I’m going to start in a dark place and work my way toward the light.
So: I’m a lifelong Oakland Raiders fan.
Confessing this publicly to anyone who knows anything about the NFL is like revealing that I’m the son of two psychoanalysts, which also happens to be true. I can tell exactly what other people are thinking, whether or not they ever say it out loud. They are thinking: this guy is a fucking nut.
For those who are not familiar with the Raiders, they are the epitome of the term once proud, a franchise incapable of accepting that its best years are past. I think of them as the NFL’s version of a wildly popular child actor who starred in a couple of minor hits in the eighties and has now grown into an ugly, entitled, coke-addicted adult who struts around D-list parties in mirrored sunglasses and parachute pants reeking of Polo cologne and insulting the women who decline his invitation to head back to his pad to check out his python.
There is some chance I have given this analogy too much thought.
The point is that the Raiders were very good when I was young and that they have been very bad for the past decade, the laughingstock of the NFL, such that they are best known at present not for any actual players but for their most exuberant fans, who smear their faces with silver and black and (for no clear reason) wear tunics with spikes and dog collars and other vaguely post-apocalyptic accouterments.
I started watching them at about age five. We lived in a sleepy suburb an hour south of San Francisco, but the 49ers were terrible. The Raiders were where the action was. They were giant and swaggering. I was small and cowering. The psychic math was not especially hard to do.
Mostly, I wanted to be close to my dad. That’s why most boys take up with sports. Teamwork, dedication, killer instinct—all that stuff comes later. In the beginning, you just want to be with your dad. And that’s what football got me, every Sunday afternoon. We’d hang a thick wool blanket over the curtain rod in the TV room to cut the glare and watch Kenny “The Snake” Stabler hobble around on his ruined knees and throw his lovely ducks to Cliff Branch and Freddy Biletnikoff. We watched Mark van Eeghen blast into the line maybe a million times, gaining 2 yards the hard way. We watched All-Pro linebacker Ted Hendricks wield his forearm like a truncheon, and cornerback Lester Hayes patrol the secondary so extravagantly festooned with a snot-colored adhesive called Stickum as to appear leprous. We watched a bald, ill-tempered obelisk by the name of Otis Sistrunk descend upon quarterbacks like a slow and final doom.
We watched the Raiders dismantle the Vikings in Super Bowl XI and squeak by the Chargers in the playoffs on a last-second fluke fumble that was batted and punched and kicked into the end zone then fallen upon by the sure-handed tight end Dave Casper.
I was the only hardcore fan in our house, the only one who submitted to the narcotic absurdity of the arrangement, who allowed the wins and losses to become personal. It was how I coped with the competitive angst of having two brothers who were bigger and stronger than me. I handed my fate over to the Raiders. I let them do the dirty work.
Later on, I adapted. I started playing sports myself, well enough to make a few teams. I experimented with mild forms of delinquency and smoked huge amounts of pot and ate my weight in low-grade candy and (Lord help me) used the family hot tub as a masturbatory aide. I took the SATs then I took them again and shipped off to a liberal arts college where being a football fan seemed to connote a tragic lack of imagination.
So I left the game behind for a while.
That’s bullshit, of course. I never did any such thing. I was still rooting through the dry soil of the box scores, tracking the Raiders’ descent into mediocrity while pretending I had better things to do. These better things included interning in the sports department of my hometown newspaper, and later becoming a sportscaster for the campus radio station. Somewhere in the world, I’m afraid, there exists a recording of me providing the color commentary for a game in which we bowed to our rivals 56–0, a score that makes the game sound closer than it was.
Then I was in El Paso, working at a newspaper and living with a woman who considered football an unfortunate symptom of patriarchal thought systems. I was trying to take myself more seriously. That’s how I wound up in the sarcophagal sub-basement of the El Paso Public Library, where they stashed the fiction and where, one day, I came across a novel by Don DeLillo called End Zone, which I picked up for the simple reason that the front cover featured a football.
It came as a pleasant shock that the book was actually about football, and more so that it was set in West Texas. This seemed like a very big deal to me. It encouraged the delusion—always so tantalizing to the chronically self-involved—that there was some cosmic connection between the text and myself.
End Zone’s narrator is Gary Harkness, a running back who winds up at tiny Logos College to evade the draft board and settle his addled brain. “Whatever complexities, whatever dark politics of the human mind, the heart—these are noted only within the chalked borders of the playing field,” Harkness assures us. “At times strange visions ripple across the turf; madness leaks out. But wherever else he goes, the football player travels the straightest of lines. His thoughts are wholesomely commonplace, his actions uncomplicated by history, enigma, holocaust or dream.”
I had no idea what this meant. But I loved End Zone for its descriptions of football, passages in which the sensual experience of the game generated a hallucinogenic intensity. “On a spring-action trap I went straight ahead,” Harkness says, “careened off 77 and got leveled by Mike Mallon. He came down on top of me, breathing into my face, chugging like a train. I closed my eyes. The noise of the crowd seemed miles away. Through my jersey the turf felt chilly and hard. I heard somebody sigh. A deep and true joy penetrated my being. I opened my eyes. All around me there were people getting off the ground. Directly above were the stars, elucidations in time, old clocks sounding their chimes down the bending universe.”
I had never thought about football as a transcendent experience. I’d accepted the allegedly more enlightened view that it was a diversion from the serious business of adulthood, and that my fandom represented a shameful refusal to leave childhood behind. But the exquisite renderings of football in End Zone suggested a richer possibility: that sport awakens within us deep recesses of emotion, occasions for reflection, reasons to believe.
