The Super Bowl is the most popular annual event in American life. When
the ritual began, in 1967, the Green Bay Packers, of the National
Football League, defeated the Kansas City Chiefs, of the American
Football League, by a score of 35–10, and, although the Los Angeles
Coliseum contained patches of empty seats, more than fifty million
people watched on television, the largest sports audience in the history
of the medium at the time. Last year, more than a hundred and eleven
million people watched the Super Bowl, more than triple the TV audience
for the Oscars. There’s little doubt that the game between the Patriots
and Eagles on Sunday night will attract a similarly gargantuan
viewership.
Fans of a certain age (and all those with the technical dexterity to
operate the YouTube time
machine) might best recall
the charms of the early Super Bowls, and of the game itself, by watching
N.F.L. Films and listening to its most stentorian narrators, including
John Facenda, a.k.a. the Voice of God. N.F.L. Films was the brainchild
of a Second World War veteran and topcoat salesman named Ed Sabol, who,
in the early sixties, won a small contract with the N.F.L. to film the
games and produce highlight films for broadcast on television.
Sabol, soon joined by his son Steve, did for the League what John Ford
did for the War. Most historians of the form speak of Sabol’s film of
Green Bay’s last-second victory over the Dallas Cowboys on “the frozen
tundra” of Lambeau Field, in 1967, as his masterpiece, but, like those
cinéastes who unaccountably prefer the period charms and underlying
darkness of “The Magnificent Ambersons” over the more obvious qualities
of “Citizen Kane,” I am partial to “Elements of Victory,” an ambling
masterwork on the Packers-Browns championship game of 1965, featuring a
Hemingway-terse script by Tex Maule, Ray Scott’s understated narration,
and the kettledrum-and-brass soundtrack that thunders under each
“Super-Slow Motion” play from scrimmage. The narration begins—“In the
gray chill of early dawn, the snows came to Green Bay”—and the martial
drama unfolds from there.
The dramatis personae include the stout and earnest place-kicker Lou
Groza, the omnipotent running back Jim Brown, the “Golden Boy” Paul
Hornung, and the hulking creatures of the line—particularly the pulling
blockers Jerry Kramer and Fred (Fuzzy) Thurston. Sabol’s signature
technique––his answer to Orson Welles’s “deep focus”—was called “tight
on the spiral,” in which he keeps the camera trained on the pigskin as
it leaves the quarterback’s twisting, unravelling arm; gently ascends in
slo-mo; peaks downfield, then descends, rotating, rotating, into the
outstretched hands (always “the outstretched hands”) of the receiver.
The setting is rarely a sunny clime; nearly always, the action unfurls
in frigid places like Lambeau Field, in Green Bay, where “the
elements”—snow and rain and mud and “howling wind”—conspire to make
the gridiron battle resemble the Battle of the Somme, but with
commercials for beer and radial tires.
When I was a kid, I watched these Sabol-produced films incessantly: “NFL
Game of the Week,” “Hard Knocks,” “Greatest Moments” (the histories and
tragedies), and also “Football
Follies” (the comedies),
which featured the League’s fumbles, pratfalls, and bobbled balls. Sabol
made the games far more dramatic than they were; there were no
longueurs. Each moment of action was heightened, prolonged,
monumentalized.
But what the Sabols, to say nothing of the various N.F.L. commissioners,
broadcasters, and advertisers, were not especially eager to emphasize
was the damage. Super-Slow Motion was a super deception. Collisions on
the field that led to fractured arms and legs, broken backs, cracked
spines, torn ligaments, and, above all, concussions, were lost under all
the Wagnerian flights, the basso-profundo voice-overs, and the
mythopoetical scripts.
The hits were always “spectacular,” never gruesome. Injured players got
“dinged,” then they “shrugged it off.” Someone got his “bell rung” or
his “cage rattled.” Euphemism was, for decades, the stoical language of
football. And yet we now know, and we have known for long enough, that
football doesn’t have “an injury problem”; it has a brain-damage
problem.
Countless players suffer from early dementia, depression, confusion,
suicidal tendencies, and countless other alarming, often mortal,
conditions resulting from the game.
A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical
Association showed that, when scientists examined the brains of a
hundred and eleven deceased N.F.L. players, all but one showed signs of
degenerative brain
disease.
That’s what all those “spectacular”—and unspectacular—hits so often
come to: chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E.
When Rob Gronkowski, the redoubtable tight end for the Patriots, got
“dinged” in a helmet-to-helmet collision with the Jaguars safety Barry
Church last month, he suffered an injury, his second concussion, that
could only hasten a path to a diminished middle age. Nevertheless, he
has pronounced himself “full go, ready to roll” for the Super Bowl. “My
mind-set is, whenever you hit a speed bump in the road, just to get back
up, keep doing what you gotta do through the process and not put
yourself in more danger,” he told reporters. “Do everything that you can
right, and just keep on truckin’ and get back out there.”
