Chapter 9. Every Picture Tells a Story

by Bob Andelman

"What's the first thing you think of somebody who doesn't follow football? Someone you don't have a lot in common with. Especially in the South, where it's not a sport, it's religion."

Barry Dreayer
Computer software salesman/consultant
Atlanta

God bless football, for without it, men might have nothing to talk about.

Given the feeblest of openings, we'll wax rhapsodic about last night's game, last year's Super Bowl or a life-changing play vaguely recalled from childhood. And if we ever played the game, stand by for a moment-by-moment recreation of how we won a crucial high school game against a sworn blood enemy.

We can talk players, coaches, trainers, owners, contracts, incentive clauses and free agency. There's the annual college draft, an endless vein of player, team, conference and league stats. Some guys can even tell you the best routes to far-away stadiums.

Not all men love football as voraciously as these superfans. The vast majority of us know enough to be conversational, understanding the mechanics and keeping up with the basics in the sports pages. Gotta take the family jalopy in for a tune-up? Check the weekend scores so you can make conversation with the mechanic. Live in a college town? You'll become a football fan through a form of mass psychosis/osmosis.

"It's amazing how much it carries over," Volney Meece says. "In Oklahoma, for instance, a Saturday night game might last three hours but it's talked about until the next Saturday game one way or the other, win or lose. I used to work on an afternoon paper. You'd be surprised how many secretaries would call in early Monday morning to get the scores by quarters for all the company pots. It's big."

You can't go anywhere in the United States on a Monday or Sunday from August through the Super Bowl in January without talking about a game or hearing people talking about it.

In many college and NFL football cities, very little business is transacted on Monday mornings until employees get the football talk out of the way. And even then, it's a convenient conversational topic and icebreaker on the phone all day.

Women do lunch and what do men do? They play football. And they talk football. Society permits it.

"It's great for relatives," says Barry Dreayer, a computer software and voice mail salesman/consultant in Atlanta. Dreayer used to teach a course for novices called "TeachMeSports." "I had lost touch with a cousin of mine. One day I was on a national sports talk radio show. He heard me in another state. The next day, he called. To this day, we keep in touch because of this shared passion."

You get a friend or two over, you're pulling for your team, talking about football, work, the wife, whatever. It's a release from the pressure of the week. "I used to have a tense job," retired tool company executive Ralph Weisbeck says. "Football is still a release for me."

If two guys, total strangers, are stuck with each other's company for whatever reasons, business or pleasure, they can count on football to break the ice. Or drive a wedge between them.

"Is that a Florida Gator pin on your lapel?"

"Yup! You a Gator, too?"

"Nope, Seminole, you asshole. You guys cheat!"

"Screw you, ya Criminole!"

See how easy it is?

Sports is easily the No. 1 topic of conversation for young men, rivaled and interrupted only when one guy pokes the other in the ribs and says, "Ey, check her out."

"And if you happen to have the same allegiance," Broncos fan Jeff Spear says, "or if you happen to just be a fan of the game, you can watch just for the sake of enjoying the sport and you can find someone to talk to on that level. You can find fans on all kinds of levels and it's something that you could easily relate to."

Football is just transparent enough so that anyone can know something about it. Every fan is a coach.

Some people have observed that women tend to communicate more freely over a vast range of topics, including emotions. Men tend to be more limited in their communication. Sports, particularly football, gives us something to discuss.

"One of the reasons men love to watch football," Dr. Stanley H. Teitelbaum says, "is because the next morning, on the job, they can talk about the game. It gives a man an opportunity to have something more to communicate about with his peers -- other men. They can communicate with a limited degree of intimacy and a limited amount of emotional connection, which I think for many men is the preferred state of relating."

* * *

A lot of us get married and wake up one day to find that we've somehow become cut off from all our male friends. Or, as our wives refer to them, "Those idiots." Priorities change, relationships fade, wives steer husbands away from single guys they see as bad influences . . . But sports bring us back together.

