We’ve reached that time of year again: The dry season, or as I like to call it, Appearance Fee February (anybody got a catchier name than that?). For those of us in the U.S., the first post-Super Bowl weekend also marks the end of the NFL for nine long months. This is beyond a dry season for sports in the States, it’s a black hole—for the next few months, until baseballs start hitting catchers’ mitts and the NBA gets around to its playoffs, there will be no more anticipation in the air on Sundays. But before that happens, it’s time eulogize another football season. I’ll be back with tennis on Monday.
Have you heard? The world is fragmenting. Millions of adults spend their evenings ogling sparkling new flat screens while their kids get a little fatter in front of whatever gaming machine came out last week. All the time our public life is shriveling to non-existence. The primary culprit in this bowling alone theory of cultural decline is, of course, television. Specifically, the vast, 1000-channel morass known as cable TV.
Ironically, cable, in its most recent and extreme form, has also helped create one raucous exception to the living-room cocoon. On wholesome fall and winter Sunday afternoons around the U.S., people of all races, colors, and creeds gather to celebrate and console one another. No, these are not churchgoers; they worship another three-letter diety: the NFL. The congregation is culled from one of two passionate, and widely hungover, groups of people: (1) football fans loyal to a team from another city; and (2) hopeless, broken gambling addicts.
This relatively recent phenomenon is the product of satellite and cable packages that break the old one-game-at-a-time grip of the national networks and give football junkies something they’ve been fantasizing about for years: access to every game, or nearly every game. Naturally, this isn't cheap, and if you’re not psychotic enough to need to sit through 5, 6, 7, 10 games per weekend, the package is going to be too much for you. This is where your friendly and only slightly psychotic neighborhood sports bar, the one with 17 flat-screen TVs, comes in.
Brooklyn is a hotbed for these bars. Few cities are home to as many transplants from other towns, and being able to see our old teams—the Philadelphia Eagles, in my case—keeps us from having to feign excitement over the eternally bland Jets or lay eyes on the dreaded Giants every Sunday. The blocks around my apartment are a hotbed within a hotbed: on the nearest corner, visible from my living room window, are two fully equipped sports bars within 20 feet of each other, each of which overflows with fans on fall Sundays. The sidewalk outside of them is covered with smoking, celebrating, head-shaking football fans all afternoon.
These men—shockingly, it is mostly men, though there are a surprising number of women who are willing to join them—start early. They take seats at the bar at approximately 12:30 P.M. Later arrivers like myself—in other words, people who get there by kickoff—must stand. Either way, we’re at home here as we gaze up at the TVs, nurse pints of beer, and lick buffalo-wing sauce off our fingers. Shy, glasses-wearing young men feel free to rise out of their seats at any moment and scream, as a player flies down the field with the ball, “Go! Go! Go! Gogogogogogogogogogo! Ahhhhh!!!!” without fear of complaint, or even a stare. Hardened residents of New York City, who might go 10 years without nodding once at their next-door neighbors, immediately strike up animated conversations and say goodbye with multiple high-fives. Rambunctious, scruffy, retro-gear-wearing Steeler hordes—no team has as many fans—share space with sarcastic, beaten-down fans of my Eagles. My favorite line from an Eagles fan this year came as they prepared for a 3rd and short late in the game. "Throw it long, you dumb----es!" someone yelled, which broke up all the other Eagles fans in the place.
One Sunday soon after I’d moved to the city in the early 90s, a couple friends and I were in a favorite local bar on a warm, early season, mid-September afternoon. The sky was clear, the sun was shining everywhere, and we were musing at the bar about whatever game was on the tube with the four or five electricians and plumbers who showed up there every week. It was the pre-satellite era, when only the most committed or pathetic NFL lover would spend four hours indoors on a sunny weekend watching a team he didn’t care about. But anyway, there we were. The bartender was boiling some awful-looking hot dogs next to us. A breeze was blowing leaves into the bar’s open door. Joe Montana was marching the Niners down the field. The beer tasted good. My friends and I agreed: This was perfection. Or at least way better than exercising.
Today’s expatriate fans don’t just share a space, we share a highly complex and evolved language: football is something we understand. A mild-mannered guy begins to soliloquize, to the entire bar at once, “You know what, the Cardinals prove how overrated the Seahawks have always been. They play in that same weak-ass division, and then they just win a couple games and they’re in the Super Bowl.” You think about it for a second, nod, and whisper, “He’s right.”
When another guy at the end of the bar yells at the top of his lungs, “He didn’t have control when his second foot came down!” you nod your head in agreement again. I never thought much about this until I watched a game with a girl friend of mine. “What does he mean, “second” foot? What’s that?”
“You have to get both of your feet down in bounds for the catch to count. It’s only one foot in college football.”
“Why one there and two here?”
“I don’t know.” It was true, I didn’t know, but the difference made total sense to me.
Later in that same game, a running back cruised down the sideline before fumbling in the end zone.
“Is that a touchdown?”
“No, it’s a touch back.”
“What’s a touch back?”
“The ball was recovered by the other team in the end zone, so now they get it at the 20 yard line.” She pretended to understand.
In the second half, one team was pinned at their own goal line, and the quarterback nearly sacked in the end zone. Immediately five guys at the bar put their hands together over their heads, walk like an Egyptian style, and called out, “Safe-teee!”
“What’s a safe-teee?”
“A safety is when the quarterback is sacked in his own end zone. The other team gets two points and the quarterback’s team has to kick it to them.”
“What do you mean ‘his own end zone’ How do you know that one’s his?”
“Uh…”
“And how is a safety different from a touchback?”
By the end of the game, details and terms from the sport that had once seemed so clear and logical now sounded utterly absurd. Why did we know so much about football, anyway, when it means absolutely nothing? If you took all the male brainpower in the U.S. that’s devoted to following it and channeled that into something useful, I’m pretty confident we’d have cured cancer and colonized Mars by now.
Of course, we don’t really know that much about football. Even the most rabid fan is unlikely to be able to explain the Cover 2 defense, or identify the A-gap in the offensive line, or tell you which player is assigned to pick up the corner blitz. To the layman, the sport sounds just slightly less complicated than building a rocket. But it doesn’t matter; knowing the rules is difficult enough for anyone with a day job. The point is, football is one of the few things that inspires collective excitement, even pandemonium. Whatever I do this Sunday—go to a museum; play squash; have brunch; watch a Columbo rerun; watch, god forbid, college basketball; go friggin’ shopping (shopping? please, no)—it won’t be something to get pandemonious about. It won't inspire collective, berserk screaming.
When I think of Sundays without football, I think, unfortunately, of 9/11. NFL games were canceled the following two weekends. This was appropriate, but especially cruel. I remember how happy, if guilty, I felt having it back, having the distraction, being able to switch off CNN. It may not mean anything in the grand scheme, it may even be a sad comment on the quality of our public life, but we had to admit then that sports were essential. We needed something we could understand.