In the mid-fifties, the dominant sports in the United States were
baseball, boxing, and horse racing. American life had not urbanized and
accelerated to the point where the three hours of languid, pastoral play
in a Tuesday-afternoon baseball game were deemed “slow.” Speaking one
night at Delmonico’s, in 1889, Mark Twain referred to the sport as “the
very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push
and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth
century!” That lasted well into the twentieth, somehow. In the
mid-fifties, everyone knew the name of the heavyweight champion, an
exalted office, and columnists competed to find the apt gladiatorial
metaphor to describe each bout. The Kentucky Derby was an event far
bigger than the N.B.A. Finals. If you were Jimmy Cannon or Red Smith or
any of the big columnists, you saw basketball as a banal game of “up and
down,” played by curious overgrown gland cases; you preferred an
afternoon at Churchill Downs, the grandstand redolent of bourbon,
crushed mint, and horseshit.
Things have changed. As baseball’s ratings slump and twitchy fans
complain of games dominated by long episodes of spitting, scratching,
and pitching-mound conferencing, there are rumbles of reform (shifting
the strike zone) and revolution (a seven-inning game). Baseball is still
selling tickets and drawing fans, but it feels as though it has
dropped out of the center of popular entertainment, lost pace with the
times. Horse racing has declined far more radically, overwhelmed by
alternative games of chance. An image of corruption, drugs, and cruelty
to animals did not help much, either.
Boxing, by its very nature, proved unreformable. There is, undeniably, a
terrible beauty in the best fights––an athletic craft exemplified by the
likes of Ali, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Roberto Durán––but cruelty and
violence, and the terrible pleasure taken in cruelty and violence, are
at the center of things. The very point of the contest is to render an
opponent temporarily unconscious or to bruise and bloody him into a
helpless state of “technical” knockout. Who wants their child to box?
Twenty years ago, when I was writing a book about Muhammad Ali, nearly
all the ex-fighters I interviewed displayed signs of dementia or worse.
When I spoke with the former heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson, in
1997, he was still the chairman of the New York State Athletic
Commission, which supervises prizefighting in the state. He was only
intermittently coherent. The next year, during a deposition, he could
not remember the names of his associates or of his secretary, and he had
to step down from his position.
In the journalism of the past decade, more and more N.F.L. players and
players’ families are describing the toll of the game on their bodies,
their minds, and their lives. It is a collective portrait of pain,
mental illness, physical debility, and, often enough, shattered
families. The latest is an
essay published this week in the Times, by Emily Kelly, whose husband, Rob
Kelly, played for the New Orleans Saints and the New England Patriots in
the late nineties and early two-thousands. As with so many other veteran
players, Rob Kelly suffers from debilitating emotional problems,
including paranoia, sleeplessness, depression, and an inability or
unwillingness to communicate. There is almost no doubt that the cause is
football.
How do you “fix” a game in which the attraction of the game resides in
its violence, in the crash of huge, super athletic men, down after down,
game after game, year after year? A special helmet? More rule changes?
No less an authority than the President of the United States has
complained that rule changes are “ruining the game.” “Today, if you hit
too hard, fifteen yards, throw him out of the game!” an outraged
President Trump said during a rally in Alabama last year.
I don’t watch much football anymore—the N.B.A. playoffs are, for me at
least, an infinitely greater pleasure—but, hypocritical as it is, it’s
hard to deny the excitement or the beauty of the game when I do tune in.
But the beauty is the beauty of a car crash in an action movie—only
here there are no stuntmen, no C.G.I. As N.F.L. players often say,
nearly every play feels like a car crash, a real one. Even after an
“injury-free” game, players soak themselves in ice baths; they are, head
to toe, an enormous contusion.
After covering the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I remember driving
one Friday night from New Orleans to the airport in Houston to get a
flight back to New York. For hours, all I could find on the radio was
high-school football, and everywhere I looked, along the road in
Louisiana and Texas, there were illuminated stadiums filled with
cheering fans and kids slamming into one another, revelling in the game
of football. Now the ratings for the N.F.L. are starting to decline.
Some Pop Warner and high-school programs, particularly in wealthier
communities, have diminished or shut down. Parents are asking the
question once asked of boxing: Do you want your kids to play football?
This will not be the last Super Bowl any more than Ali–Frazier III was
the last heavyweight-championship fight. But, just as boxing inexorably
shifted to the margins of American life, this might be, for football,
the start of the long eclipse.