Of course, we know that sometimes they don’t. The long-term effects of concussion are increasingly the subject of public interest, alongside gun control, mass shootings, and crime. But Americans juggle conflicting emotions about the violent game. Some parents, and even former NFL stars, are discouraging their young children from participating in football. At the same time, football, like no other sport, transcends politics, gender, race, age, and class in the United States. NFL games accounted for 82 of the 100 most watched TV shows last yearaccording to Nielsen, making it the last remaining form of water-cooled entertainment in our atomized culture.
It’s no coincidence that professional football only emerged as a national sport in the late ’50s and ’60s when it embraced television, which marketed football’s brutality as a counterweight to the laziness of football. baseball. The League has prepared documentaries and standout shows, memorably narrated over the years by John Facenda, the voice of God. “The game is a time reversal, where young dreams grow up and old people remember their youth,” he intonation. As writer James Surowiecki put itNFL Films “tried to simultaneously convey the gritty reality of the game and mythologize it in a Homeric style.”
This was also a period of widespread American defeat in Vietnam. A 1967 documentary, “They Call It Professional Football,” featured NFL supporters, like American soldiers in Da Nang and along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, carrying out “find and destroy” mission. Head coaches like Vince Lombardi are celebrated as tactical generals who lead elite armies that sacrifice themselves to victory. The nation was on the verge of disintegrating and football needed a counterculture representative of its own, who arrived in the green and white uniform of the New York Jets in the Emerging American Soccer League. While universities erupted in protests against the war, Jets playboy quarterback Joe Namath, with his long hair, fur coat and bedroom eyes, famously predicted that the Jets would beat the NFL’s hugely established Baltimore Colts and win Super Bowl III.
When the Jets won, football didn’t just survive the upheaval. It becomes richer, more popular than ever, and unified. At least on Sunday, Americans can dream of Hollywood endings despite their divisions.
We are again a divided nation, and more than ever, we have a better understanding of what the game means and what, like it or not, it says about us. Buffalo fans this Sunday suggested that Hamlin’s recovery is a metaphor for the resilience of a city ravaged by storms, decay and crime. As if on cue, the Bills replayed the opening game against the Patriots to beat, the team’s first time doing so in 18 years. Playing well in the first half, Buffalo equalized in the second half. “We all won,” Hamlin tweeted from his hospital bed. As Nantz, the broadcaster, put it: “Love for Damar, it definitely came out. Not just here. All across this league, this country.
Then he asked the melancholy question that summed up the week. “Love, support, prayers,” he said, “why can’t we live like this every day?”
