Today of course is Superbowl Sunday the showcase event of the NFL and the "greatest day in the American sporting calendar". Ahem. I've never found the Superbowl that compelling an occasion as it seems to be much more about a ghastly half time show, dreary celebrity cameos in cheesy 30 second commercials and an over refereed sporting contest with little drama or actual, you know, excitement. (Its a bit like the FA Cup and World Cup Finals in that respect which are always pretty anti-climactic and underwhelming too.) The growing scandal in American Football and the thing that could actually destroy the NFL is the issue of concussion related brain damage which many ex players have found themselves subject to. According to ESPN 3000 NFL players are suing or considering suing the NFL for negligence. Helmets have made the game of American Football far more dangerous that it should be as players have become used to tackling head first in the assumption that the helmet was protecting them. One solution for American Football might be scrapping pads and helmets completely and then perhaps gridiron could become a more compelling sport that looks a lot more like this beautiful game:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
65 comments:
I have thought for years that football equipment is more intended to protect the hitter and less the victim. The hard plastic shells of shoulder pads and helmets allow players to lunch themselves as missile, increasing the impact of each hit. Football padding (hockey, as well) should be designed in such a way to protect the wearer from impact, not to allow him to provide greater impact.
Do you know of any books about how football managed to overtake baseball in the US? I think there might be an interesting cultural study there, from the 60s to now.
Got to agree the show is always awful,made worse by the atrocious sound broadcast on the tv.
But I'll watch as always,in fact I'm that sad I've taken leave so I can watch it.Since Channel 4 started broadcasting it,I've been in to it and would love to go to a game.
Rugby,however does bore the arse of me.I tried and tried getting into it and it just doesn't grab me.All those freezing bloody afternoons at the playing fields at school did not impress me at all.
Well,what has always impressed me about rugby is the get up and go attitude about the players,shaking off injuries etc.Unlike the whining,diving prima donna's playing footie.
It's interesting to see how the NFL will deal with the potential lawsuits.They seem to have left it a bit late about outlawing some of the tackles within the last couple of seasons,may be too little too late.
This is a red letter day for me--I am actually agreeing with you guys on sports for once. Of course, the fact that the San Francisco 49ers are in the game means that the stakes are very high around here. I can probably have the town to myself if I go out at whatever time it is they're playing.
I do know a few football fans, though, and a couple of them were able to go to a 49ers pre-playoff game right after Christmas. I was surprised to learn how rare it is that people actually go to the games live, tickets being both rare and expensive, and they told me that the ascendency of pro football is really a television related phenomenon. Monday Night Football was considered a very risky venture when it started in 1970. I was surprised at this because football had already had complete ascendency in my high school and by extension small town culture, and it wasn't new.
My friends were speculating that, just as there's some thought that everyone will be vegetarian in thirty years, the whole head injury thing will make football extinct too. I said I thought they'd probably just make better helmets. Someone went on to say, or just have an expendable class of people.
The head injury thing is scary,though. By some chance, there have been several people who've had bad head injuries in extended circle in recent years and it is no joke.
Dana
The pads and helmets definitely make things worse for the person being tackled and in the long run of course for everyone.
John
Its an excellent question. It must be related to the rise of colour TV. I mean the Superbowl was only invented in what 1968? The World Series had been going 6 or 7 decades by then...
Paul
The British TV experience is much better than the American TV experience. There are fewer ad breaks in the UK (they fill the extra ad space with commentary) and the commentators tend to be much more spikey and interesting.
Of course I've never been to an actual game so I cant tell what that atmosphere was like. When I lived in Denver, Broncos tickets were sold out four or five years in advance...
Seana
Concussion related brain damage is no joke. Early onset Parkinsons because of repeated head injury is no joke.
If 3000 players are suing the NFL and they all get a million or two a piece, say, well thats it as far as the current model of the NFL is concerned.
The game could continue of course but it would have to be much more like rugby union or rugby league.
Seana
According to Nate Silver, its San Francisco's game to lose:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/magazine/nate-silver-super-bowl.html
High times for sports fans by the bay this year...