Late in the novel, Harkness and his teammates play a pickup game in the driving snow. It quickly degenerates into a free-for-all. “We were adrift within this time and place and what I experienced then, speaking just for myself, was some variety of environmental bliss,” he observes. “We were getting extremely basic, moving into elemental realms, seeking harmony with the weather and the earth.” This was the novel’s thrashing heart: an ecstatic celebration of the body at play.
Passages like this sent me reeling back to my own youth, to the game we played every day at recess and after school. Tackle the Pill had one rule: bring down the kid with the football. You didn’t even need a ball. Some days we played with an empty milk carton. And what I loved about the game were the revelations of momentum and leverage, the way an abrupt reversal of direction would send a tackler slingshotting past, and you would burst into the clear, adrenaline fizzing beneath your ribs, the next tackler taking his angle and some ancient instinct within you already working out how to make him miss—stutter step, spin, straight-arm, all three synced and firing in sequence—and always the need to keep those knees churning, especially if someone grabbed your shirt, to churn toward that magical trice when your centrifugal energy ripped his grip loose and sent his body hurtling out of your orbit like a satellite hitting escape velocity.
This was football distilled to its essence: You think you can tackle me. Go ahead. Try.
Emmett Creed, the gnomic coach in End Zone, puts it like this:
“People stress the violence. That’s the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there’s a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There’s a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies strewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there’s a satisfaction to the game that can’t be duplicated. There’s a harmony.”
Creed was right. I loved the pileups, the sensation of being crushed by the weight of my loyal enemies. The rules dictated that some other boy would have to grab the ball and set off. But a few times a game, after a long run, there would be a stillness where by some unspoken assent we could briefly retire from the hard work of being boys, all the fighting and feinting, the pretending not to be afraid, where we consented to be joined in these secret burdens, a dozen brothers pressed against each other and the earth in an unembarrassed embrace.
It’s true: we accepted the pain. I can remember being knocked cold in a game with some bigger kids and staggering home from Los Robles Park with a knot above my eye and a thumping headache, livid they wouldn’t let me keep playing. I was probably nine. At a sleepover in seventh grade, we snuck out for a midnight game and Steve Hayes tripped on a sprinkler head and broke his arm and we got his best friend to walk him home so his dad could drive him to the emergency room so we could finish the contest.
During a pickup game in high school, in a drenching rain, someone came up under my arm and lurched me out of bounds. I walked back to the huddle with a peculiar sensation of tightness on the right side of my upper torso then heard a dull pop, which was the ball of my shoulder joint slipping back into its socket. The same thing happened again a few plays later. It never occurred to me to stop playing.
Much of this was the invincible idiot joy of youth. But there’s something about football that elicits this behavior. You know you might get hurt playing. That’s part of why you play, to see what you’re made of, how you take a hit, to see what happens when your courage meets real hazard.
In high school, I began showing up outside Stanford Stadium on Saturday mornings so I could sell hot dogs at the football games. This involved lugging around a giant steel box heated by two cans of Sterno and filled with hot dogs wrapped in white paper, a set-up that led to blistered hands and several small fires.
I loved the job. Stanford wasn’t much good in the early eighties, but they had an all-world quarterback named John Elway. He was almost comically handsome, a blond, horse-jawed kid who ambled around with a pigeon-toed grace. If Johnny Unitas were crossbred with Zeus the result would be John Elway. He threw so hard in practice his receivers all bore identical bruises on their sternums: a tiny purple x where the seams of the ball met.
The play I’ve never forgotten from that era was a third-and-long from midfield. Elway’s offensive line broke down, as it did most plays, and he rolled out to his left, where a blitzing linebacker awaited him. He zipped back to his right only to encounter more rushers and reversed field again. At this point, he had retreated some 25 yards and was being chased by a conga-line of homicidal defenders. It was a strange sequence. What happens, I wondered, if the quarterback never stops going backward? If he exits the field of play? The stadium? The municipality? What’s the penalty in that situation? We never found out. Because Elway did something categorically insane. He wheeled around and cocked his throwing arm, even as his antagonists closed in.
I should note that the mood in the stadium at this point was one of concerted dread. Nothing good was going to happen on this play. Elway had done something very stupid and his punishment was likely to include the cracking of his bones and the sucking of his marrow.
But there is a reason that John Elway was down on that field and we were sitting in the stands. Elway knew the capacities of his body. He knew (or at least believed) that he could throw a football 80 yards in the air off his back foot as he was about to get steamrolled. And the amazing, almost spooky thing, is that one of his receivers knew this too, because he was standing on the opposing team’s goal line waiting as Elway let fly. He waited for what seemed to all of us a very long few seconds, as the ball fell out of the sky and into his cradled arms. No defender was anywhere near him. It was like watching an outfielder shag a lazy fly ball.
I remember also that the old Stanford stadium had this little patch of grass off to the side of the end zone where kids could scrimmage. And during the next timeout, I watched a bunch of boys I knew—they were members of my soccer team, actually—attempt to recreate the play, over and over.
That’s what kids do. We’re a mimetic species. We see greatness and we try to locate a version of it in our own bodies.
We all recognized what John Elway had done on that field. He might have been any kid on any playground. Elway ran around like crazy until he spotted something nobody else did, a path to redemption where others saw only ruin. In the moment of greatest peril, he summoned poise. In the midst of entropy, he found order. We all want to find that magic within ourselves. And failing that, we want to watch as someone else does.