After his induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1990, running back Franco Harris explained one of his team's secrets to winning four NFL championship rings during the powerful reign of the Pittsburgh Steelers in the 1970s. “Halfway through the decade,” he said with a smile, “we realized that we had a great team and that we could do great things.” So how did they bring that potential to reality? “We said to ourselves, ‘let's make sure that we do enjoy these moments and let's try to share as many things as we can together.’ And we did. We just did a lot of things together as a team off the field and we really shared a lot of special moments off the field just as much as on the field.”1
Friendship. It was a key factor in building one of the greatest dynasties professional football has ever seen. It was also a key component in Aristotle's (384–322 B.C.) elaborate and enduring ethical philosophy. The Steelers had talented individuals, a competent coaching staff, and dedicated management, but they never would have racked up the wins if it had not been for the bond of friendship. Aristotle would hardly have been surprised at this. Though he had never laid eyes on a pigskin, the sage from Stagira predicted exactly the attitude that would thrust the Steelers out of mediocrity in the 1960s and into four Super Bowls during the 1970s. Aristotle could have practically written Franco Harris's script: “Since they wish to live with their friends, they do and share in those things which give them the sense of living together.”2
But we must not to be too syrupy about friendship—or football, for that matter. Aristotle knew well the imperfections of friendship and its limited role in living a happy life. Indeed, as Terry Bradshaw reveals in his autobiography, there were plenty of tense relationships between players, coaches, and management that the Terrible Towels kept covered only for so long.3 Aristotle was astute to observe that “doing,” “sharing,” and “living” together means more than going out for a postgame beer and an off-season round of golf. Some of the best teams were composed of players who spent little time with one another beyond the interminable summer-camp sessions and coast-to-coast air travel. Aristotle's notion of friendship was much broader and deeper than the one we hold today. A taxonomist by training, this student of Plato was a master of distinctions. In books 8 and 9 of his Nicomachean Ethics, he attempts to delineate and describe the many ways in which humans relate to one another as friends. To appreciate what football can teach us about friendship, and what friendship can teach us about football, we'll have to take a closer look at both.
Aristotle's Approach to Friendship
Today, we tend to think of “friends” only as those with whom we pass our spare time. However, Aristotle had in mind everybody to whom we relate on a day-to-day basis with some regularity and with some degree of dependency or intimacy: husbands, wives, parents, children, neighbors, business partners, bowling-league buddies, and fellow Democrats or Republicans (whatever the case may be). Broadly speaking, we relate to such people through philia (the Greek word for “friendship” or “love”), which is the natural affinity moving us to enter into a life of community. Aristotle believed that the need for philia in a happy life is so obvious that no argument is needed to justify it. “For without friends, no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.”4
We must also keep in mind that the verb “to love” (philein) had a much broader connotation in ancient Greece than it does today. Philein is the action one performs toward a friend regardless of the type of philia involved. Whereas today we limit the use of “love” to romantic and familial relations, Aristotle would not have hesitated to apply it to coworkers, gas-station attendants, and hotel receptionists. Similarly, according to Aristotle's broad meaning, every player on a football team needs to “love” his teammates and coaches even if, deep down, he really does not “like” them. Quite frankly, football would not exist without philia. It takes eleven men (or at least two in the case of backyard ball) to field a team. At the very least, each of the members shares a love for the sport and a willingness to associate with others who have the same love.
We can think of it this way: With a bit of training (okay …with a whole lot of training), I could run the Boston Marathon or swim the English Channel by myself. Alone on the gridiron, I can't do much more than run a few wind sprints (if that). You need only one opponent to play a set of tennis or a game of hoops. But one-on-one football gets old fast. It was philia that gave birth to football, and the great American game still needs it today.
So just what was Aristotle's revolutionary philosophy of friendship? It was all based on a set of three fundamental categories regarding the object of love. Broadly speaking, friendship is based on utility, pleasure, a shared commitment to the good, or some combination of the three. Though there is a hierarchical ordering among these three, each contributes in its own unique way to the good life. Aristotle was convinced that “man is by nature a political animal.”5 He meant that human beings naturally need each other even before they go out of their way to seek one another's company.