"Male bonding" is a cliche, but everyone understands what it means. It's one of the few ways we can still hang out in an acceptable way, outside the shackles of maturity and responsibility.

"It's a good feeling to be able to do that with the guys," Teitelbaum says. "I also think of bonding as a way for many men to get away from the world of adult responsibilities. It's kind of escaping into a less responsible mode -- which we need to do. If you have the responsibilities that most people have as they move into their late 20s, 30s, 40s and beyond, you have a need to get away. Watching football presents an opportunity to escape into a less responsible mode and to recapture the boyhood exuberance and enthusiasm of rooting for your home team with the other guys."

Teitelbaum knows from personal experience the release of being able to talk football with another guy -- his son.

"You can get into what is going on in different levels of the game than you probably could with your wife," he says. "When I go to the games with my grown son, it is a very different experience than when I take my wife. If I take my wife it's fun but I have to explain so much more of what is going on. My son will see something that I don't see, or I'll see something that he doesn't see. We know the gist of what is going on much beyond the surface of the play. There is something that men feel they get in sharing football together with other men which is above and beyond what they usually feel in sharing it with their women."

"Doing things with guys is very important to me," psychologist Rick Weinberg says. "I spend most of my life around a woman -- my wife -- and so I think football is a great way for men to relate to one another around a game with beer, popcorn and chips."

* * *

No doubt, there are men who hate or don't understand football. There's nothing unmanly about them. Not much, anyhow. But more than likely they keep their disdain private, avoiding the game whenever possible, putting on an enduring poker face when socially required to watch or talk pigskin.

"If you were at Harvard," Dr. John M. Silva says, "I don't think there would be too much pressure to follow Harvard basketball. If you did, fine. If you didn't, no big deal. But if you are at Notre Dame or North Carolina and you weren't following basketball, you would be abnormal. I think a lot of it has to do with the norms that exist in the environment that you are in. When I was a kid growing up just outside Boston, I followed the Celtics. You could never get away with wearing a Knicks or a '76ers shirt. You'd be lynched. I am sure the same thing operated in New York City, particularly when there were fewer teams and the rivalries were greater. If some kid walked into the Bronx with a Celtics shirt on, I don't think the kid would have gotten out of there alive. A lot of it has to do with the group that you are involved with and what the norms of that group are. At some schools I don't think athletics are that important. You can go to a Yale football game -- the Yale Bowl holds 80,000 people -- and you are lucky if they have 20,000 people in there."

Peer pressure forces some men -- and women -- to learn enough about the game to get by. Barry Dreayer, the Atlanta salesman, sensing an opportunity to make a few convert and a few bucks, offered a class for several years called "TeachMeSports." It gained local and national media coverage, but when the TV cameras came to class, embarrassed men refused to be photographed.

"It's a macho thing," Dreayer says. "It's the most non-threatening way to make small talk, the ideal icebreaker for doing business. And I think it helps solidify relationships."

* * *

Football provides many of us with a conversational confidence, especially young men. Conversational competence depends on knowing what's going on, and many conversations in an office or on a job site or in social situations pivot around sports. It starts with discussion of a particular team or a league or a player. If you can't join in and have something to say, you're left out. Being in the know about league leaders, hot streaks, slumps and playoff prospects is valuable for interpersonal relationships. It's not rocket science, but it does have value.

Football has status; it's always in vogue to be a football fan. Some people will claim to be fans when, in their hearts, they're not. But they want to be included in Monday Night Football gatherings and conversations. They want to play a part in whatever the crowd is into. Football today, rocket science tomorrow.

"When you go back to work on Monday," Dan Jiggetts says, "you want to have seen everything that everybody else saw. The reason people watch the highlights shows is they don't want to miss a thing."