I've actually had the helmets and pads vs no helmets and pads discussion with a co-worker. We both agreed that it would reduce concussions, but that the NFL would never do it unless forced to do so by lawsuits. It's doubtful most fans would want it because it would tone down the ferocity and violence of the game. By the way, how common are concussions in rugby? Hockey's my game, and it's got its own concussion problems thanks to hits and fighting. The average NHL enforcer probably finishes his career having taken part in a couple of hundred bareknuckle fights. In the last few years several enforcers in their 20s have killed themselves due to depression brought on by hockey-related head injuries. At a certain point you have to ask yourself, as a fan, if sporting entertainment is worth the death and disability that comes with it. Reality shows and sitcoms are almost all crap, but nobody dies making them.
Yeah, it's probably the worst year ever not to be a sports fan in Northern California. Or the best, depending on whether socializing or solitude are highest on your preference list.
Wonkblog has a column on statistically related Super Bowl things as well.
Drive safely, post game, Americans.
Cary
Well I dont know the statistics but I think concussions in rugby are a rare event. Tackling above the shoulder is illegal and no one tackles head first. I played rugby as a prop forward for twenty years and never had a head injury or indeed a concussion in all that time. (My knees, however, are fucked!)
Seana
I wonder what will rate as the bigger event - a Superbowl or WS win? I suppose in the Castro/Mission etc. it'll be the WS but in the suburbs the Superbowl?
Maybe because they always happen on Sunday afternoons, but you notice much more when the Superbowl is on, because the world just stops. Except at halftime. But then the World Series is more days total, so I don't know, though I expect Nate Silver would.
This is just my opinion, bit i believe football overtook baseball in this country because football, played only once a week, is an event. The media can build the game up all week, and, with most games still played on Sundays, people can make time to watch them all; missing one of only sixteen games is something you don't want to do.
Baseball, on the other hand, plays every day, and missing one game (or ten) of 162 is not a big deal. In addition, baseball sometimes plays on weekday afternoons, so no one really feels a need to see every one of their team's games.
I first started to think of this when I read, years ago, that the difference between football and baseball on television was people would watch a football game between two teams in which they had no rooting interest, whereas they would not do that for baseball; they watched the hometown team, or they didn't watch. Even today, there are only 256 regular season football games, about 1.5 time the number played by each baseball team. The NFL has done a masterful job of promoting them as a rare product and not to be missed.
As for me, I'm the anomaly. (Big surprise to those who know me.) I'll watch anyone play baseball, but rarely bother with a football unless the Steelers are playing.
Fucking Blogger has now destroyed this comment twice. Let's try it again before I demand that Google give me a service worth what I;m paying for it.
John: I have seen the thought expressed that baseball, which (was) governed by the sun, was the product of a rural, agricultural America, and football, governed by the clock, of an industrial America. No accident, perhaps, that professional football's popularity exploded after World War II. Pro football also had teams on the West Coast well before major league baseball did, so it was faster than baseball to recognize demographic reality.
Seana: Re football on TV, the one NFL game I have attended in person convinced me that such an experience ought to be used as punishment for minor criminal offenses.
Adrian, as for beautifiul games, I'll watch the second half of this
later this evening.
=============================
Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com
Peter, having been masochistic enough to play in the marching band for the last three years of high school, I was at pretty much all the home games and a fair amount of away games. So I don't know if anyone could pay me enough to go to a pro game.
Well, I suppose there is some price that I would break at, but a free ticket would not be enough. Unless I could scalp it.
Seana, an NFL game live was worse. Teams would break from the huddle, full of vinegar and ready to hit, then they'd mill around silenty, uncomfortable, and to no apparent purpose on the ghastly blue-green artificial turf, all because the TV commercials had not finished running. Your band would not have been allowed to play during such a break because all had to be silent for the moment when broadcast went live again after the commercial.
Peter
I wonder if the concussion thing will kill the CFL as well?
I wouldnt mind that, Canada should be a big rugby power along with Ausralia, S Africa, NZ and the other former dominions.
Dana
Well when you're invested it matters a lot more. I admit that I do get a bit more excited about football when its the Jets or Giants and I have a big soft spot for the Packers. I can see how supporting the local team in an event game can get everyone hyped up.
Seana
Well thats one of the advantages I suppose of watching college football over the NFL. The band stuff can be quite fun. ALthough you probably dont watch college football either do you?
Speaking of bands, college football and fun -- and it happened in Northern California!
No, no college football either. I might have been converted, I suppose, if I had gone to any other four year college in America, but Santa Cruz, as you may remember, didn't even have a football field, let alone a football team. Which was a huge relief.
I wasn't ever very suited to playing in a marching band, but luckily, the one I was in wasn't very good, so I got by. Some years later my family went to a band review because my cousin from Illinois had been in a competitive band, which would have been very different.