QBs and Offensive Linemen: Friendship Based on the Useful
According to Aristotle, the most basic form of friendship is based on utility. It is useful and desirable for two human beings to associate with one another if each derives some benefit from the relationship. The object of love in the case of friendship based on usefulness is not the person per se but some quality, benefit, or advantage gained from the relationship. This is precisely why opposites attract.
From the point of view of usefulness, a 165-pound quarterback is naturally attracted to five 300-plus-pound offensive linemen. He finds them useful as he gazes into the eyes of the menacing defensive linemen and blitzing linebackers glaring at him across the line of scrimmage. On the other hand, friendships based on utility are short-lived. Unless he needs them to fend off swarming fans waiting outside the clubhouse, a superstar quarterback can bid farewell to his linemen as soon as the game is over. Similarly, a coach might easily replace the offensive line with five other able bodies and the quarterback would be just as happy—provided they have studied the playbook and know when to block right rather than left. More often than not, friendship based on utility seems to revolve around some element of inequality. In fact, in the Politics, Aristotle argues that a fair and just society must acknowledge and esteem the differences that distinguish various classes of citizens and the role they play in preserving the well-being of the state.6 Such differences are based more on a specialization of competency than on degree. Each needs the other in order to excel.
The same could be said of a football team. A quarterback, as we've already noted, would find it very difficult to perform any of his tasks without an offensive line. But does the offensive line need the quarterback? We could imagine a rather absurd situation in which an offensive line springs into action with no quarterback behind it. The team probably would not score too many touchdowns, but the linemen would still be able to execute their blocks perfectly. From one point of view, a quarterback needs his linemen more than they need him (i.e., to keep from getting sacked), but from another point of view, the linemen need the quarterback more than he needs them (i.e., to advance the ball up the field). In Aristotle's words, they “do not love each other for themselves but in virtue of some good which they get from each other.”7
We can contrast the relationship between a quarterback and his linemen with that between a quarterback and his receivers. Does a quarterback need them? If he is going to pass, yes. But does he really need to pass? If you put a running back like Barry Sanders together with an all-pro line, probably not much. After all, college football had been in existence for over forty years before a rules committee finally authorized the use of the forward pass in 1912 (to spice things up, of course) and saved the game from imminent extinction. Does a receiver need his quarterback? If we assume that the quarterback is the primary passer, and that what the “receiver” receives is a football in flight, then yes. On one level, there is a disproportionate need between the quarterback and his receiver. On another level, there is perfect reciprocity between them (i.e., a quarterback needs someone to throw the ball to).
These examples help us to see how Aristotle perceived characteristics of both equality and inequality in friendships based on utility. Every unequal friendship still needs reciprocity. There is usually about a 150-pound difference between a quarterback and an offensive tackle, yet due to a certain proportion between them, their friendship remains intact. “Each party neither gets the same from the other, nor ought to seek it.”8 Whereas the quarterback can nail a receiver in the numbers from thirty yards out, a lineman can bench three hundred pounds thirty times. The great chasm separating their respective talents and abilities is precisely the thing that establishes the proportion upon which their friendship is based. “For when the love is in proportion to the merit of the parties, then in a sense arises equality.”9
Friday Night Lights: Friendship Based on the Pleasurable
Aristotle's second basic category of friendship is based on pleasure. As every thirty-second Sunday commercial spot reminds us—whether it be for cars, beer, or Caribbean cruises—football is all about pleasure. Aristotle associates pleasure-based friendships primarily with the young, “for they live under the guidance of emotion, and pursue what is pleasant to themselves and what is immediately before them.”10 High school players look forward to the thrill of another Friday night and one more chance to win. College football rides on the pleasures of tradition and fraternity.
Yet once again, good philosophy and good football both need a good dose of sobriety. As any rookie will tell you, everything changes in the big leagues. Youthful pleasures quickly fade into the grueling routine of mature adulthood.
