I'm Not Ready For Football

The new season of the National Football League begins tonight, and I can't think of anything more depressing. Football is one of the most violent, most neanderthal games I've ever seen. Imagine a"sport" in which two teams, decked out in helmets and shoulder pads, proceed to jump on and tackle each other to keep a player from one team from reaching the opponent's goal line with the ball in his hand. It's brutish, nasty, and not too civilized. In fact, it's almost warlike; when you advance the ball for your team, you also advance their control of the field, suggesting a form of territorial acquisition - just as in a military campaign. The games are so rough, it's no accident that the NFL teams only play once or twice a week, and that the Super Bowl isn't a best-of-seven series, otherwise the players would kill themselves! By the way. . . not all the players, despite the myth, are stupid or classless, but those that are tend to be jerks - just like the star football player you probably knew in high school.

A football game is supposed to last one hour, but thanks to timeouts, the halftime break, and other whatnot, the game always manages to be stretched to three hours. The coaches and players spend most of their time plotting strategy, figuring out how to smash the enemy's defense, and move the ball across the field. The scoring - a touchdown is six points, a field goal is three points - is supposedly designed to make the game more interesting than scoring one point per goal, but it also allows oddsmakers in the gambling racket to base bets on not only who will win the game, but by how much.

The Super Bowl championship game is a travesty in itself, with its horrible halftime show, hideous and hideously expensive commercials, and its smarmy showmanship. The Super Bowl shows who we Americans are and what we value, and what there is to see isn't very encouraging. The bombast of the game, with its crudity, its crassness, and its vulgar patriotism in the form of the opening of the game with the national anthem and the showy, grand entrance of the players, shows what a bunch materialistic, overly ambitious, and arrogant clowns we've become.

The best you can say about football is that the fans don't riot like soccer fans in the United Kingdom do, but at least British soccer fans have something to fight about. I will always consider soccer - the game the rest of the world plays - to be the superior sport, because it's more fluid, more difficult to score a goal in, and more difficult to move the ball around in. You have to kick it with your foot or deflect it with your head. In "football," the ball rarely is actually kicked, and it's mostly carried in a player's arm, being thrown and caught in between. With the presence of the Major League Soccer franchise, soccer looks to be the sport of the future in the United States.

Alas, thanks to the NFL, it always will be. :-(

(P.S. If football is so wonderful, how come we Americans are the only ones who play it? Even the Canadian Football League is full of Yanks!)