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Chapter 11. Hit Me With Your Best Shot

by Bob Andelman

"At the height of the game, if a player is injured -- I hate to admit it -- but my first thought is, 'Goddammit, we're going to waste five minutes while they take this guy off the field!' "

Jim Melvin
Newspaper editor
St. Petersburg, Florida

The only guys who don't get some cheap thrill out of the violent nature of football are the ones who don't watch it. For most men -- the same guys who clench their own fists during a boxing match and bob and weave in their seats -- a cathartic release occurs by watching a defensive back as he snares a wide receiver in mid-air and slams him back down to earth.

• "I like contact sports," Buffalo fan Ralph Weisbeck says. "I'm built light and was never good at sports but I like the bit of mayhem you see on a Sunday afternoon."

Snap!

• "The violence is a part of the game," financial accountant Larry Selvin says. "It's a brutal, vicious sport. But fans aren't bothered by it."

Crackle!

• "It's just human nature that we go to a hockey match and we want to see blood and guts and fights," Volney Meece says. "It's a Catch-22 thing. I think the average fan wants to see a helluva hit. You see those highlight films on ESPN and on the networks, the great shots where a guy gets cartwheeled up in the air and slammed into the turf. Or when somebody breaks their leg like Joe Theisman did and the bone was sticking out at a 45-degree angle. They show that over and over."

Pop!

• "I hesitate to say the violence is why I watch," Louisville Courier-Journal copy chief Jim Luttrell says. "Maybe the raw power of the game. The grunting. I get a kick out of watching NFL films with the sound of the hits."

As hard to swallow as those comments may be for some people, experts acknowledge that violence is exactly why men love football.

"Sports have been around since the caves, or at least at that part of man's evolution when he started to increasingly sublimate his aggressive drive, to channel his pride in a productive way," Dr. Mark Unterberg says. "It may have started out as preparatory for the hunt or defense or a play-type situation for acting out what would be the real thing later on. For example, lacrosse is a definite offshoot of an Indian game that tribes would play with each other instead of going to battle."

Unterberg says the Indian sport, like lacrosse, could turn bloody. Do fans really want blood?



"No. It's a metaphor," Unterberg says. "At some level it gratifies the need for that. Maybe the ultimate demise of the opponent. Conquering the adversary."

We want violence. In conscious and unconscious ways, it makes us feel more alive to see some stranger on a football field get trashed. The sounds of crashing pads, of bones popping. But that's the short-term view. As soon as the blood-lust is satisfied, we want the victim to come to his feet and hobble off the field to a round of polite applause.

"You know the truth? It's a violent game. And I'm not a violent guy. But I am a trial lawyer. By nature, I'm a competitive guy. I played sports all my life," attorney Peter Hendricks says.

It doesn't have to be football. Driven by a good car crash lately? You can't go past a wreck without looking. "Oh, how horrible," but hmmm, were there any bodies? Anybody badly mangled?

"That's an Aristotelian paradox I don't quite understand," says Dr. Daniel Begel, a Milwaukee psychiatrist and founder of the International Society for Sports Psychiatry. "All I know is that when we try to organize a game among football coaches, ex-players and team doctors, we have a real hard time getting more than 12 people for a game once or twice a year. It's practically impossible -- and these are people who love football. Football coaches at the college level, for recreation, do not play football. They play basketball, handball or racquetball."

Even so, Begel doesn't think football is a violent game.

"It may be harder for people to control themselves in a football game than in a basketball game," he says. "It's a great pleasure to play a football game in which people are just enjoying the game and loving the competition. But recreational football seems to slip very easily into displays of aggression. It may be uncomfortable for people. People may not be able to handle it, but I do not think violence is intrinsic to the game. I think football is aggressive, but played fairly. I'm not sure -- well, I guess it is violent if there is contact. I think of violence as doing harm to people. I don't think there is anything harmful about a good tackle."

And there's nothing wrong with wanting to watch a good, clean tackle being made, either.