“It was a different ball game,” Terry Bradshaw writes of his rookie season. “The game had always come so easily to me that I had never studied it.”11 Bradshaw consequently spent much of his first season in the Steel City on his butt, either because he had been sacked or because he was on the bench. Bradshaw is one of countless rookies who struggled through the transition from the simple pleasures of high school and college ball to the serious business of the big leagues. “It doesn't matter how good you are or what your loyalty is to a team,” explains Jerry Rice. “Professional football is a business and you will get replaced. It was a business back when I broke in and it has grown tenfold since.”12
Aristotle explains that with increasing age, the pleasures of friendship mature. At the professional level, players are happy if they can find just a few close friends who can understand them and whom they can understand. One takes great pleasure in getting mobbed by his teammates after the big score against the crosstown high school rival. But in the pros, one is more likely to take pleasure in finding an agent he can trust.
Schembechler and Carter: Friendship Based on a Shared Love of the Good
The third and highest form of friendship can be formed when two people discover in each other a similar goodness that motivates them to imitate one another as closely as possible. “For these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good in themselves.”13 In such a friendship, one does not love the other solely on account of a useful quality or the sense of pleasure he derives from the other, but rather because he recognizes that what his friend pursues, what he himself pursues, and what each of them wants to pursue for the sake of the other are truly good.
Interestingly, this opens the door to the importance of self-love in Aristotle's theory of friendship. In order for you to recognize what is truly good for your friend, you must already know—however imperfectly—what is truly good for yourself. Unlike the other two forms of friendship, this third form is permanent, “since there meet in it all the qualities that friends should have.”14
Friendship based on a shared love for what is good endures long after one retires from football. Aristotle observes that such friendship is “rare” and requires “time and familiarity.” Though it usually exists between two people close in age, it can also span generations and even bridge the gap between players and coaches.
Longtime University of Michigan coach Bo Schembechler speaks of wide receiver Anthony Carter in these terms. Bo, like everyone else at Michigan, was awestruck by Carter's dazzling catches and lightning-quick moves between the years of 1979 and 1982. Such feats easily won Carter many friends on the basis of usefulness and pleasure. What galvanized his enduring friendship with Coach Schembechler, however, were his virtues of humility, prudence, and deference to teammates.
Bo tells the story of how he spied Carter sitting alone in the locker room after the Wolverines’ 1981 Rose Bowl victory over the Washington Huskies. “Anthony,” he asked, “what are you doing in here? There's all those reporters out there. They all want to talk to you.” “Coach,” he answered, “they talk to me enough. If I stay in here, then they'll have to talk to some of my teammates and give them some credit.”15 Schembechler says there was no greater testimony to Carter's character. The mutual admiration between coach and player illustrates precisely the type of friendship Aristotle placed above utility and pleasure.
Aristotle also contrasts friendship based on a shared love for what is truly good with the two inferior sorts of friendship in that the former is had only by those who are truly good themselves. “For the sake of pleasure or utility, then, even bad men may be friends of each other …but for their own sake clearly only good men can be friends; for bad men do not delight in each other unless some advantage come to the relation.”16
Corruption within a football franchise can be contagious. If the only shared goal is to chalk up the victories, then friendship never rises above the level of the useful or the pleasurable. But if a team strives to cultivate virtues that will shine just as brightly off the field as they do on, they will reach Aristotle's third and highest level of friendship in which friends love one another “without qualification” and “in virtue of their goodness.”17
True Teammates: The Concord of Friendship
Aristotle speaks of “concord” as one of the fruits of friendship in the sense that two friends who love and strive after the same things tend to agree in mind and heart, so much so that they seem to be one.18 “What is a friend?” he asks. “A single soul dwelling in two bodies.”19
This is the way former Chicago Bear fullback Roland Harper describes the relationship both he and his successor Matt Suhey had with legendary halfback Walter Payton. “I think what made Matt and Walter such good friends was an extension of what happened between me and Walter. When you've got the right guy in front of you, there's this telepathy that goes on that connects you. He had to know which way I was going to block someone so he could set that block up and cut off it.”20 According to Aristotle, this type of concord—or “telepathy” in the words of Harper—is unique to the third type of friendship since it is not based on an exchange of one thing for another but on an affinity for the same thing.21
We would naturally assume that the one thing every player on a team wants is to come out ahead when the clock expires. But in order for that to happen, the players have to share many other common “loves.” What separates a great coach from a good coach is the ability not only to use his players’ individual talents well but also to build concord among them so they can bring out the best in each other. They all want to win, but they have to learn how to love the same things to emerge victorious.
