” ads, featuring a series of black-and-white images of people screaming at each other. And maybe you’ve also seen the “Timeout Against Hate” ads, a collaborative effort of eight major sports leagues.
“Hate is winning out there,” a series of sports stars say. “So let’s use this moment to change the momentum and call a timeout on hate.”
And then the commercial ends and it’s back to the football; back to announcers telling us it’s a war and these two teams don’t like each other; back to flag-planting and fighting.
mwoods@jacksonville.com
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