PREFACE

 

“We want football! We want football!”

On a pleasant spring evening, a flash mob gathered at Radio City Music Hall to chant for the greatest sport of the greatest country in the world. Thousands were present to attend the 2011 National Football League draft, hoping to glimpse celebrity athletes, coaches and sportscasters. New York City police cordoned off an intersection to manage the crowd.

“We want football,” the boisterous assembly chanted. “We want football! We want football!”

An earthquake followed by a tsunami had just struck Japan, killing sixteen thousand and causing leaks at a nuclear reactor. Hundreds had perished as an apocalyptic wave of tornadoes hit Alabama. Unemployment was high, the national debt increasing at an alarming pace. United States aircraft were bombing Libya, while the “Arab Spring” revolutions swept Egypt and the Persian Gulf. In Afghanistan, special forces were completing rehearsals for a commando raid to kill Osama bin Laden.

But to the crowd in Manhattan, something really important was happening—the National Football League had locked out its players. Come autumn, there might be no football on Sundays. The throng chanted, “We want football! We want football!”

The United States definitely wants football. Gridiron football is the king of sports—the biggest game in the strongest and richest of nations. Football rolls in money and popularity, and has taken command of that American shared experience, television. NBC’s Sunday Night Football is the number-one network show: not the number-one sport, the number-one show. ESPN’s Monday Night Football is the number-one cable show: not the number-one sport, the number-one show. In recent years, either nine or ten of the ten highest-rated television events were NFL contests, with football besting even the Academy Awards. The 2012 Super Bowl between the Giants and the Patriots was the most watched television broadcast in American history. And of the twenty most watched television broadcasts ever, both in the United States and internationally, all twenty were Super Bowls.

Each season of high school, college and professional football builds up to the Super Bowl, which in its zany excess—testosterone-pumped gladiators clashing, rock music at earsplitting decibels, buff cheer-babes dancing, military flyovers, encampments of motor homes, thousands of journalists from around the globe including reporters from North Korea—is the face the United States presents to the world.

I attend the Super Bowl annually. My first time, I arrived to find city streets packed with what seemed hundreds of thousands of revelers, far more than could possibly have tickets. Many did not, in fact, have tickets. They’d made the trip simply to be in the Super Bowl city, soaking up the party atmosphere, later able to tell friends, “I was at the Super Bowl,” skipping that they watched on television from a hotel. When the Super Bowl was held in Dallas at the Cowboys’ billion-dollar new stadium, some five thousand people paid $200 each just to stand outside the facility and watch on video screens, so they could say they’d been there.

Is it coincidence that America is the strongest, richest and most vibrant society, and also the sole country whose national sport is gridiron football?

Considering football’s cost and over-the-top character, perhaps the United States is the only nation big enough, wealthy enough and crazy enough to have football as its national sport. But there is something deeper. Football both expresses the American spirit and plays a role in that spirit. Without football there would still be fifty stars on the flag and we’d still all be real live nephews of our Uncle Sam. But America wouldn’t be quite the same.

The game offers many pluses. Football is the most complex of all sports on the basis of tactics: its sense of being a living chessboard is one reason play is so engaging. Football teaches young people self-discipline and teamwork, helps promote colleges and universities, can set positive examples for society. One of my children benefited tremendously from his years of high school and NCAA football, the sport helping him mature and gain self-confidence, in addition to granting him the thrill of being recruited by an important college. And football is fantastic entertainment: a well-played game is both exciting and aesthetically beautiful.

That athletics can teach valuable lessons, and be a fine diversion, are reasons even really smart people become sports nuts. Political columnist George Will and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Sotomayor are addicted to baseball. Albert Camus, the archetype of the French intellectual, preferred soccer to attending the theater or visiting museums. Former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, now a professor at Stanford University, is an avid football fan and attends all Cardinal home games. Supreme Court justice Byron White, who died in 2002, was in youth a college football star and said of his lifelong love for athletics, “I read the sports pages first because they chronicle achievements. The news pages chronicle failures.”

The pluses of football must be weighed against many negatives. They include concussions and other kinds of injuries, which occur more commonly to youth and high school players than to well-off professionals; public subsidies for NFL stadiums converted into private profit; young men who spend four or five years at major universities generating revenue but receiving no education; abuse of painkillers and other drugs. An unseen aspect of football is troubling, too. For every one young athlete who becomes a celebrated star, perhaps a hundred gain nothing, being used up and tossed aside.

It’s bad enough that many universities clear $50 million per year or more on their football programs, with head coaches paid up to $5 million per year, while players get only meal money. Did you know that the National Football League, annual revenue around $10 billion, claims to be a not-for-profit enterprise in order to evade taxes? If you think that’s an outrage—you’re right.

Because football is a deep part of the nation’s culture, its impact on the nation should be assessed. The two best books about football—Friday Night Lights, by H. G. Bissinger, and The Blind Side, by Michael Lewis—were not concerned with who wins games, rather with how the sport touches lives. Neither was conventional sportswriting, and both found a broad audience. These fine volumes made me think the football book that had not yet been written is the book about how the sport touches the entire nation. So this book asks what overall impact football has on American society.

