Chapter 20. The Man Who Fell to Earth

by Bob Andelman

"I get depressed two weeks after the season is over. I'm a Jets fan. I remember watching games when they were 2-10, sitting in freezing snow. The first game I remember was the Jets winning the Super Bowl. I was 8. I was living in New York at the time. Everywhere you looked, people were talking about it. And Namath made the famous statement guaranteeing victory."

Joe DiRaffaele
Owner, Labor World
Coconut Creek, Florida

Men are bored. Okay, some men are just plain boring, but the fact is that come the weekend, many men's lives are insufferably dull. Ho-hum. Routine. Pass the No-Doz.

Football is a wake-up call for these guys.

Sport sociologists speculate endlessly about the sheer boredom of most men. The boredom and routine, the absence of glamor and excitement in our everyday lives. Football is our chance to almost take on a new identity as the involved fan, imagining participation and feeling the emotion of participation, so there is no question of the emotional charge out of seeing our beloved Vikings win.






This week's Steelers-Browns game may give the average blue-collar worker in the suburbs of Cleveland a reason to slog through another week of going nowhere on his job and enduring the day-in, day-out, hum-drum nature of his family life. For a few hours on Sunday, he'll come alive again, feeling that adrenaline rush the way he did in high school.

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"I not only enjoy it," Eric Berger says, "it gives me some sort of escape from the daily requirements of this and that."

Some men -- like Berger -- may not view their lives as dull at all, but they recognize the need to escape from time to time. They drop out from their routines.

Men's lives are chewed up by work. Football somehow provides us with a space of our own.

Watching football is like going to the gym. It's an area of our lives where we are able to do something for ourselves. A lot of men get into trouble with that, because we resent an intrusion. "What do you mean coming in here in the middle of the game and asking me, 'Who is going to pick Mary up from school tomorrow?' Get out of my face! This is my time and my space."






"For some men," Dr. Don Sabo says, "you might say that football spectatorship is a refuge from the onslaught of work and family responsibility. It's an island of respite. A lot of men really feel disempowered in their lives."

Most people in this example want to escape their workmates, their spouse, their children or their worries for a couple hours. It doesn't mean they don't love their family or they can't face reality. It doesn't mean they're bad people. They just need a break, a time-out from the usual below-the-line stress. Many guys get it from watching football.

"You have, on one hand, people who are seeking rewards and, on the other hand, they are escaping a personal and interpersonal world," Dr. Seppo E. Iso-Ahola says. "When you apply this to the spectator setting, it is an excellent place for these motivational tendencies to take place. Obviously, there are many opportunities for seeking personal rewards. It's an excellent opportunity for people to escape the mundane routines in which they live, especially when you are talking about men. Football is a man's game, a macho game, and it provides an excellent opportunity to escape for a couple of hours."

Iso-Ahola is quick to say that there doesn't necessarily have to be anything bad going on at home or in a marriage for a man to need an NFL break.

"Men often watch football in the company of what they call their best buddies," he says. "They are seeking interpersonal rewards as well. It is interesting at the same time they are avoiding certain types of interpersonal encounters like spouses and workmates they are seeking other types of interpersonal interaction. It is not like they want to be alone. But they want to regulate that social interaction."

Football provides an excellent opportunity, psychologically, for this kind of regulated escape."

Dr. Gregory B. Collins disputes the notion that men, as a rule, are bored. He pins the need for escape more clearly on stress.




"I see a lot of men in my practice and I rarely if ever hear them say that their lives are boring," he says. "I don't think it is a frequent complaint. I hear more about stress or misunderstandings, conflict and that sort of stuff rather than 'boring.' I don't know that football is a major motivator but it fills a void. I see people with all kinds of exciting jobs and they all watch football. It's something that is very broadly appreciated by people with good, exciting jobs by most people's standards and by people with boring jobs. It doesn't seem to matter."

There are certainly a lot of schools of thought concerning the boredom/escapism notion. For instance, healthy, happy people work and play. Sick people work all the time. They are workaholics. Sick people play all the time. They are playboys and playgirls and don't take anything seriously. The happiest people are people that balance their work and their play.

"To a degree," Dr. William J. Beausay says, "when people identify with their team on the weekend, that is a degree of health. When they pay their money and holler and scream, that is cathartic. It vents a lot of internalized aggression and conflict, so that is healthy. The happiest people in the world are people who work at their play and who play at their work. They know what they do each day and what is going to happen. The problem is they can control their play but they can't control their work so, at play, they buy a ticket and they really work at it. They really get into this. They buy the coats, the jackets, the cards and everything. That is healthy."

Beausay says people would be a lot happier and healthier if they played at work and worked at play. He theorizes that if people could really play at their work during the five days of the week, they would spend less time working at their play on the weekend.




"The happiest, healthiest people are the ones who have a balance," he says. "They work at their play and they play at their work. Unfortunately most people are caught in that they work at their play but they can't play at their work. It's a formula and, like algebra, you have to have the equal value on both sides of the equation."

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!