Peter, well, at least that announcer was pretty excited. I can see my old band doing something like that. Although we would never have been in the field at the end of a game.
I agree with many of the comments regarding football's rise in popularity and I would like to add something that may make people uncomfortable.
The rise of the NFL and NBA to prominence is a function of the American male becoming more stupid and less patient.
Baseball is an eloquent game that is decidedly cerebral. Basketball and football are more brutish and far more simple.
American men have become less interested in nuance and more obsessed with immediate gratification. Watching basketball or football requires less concentration and offers higher and more rapid scoring opportunities. That is, you don't have to think that hard about it.
If baseball is the Russian novel of the sport world, then football is the entertainment magazine, and basketball the comic strip.
American men love football with the same stupid, ogrish intensity that they worship the real great American pastime: war.
Of course, I'm speaking generally and do not wish to imply that all men feel this way.
Raging L., I'm going to bet that you are not going to find many dissenters here.
I will say that many women, though not me, do seem to like football too. In fact, I bet if women didn't like it, many men would have no incentive to play it.
Adrian: I don't know if concussions have been a big issue in the CFL. The real question, of course, is whether they will kill NFL Europe. Or is NFL Europe dead already?
If that Berkley-Stanford thing was repeated a time or two, bands would be under scrutiny as a cause of head injuries.
Well, what Raging Leonard says, and then some.
I grew up playing baseball in the spring and summer, football in the fall, and basketball indoors during the winter (we had no hockey). Each in its season.
The football we played was without equipment and usually two-hand-tag rather than tackle, in order to include neighborhood boys of different ages and sizes into the game and make it more fair, more evenly matched.
Football--and indeed all sport, as the early American Indians pointed out--is "the little brother of war."
All of that high school stuff about "school spirit" and sports was the indoctrination of jingoism foisted upon youth.
Baseball is still the more admirable game, but the capitalistic mantra toward "winning at all costs" caused blindness in a number of ways, especially when it came to PEDs.
George Carlin's observations on the differences between baseball and football are not only funny--they're true:
"Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life. Football begins in the fall, when everything's dying.
Baseball is played on a diamond, in a park.The baseball park!
Football is played on a gridiron, in a stadium, sometimes called Soldier Field or War Memorial Stadium.
Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life.
Football begins in the fall, when everything's dying.
In football you wear a helmet.
In baseball you wear a cap.
Football is concerned with downs - what down is it?
Baseball is concerned with ups - who's up?
In football you receive a penalty.
In baseball you make an error.
In football the specialist comes in to kick.
In baseball the specialist comes in to relieve somebody.
Football has hitting, clipping, spearing, piling on, personal fouls, late hitting and unnecessary roughness.
Baseball has the sacrifice.
Football is played in any kind of weather: rain, snow, sleet, hail, fog...
In baseball, if it rains, we don't go out to play.
Baseball has the seventh inning stretch.
Football has the two minute warning.
Baseball has no time limit: we don't know when it's gonna end - might have extra innings.
Football is rigidly timed, and it will end even if we've got to go to sudden death.
In baseball, during the game, in the stands, there's kind of a picnic feeling; emotions may run high or low, but there's not too much unpleasantness.
In football, during the game in the stands, you can be sure that at least twenty-seven times you're capable of taking the life of a fellow human being.
And finally, the objectives of the two games are completely different:
In football the object is for the quarterback, also known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy's defensive line.
In baseball the object is to go home! And to be safe!"
Unfortunately, it may be only that the studies on the incidence of CTE among rugby players have not yet been done. One clear problem is you have rugby players choosing to not report concussions, just as in hockey and the NFL.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-17959764
I don't see the NFL dying, but becoming more like the CFL, which has historically had less of a problem with head trauama, more of a pass-catch league instead of a more violent running game.
Leonard
I agree with some of what you say, although for some reason I know a lot of intellectuals (ok two) who are really into basketball. Its a game that has never appealed to me but some people do like it.
I do think baseball is the superior American game. Actually if truth be told I think baseball is the superior world game.
Peter
I forgot about NFL Europe which I'm sure is a pretty common sensation.
Rich
God that Carlin stuff is terrific. Carlin grew up on 120th St. in Manhattan, exactly 2 blocks from where I lived for 8 years so I imagine he got up to the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium quite a lot. The nearest football ground? Probably the Columbia field right at the top of Manhattan and why would he ever go there? I imagine too that the kids on 120th street were playing a lot of stick ball.