Why me as author? I bring a moderate combination of intellectual and athletic experience. My writing includes eight books, a thirty-year association with The Atlantic as national correspondent and then contributing editor, contributing-editor roles at Newsweek and The Washington Monthly, and a political-columnist post at Reuters. I have been a fellow in economics and in government studies at the Brookings Institution, and a fellow in international affairs at the Fulbright Foundation. I played football in high school and at the small-college level. I have many years of youth-coaching experience, including as head coach of the middle school affiliate team for a large public high school. I write the “Tuesday Morning Quarterback” column for ESPN.com, have been an on-air football commentator for ESPN and for NFL Network, and have appeared in football documentaries produced by PBS and by NFL Films.

In the initial planning for this book, it became obvious that many pages would be devoted to faults of the sport—its negative impacts on health, education and use of public funds. To balance the reproach, I wanted to show that football can be done in a conscientious, ethical manner. So I decided to include an insider’s account of a well-run team.

I considered focusing on one of the well-run NFL clubs. But there are fewer than two thousand NFL players, many with high incomes, making the pros’ situations rarefied. Next I considered taking the reader inside a prep football team. But in its depiction of high school football, Friday Night Lights has already come close to perfection.

That led to college football. All the good and bad of the sport is on display in the major collegiate programs, and the college experience is familiar to large numbers of Americans. I decided to give it the old college try, and to seek a university whose football program met these qualifications: makes a major bowl most years, has a low rate of football scandals and a high graduation rate for African-American players.

The criteria cut the field to a distressingly small number: Boston College, Notre Dame, Stanford, Virginia Tech and Wisconsin. BYU, Duke, Northwestern and Vanderbilt would join the honor roll if the benchmark for winning were a little looser. That there are so few college-powerhouse programs that are not tainted would disturb the NCAA—if the NCAA cared about anything other than money.

I chose Virginia Tech. The head coach, Frank Beamer, is the winningest active coach in Division I. He’s been at Virginia Tech for twenty-six years, spurning big-bucks offers from the pros. His program’s twenty consecutive years with a bowl invitation shows that a team can win game after game after game without taking shortcuts in ethics or in the classroom. The engineering school of Virginia Tech is a leader in research into reducing sports-concussion risk. And Beamer represents an Old South university with an African-American graduation rate many Northern colleges can only envy.

Beamer agreed to let me accompany the Virginia Tech team for the 2011 season, which would end with the Hokies ranked seventeenth. The intent was not to recount the season, but to see what high-level football looks like from the inside. There were no restrictions. I was at practices, in the locker room, on the sideline, traveled with the team, wandered into players’ or coaches’ meetings unannounced.

Public-relations “minders” have become nearly ubiquitous when writers are present at large institutions, but at Virginia Tech no one from the university followed me around and no one from the college’s legal office approached me to sign anything. Beamer asked if he would have input into the finished product; I answered no, adding there were certain to be passages he wouldn’t like. “Okay, that shows you are honest,” he replied. Beamer and I made no written agreement: everything was done with handshakes. Which made me think, “Okay, that shows he is honest.”

The Hokies were a breath of fresh air compared to the closed, paranoid style of the NFL. For the NFL sections of the book, I requested interview time with Commissioner Roger Goodell. He agreed; date and times were arranged. But when NFL headquarters staff learned that I planned to ask about the health effects and financial structure of football, the interview was immediately canceled. NFL spokesman Greg Aiello told me it was not “in our best interests” to discuss safety, subsidies or tax exemptions.

This book starts by profiling Beamer; then spends a chapter on what day-to-day life is like in the Virginia Tech football program; then shifts to the NFL, specifically its money; then looks at money and the NCAA; then examines the question of whether college football players are exploited; then examines concussions and other forms of health damage caused by football; then asks if football sends society the wrong messages on weight gain, pill-popping and other issues; then asks whether football has become uncomfortably like a cult; then profiles some of the many former players who have only ruined lives to show for their years in the sport; then asks why gridiron football is uniquely American. The penultimate chapter returns to the Virginia Tech Hokies, describing in detail the 2012 Sugar Bowl game. The book concludes by speculating on the future of football.

Because many of the pages that follow concern things wrong with football, it’s important that the book begins and ends by showing what the sport looks like when you do it right.

Football needs to get its priorities in order. Up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia is a college where this has already happened.

NOTES

I have written the “Tuesday Morning Quarterback” column for fourteen years for Slate, NFL.com and ESPN.com, and shudder to think that project now exceeds two million total words. Some paragraph of his book reprise or expand upon research and ideas first presented in the column. All money figures have been converted into 2013 dollars. To avoid endlessly repeating “in an interview with me,” when a quotation comes from the public record, I use constructions such as “said” or “has said”; when the quotation is from an interview with me, the speaker “says.” For games with confusing dates—the 1981 Super Bowl was played in 1982, for instance—the text cites the year in which the game occurred.