Of course, we know that sometimes they don’t. The long-term effects of concussions have increasingly become a topic of public concern, alongside gun control, mass shootings and crime. But Americans juggle conflicted feelings about the violent game. Some parents, and even former N.F.L. stars, are discouraging their young children from taking up tackle football. At the same time, football, like no other sport, crosses politics, gender, race, age and class in the United States. N.F.L. games accounted for a whopping 82 of the 100 most-watched television broadcasts last year, according to Nielsen, making it the last remaining form of water cooler entertainment in our atomized culture.
Not coincidentally pro football only took off as a national sport during the late ’50s and ’60s when it embraced television, which marketed football’s brutality as a counterweight to baseball’s languor. The league cooked up documentaries and highlights shows, memorably narrated for years by John Facenda, the voice of God. “The game is a time warp where the young dream of growing up and the old remember youth,” he intoned. As the writer James Surowiecki put it, NFL Films “tried to simultaneously convey the gritty reality of the game and mythicize it in a Homeric fashion.”
This was also the era of America’s metastasizing debacle in Vietnam. A 1967 documentary, “They Call It Pro Football,” exalted N.F.L. linebackers who, like American soldiers in Da Nang and along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, were on “search-and-destroy” missions. Head coaches like Vince Lombardi were lionized as tactical generals leading self-sacrificing armies of clean-cut soldiers to victory. The nation was on the verge of coming apart and football needed its own counter culture representative, who arrived in the green and white uniform of the New York Jets in the upstart American Football League. While campuses were erupting with antiwar protests, the Jets’ playboy quarterback, Joe Namath, with his long hair, fur coats and bedroom eyes, famously predicted the Jets would beat the N.F.L.’s ultra-establishmentarian Baltimore Colts and win Super Bowl III.
When the Jets won, football not only survived the upheaval. It came out richer, more popular than ever and unified. At least on Sundays, Americans could dream about Hollywood endings despite their divisions.
We are again a nation divided, and reading more than ever into the meaning of the game and what, wishfully or otherwise, it says about us. Buffalo fans this Sunday suggested Hamlin’s recovery was a metaphor for the resilience of a city battered by storms, decline and crime. As if on cue, the Bills returned the opening kickoff against the Patriots for a touchdown, the first time the team had done that in 18 years. A nail-biter through the first half, Buffalo pulled away in the second. “We all won,” Hamlin tweeted from his hospital bed. As Nantz, the announcer, put it: “Love for Damar, it was definitely in the air. Not just here. All across this league, this nation.”
Then he asked the melancholy question that seemed to sum up the week. “The love, the support, the prayers,” he said, “why can’t we live like that every day?”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nytimes.com