Matt
Maybe they're two fucked up to even report them?
Maybe I dont actually remember the concussions I got!
No but seriously my knees are fucked and thats from twenty years of scrummaging as a loose head prop. Not something I'd recommend
Seana
I like the band at college games. I still dont like cheerleaders though at any game. I have never seen the point. I find it bizarre that our 43rd President was a male cheerleader. And he beat the guy with two purple hearts and a silver star by being perceived as tougher. Strange country America.
Yes, I think George Carlin nails it. The "football" mood goes along with the shift into the go-go 80s. I'm reading a book now called, "1973 Nervous Breakdown" subtitled, "Watergate, Warhol and the birth of post-sixties America," that makes some good points (I think). Corporatism really takes over, unions get busted and football takes over from baseball.
Football is also almost completely American whereas baseball (and hockey and even basketball) are international and players speak different languages. Maybe the rise of football has to do with a last-gasp of insular America? There was a line on "The Big Bang Theory" something like, "They love every kind of football in Texas except European football which they think is a communist plot."
John
Although the death of American football has been predicted for years and it never happens. What I like about soccer is the fact that all you need is a ball (doesnt even have to be a soccer ball) to play a real game on the street, the beach, a playground etc. Whereas most other sports require equipment and American football seems to require the most equipment of them all.
Cheerleading is bizarre.
I like John's thesis, but football has been big on the high school and college levels for a long time. I remember that my dad's brother, who was the only real athlete in the family played baseball, but the only reason he didn't play football was because his mother wouldn't let him. She was worried about injuries even then. But the fact that the story survives means that there was some hint of glory attached to it even back then, which would have been in the thirties sometime.
Both my parents went to their colleges games, especially my mom, probably due to the bitter USC-UCLA rivalry. And the first Rose Bowl was in 1905.
I think baseball and football are expressive of two very different but real aspects of American culture. And why I found Friday Night Lights so dramatically interesting, even though I don't follow the game. It was very easy for it to become a portrait of a whole community, in a way that possibly the story of a baseball team could not.
Seana
I think you're right. I've never been there but I've read that in parts of Texas football is a kind of secular religion and the Superbowl must represent the high mass of high masses.
They're probably wondering how godless Northern California came to be anointed to play, though.
High school/college and professional sre different. Sure, the Super Bowl only started in the 60s, the Rose Bowl is more than a hundrd years old. Until the NFL rose to dominance pro football was at about the same level as pro wrestling. It's interesting (to me, anyway) how the rise of pro wrestling also mirrors some changes in American life. There may also be something to the idea that football and wrestling are less about playing and more about watching. The whole culture of watching is different - baseball has no cheerleades, its roots are professional whereas football grew out of that college experience.
I think there might be something about the rise of pro football and the depowering (what is the opposite of empowering?) of people. The NFL requires individual owners, not corporations. It's very much in line with the Fox/Tea Party view of America, rich people running things and everyone else doing what they say.
Hmmm, I hadn't thought about this before, but my guess is someone smarter than me has already written about this.
It's interesting that basketball falls somewhere in between these two things. It has all that professional prestige now, and so is about watching, but two kids in a driveway can play around with a hoop and a ball for hours. And it's another one that doesn't discount women as players as much. At least, there seems to be a real interest in women's basketball in certain parts of the country, even among men. Interestingly, women have apparently been playing basketball for a long time. My grandmother wrote me a letter once in which she happened to mention playing it, and she was born at the end of the 19th century. I think she said that people were slightly scandalized by these Indiana girls wearing bloomers!
Yes, Seana, I've seen a few WNBA games and if Toronto had a team I would go to the games. Basketball, soccer and even hockey have strong women's programs. We're still a little bitter in Canada about the US-Canada woman's game at the last Olympics but at least we got the bronze ;).
There was that whole League of Their Own about women's baseball.
On the other hand, the Lingerie Football League doesn't look like it'll be in the Olympics anytime soon...
Well, baseball has amateur roots, too, in the clubs of the mid-nineteenth century. But you're right. Professionalism caught on a lot earlier in baseball than in football. Until the growth of television and the expansion of the major leagues, minor leagues covered America and were a repsectable place to earn a living and spenmd a career, rather than just a way station to or from big-league baseball.
Well, maybe they will, because apparently they've decided to start wearing uniforms next season.
So much for the male viewing demographic.