“In my first season, I was less interested in individual performances, and more interested in building a team,” explains Lou Holtz. “Teams win when everyone subjugates his own personal welfare for the benefit of the unit. A team is capable of accomplishing things that no individual can regardless of how multitalented he may be. The team player recognizes this fact, and does whatever it takes to make the team better.”22
This might be the reason there are so many players in the Pro Football Hall of Fame and why it is so hard to select them. Of the many individual characteristics to consider, a key factor is also how well a player contributes to the overall good of the team through time.
The Love of the Game Is the Game of Love
British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) once starkly contrasted competition in the political realm with competition on the sports field. He noted that whereas the former brings only hunger and despair to the world, the latter is the very raison d’être of athletic events. “If two hitherto rival football teams, under the influence of brotherly love, decided to co-operate in placing the football first beyond one goal and then beyond the other, no one's happiness would be increased.”23
Russell's point is well taken, but he raises a further question. If healthy competition is the ultimate goal of sports, wouldn't it be safer to keep physical contact to a minimum? Should we not limit ourselves to baseball, basketball, soccer, and cricket? Is there room for “brotherly love”—or, to use Aristotle's terminology, philia—in a game that requires players to drag each other to the ground and permits them to slam into each other at breakneck speeds to do so? In the eyes of many, football is a violent sport. Indeed, it is. In the eyes of many, football is greedy business. Sadly, it is. But after all, it is still a game and not warfare. We play football and watch football to have fun, or we don't play it at all. Though it is a contact sport, it is more importantly a communal event. Before all else, it is based on friendship, not enmity. If you don't play it or watch it in that way, you probably won't play it or watch it for very long. If you play it or watch it for the sake of philia, you'll find it's almost impossible to give up.
No one knows this better than Penn State coach Joe Paterno. In the fall of 2007, he began his forty-first season at the helm of the Nittany Lions. Joe knows that friendship—indeed love—is at the heart of the game.
“People are surprised when I say that one of the things we talk about in a locker room is love,” he writes. “I just cannot adequately describe the love that permeates a good football team.” Paterno goes on to explain his team's pregame ritual of reciting the Lord's Prayer together: “To gather a team around you just before a big game …each one taking the hand of another on each side until every body and every soul in that room is connected, each pledging to give and to expect the best, each becoming a part of the others—if they can do it here, they will be able to do it anywhere.”24
If only Aristotle were around to suit up.
Notes
1. Franco Harris's remarks are quoted from the Pro Football Hall of Fame Web site, http://www.profootballhof.com.
2. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. David Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 246 (bk. 8, 10).
3. See Terry Bradshaw, with David Fisher, It's Only a Game (New York: Pocket Books, 2001).
4. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 192 (bk. 13, 1).
5. Aristotle, Politics, bk. 1, 2.
6. See Aristotle, Politics, bks. 5 and 6.
7. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 195 (bk. 8, 3).
8. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 203 (bk. 8, 7).
9. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 204 (bk. 8, 7).
10. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 196 (bk. 8, 3).
11. Bradshaw, It's Only a Game, 39–40.
12. Jerry Rice, with Brian Curtis, Go Long! My Journey beyond the Game and the Fame (New York: Ballantine Books, 2007), 36.
13. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 196 (bk. 8, 3).
14. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 197 (bk. 8, 3).
15. Bo Schembechler, with Mitch Albom, Bo (New York: Warner Books, 1989), 92–93.
16. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 198 (bk. 8, 4).
17. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 199 (bk. 8, 4).
18. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 200–201 (bk. 8, 5).
19. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 221 (bk. 9, 1).
20. Walter Payton, with Don Yaeger, Never Die Easy (New York: Villard, 2000), 108.
21. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 202 (bk. 8, 6).
22. Lou Holtz, Wins, Losses, and Lessons (New York: William Morrow, 2006), 215.
23. Bertrand Russell, Authority and the Individual (London: George Allen & Unwin), 72.
24. Joe Paterno, with Bernard Asbell, By the Book (New York: Random House, 1989), 130.