The Toronto Star just printed an interesting article concussions that takes the view that football is exploiting the economic underclass in the U.S. I think the rise in popularity of football as partly due to gambling. Some writers have even taken the view that the NFL is as much about gambling as it is the sport itself.
Adrian: What kind of accent does the guy with the pink/orange tie have in this clip? Sounds to me like a mix of Irish and South African.
John
I like the wrestling analogy because if you look at the size of both wrestlers and football players it becomes evident that steroids are a huge part of the culture. Steroid abuse which almost certainly begins in high school.
I'm not saying that baseball has no steroid or PED problem but baseball seems to be the sport which is actively pursuing the abusers and the dealers now - admittedly largely because of recent embarrassing scandals.
Cary
On a similar vein I've written in the past how weird it is to recruit black kids from Mississippi and Alabama take them to Notre Dame and force them to wear shirts that say Irish on the front of them. To me that's more than a cultural cringe its positively creepy but its a conversation which America seems determined not to have.
Peter
You'll have to help me out, because of my colour blindness I cant tell which guy you're talking about. What point in the clip does he appear? All 3 panelists seemed to have Irish accents to me.
Adrian: They guy in the middle. He says "hef" for "half" in the manner of southern African accents. He is Irish, but I figured his pronunciation was such that you could tell from his accent what street he lived in and which bedroom in the house was his when he was a child.
Peter
The bald guy in the middle?
Thats a pretty standard west of Ireland accent - at least to me - if I had to guess I'd say he was from Kerry or Clare or Galway. He's definitely not from Cork or Dublin nor indeed from Donegal.
I'll bet Ken Bruen could pin him down to the village.
Adrian: That's the one. I have not been to western Ireland, so it makes sense that the accent would be unfamiliar. And Galway played in the match, so it makes sense to have a commentator from there, as well.
Peter
Dont concern yourself. Its what you're familiar with. I'll bet you I couldnt tell a Pittsburgh accent from a Philadelphia one. Until recently my wife couldnt tell the difference between an Australian and NZ accent which caused amazement to me and my daughters because at least to our ears they're very different.
Not concerned, just enjoying the reminder that I'd like to visit the west part of the country the next time I'm in Ireland.
The New Zealand accents I've heard are so different from Australian ones that I have a practically synesthetic sense of tasting lamb when I hear them.
In principle, I think I could tell those two accents apart, but in practice, probably not all the time.
Oddly, when my sister and I were traveling around Southeast Asia some years ago, we were asked more than once if we were Kiwis. Not only weren't we, but we didn't even know what a Kiwi was. Other than the fruit, I mean.
One thing I do like about the Super Bowl is that I always see a lot of father's out playing with their kids at halftime and after. I also just saw a kid alone, wearing a 49er shirt, trying to throw a football through a basketball hoop.
Peter
The NZ accent strangely is a little bit more like the S African one. Certainly v different from Australia.
Seana
I did turn it on for a moment to get the score. There had been a power failure in the Superdome and the game had stopped and no one knew what to do. Not the advertisement for the city of New Orleans they could have been hoping for.
Yes, I think you're right about NZ accents being closer to South African ones.
I heard about the power outage, but hadn't really connected the whole Superdome aspect of it. I was out to dinner with a friend, and we went to a place where the front room was a bar and the back room was the restaurant. Front room was completely full and the back room completely empty. It was weird to hear the roars from the front without knowing what they signified, but I will say the service was excellent. The crowd seemed to be quite cheerful when we left, even though the 49ers had lost. Of course, they had been drinking for several hours.
Seana
Beer does soften the blow I imagine. Also the WS might help.
Cary
Of course you're right. Its ALL about the gambling. From working in a bar in NYC I found that gambling on football and college football is absolutely endemic.
I felt no need to replicate the experience today, but I found out during the World Series a few years ago that few places can be as pleasant for watching a sporting event as a non-sports bar.
I have no idea if this is true, but my hunch is that betting on football games really took at the same time Vegas took off - if that's true, then my question is, Why football? Why did people bet on baseball, a sport most people probably knew a lot more about.
And, of course, there could be a lot more of those strange bets - first to get a hit, who;s winning after three innings, how long will the starting pitcher last, etc.. Plus there would be a lot more games to bet on.
Yesterday where I was watching the Super Bowl guys at the next table had bets on which team would get the first penalty, would a punt get blocked and on and on.
thanks for share.
Post a Comment