"There is a mistaken notion held by a lot of people in football that it is such a violent game," Begel says. "I think of violence as harmful activity. I think of violence as the person who is cutting someone off at the knees to try to injure them. I think of violence as someone like the defensive back who builds his reputation as a big hitter but is always just a little bit late. I think of that as a violent person. I do not think of the great linebacker who is all over the field and makes crushing tackles as necessarily a violent person. A strong and an aggressive person and a competitive person but not necessarily violent. It may just be a semantic distinction. That's not to say that the fan isn't looking for violence. I think that if the main motivation was the thirst for violence they would all be at hockey games."

There are 22 positions on an NFL football field. Some require skill, some containment, some -- like quarterback -- require leadership. Some positions are just aggressive death-and-mayhem positions like defensive linemen and linebackers.

"I think as people watch the game they'll be critical or applauding the aggressiveness or violence or enthusiasm of the player depending on what they think is required or whether he is getting the job done or not," Dr. Gregory B. Collins says. "Most people, if they played the game, have been knocked around so they know what it's like. They know how to dish it out and they know how it feels to be on the receiving end. I think there is identification both ways. When the player is knocked out cold on the field, people clap when he gets up. On the other hand, if it's a heckuva hit, people clap when he goes down. There is identification on both sides of that issue."

No one sitting in Veterans Stadium or in his living room in New Orleans wants to see Saints quarterback Steve Walsh get seriously hurt by a bad hit. But there is an undeniable thrill that runs up and down the spine when a Reggie White breaks through the line and puts Walsh flat on his ass.

"Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!"

Only Walsh, his offensive line and the coaches are crying, "No! No! No!"



What's so appealing about that? Fans of any age and size can vicariously play the game through the Monsters of the Midway without getting themselves beaten black and blue. "The violence is attractive," Shawn Cahill says. "When you see the highlights or bloopers, it's usually a big hit."

Is this attachment to vicarious violence healthy?

"I don't think there is any harm in it," Dr. Robert B. Cialdini says, "especially if it lets off certain kinds of steam that modern society doesn't typically let men find outlets for their physical energies."

The United States is a very competitive society, Cialdini says, possibly the most violent society of all of the major industrialized nations. Football fits easily into such a place where young males are socialized and raised with the expectation of being powerful and aggressive.

"It is an aggressive sport," says Dr. D. Stanley Eitzen, a psychology professor at Colorado State University and co-author (with Dr. George H. Sage) of Sociology of North American Sport (Wm. C. Brown). Eitzen is also a past-president of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sports. "It is where you hit people. You move people. More than any other sport, boys play football. They have participated in it and it's kind of a male masculinity rite to play football and be tough and act like you like being tough even though you may not. To brag about hitting. I played football too and I can remember people saying, 'I can't wait until we start hitting in scrimmage.' The whole coaching fraternity asks us to be hitters and to deliver a blow. We are an aggressive society."

Men like to feel in control. That can be achieved not only by personal performance and personal accomplishments but to a significant degree by vicarious experiences. It's this vicarious experience that a lot of spectators need.

"There is data that has shown that people, depending on how much stress and tension they feel in their work, do the opposite in their release activities," says Dr. Seppo E. Iso-Ahola, a University of Maryland professor of sport psychology. "If you do the type of work that doesn't cause stress and tension, you will seek that in your leisure. If your work is too stressful, you want a tranquil, quiet and peaceful leisure type of activity."

Football provides an excellent opportunity for balancing these needs and the need for stress in a socially acceptable way. Pleasant stress. There is pleasant stress that is controllable by the person engaged in it. The heart rate of spectators goes up significantly during football games, more than other events. That shows that they are drawn not only by vicarious stresses and experiences but also by real stress of participation in the crowds.

"Everybody gets into it," Iso-Ahola says. "In Europe, what people value and appreciate is the skill. But in America that is less important than the fighting aspect. It supports the idea that American males love violence in sports.

"I suppose some people would say it goes all the way back to gunslinging and the Wild West syndrome," he says. "But you are really stretching explanations if you go that far in modern times. I don't think that anybody would be able to present any arguments that there is something genetically different about American men. There is not any data to support that, so therefore what you have left is the social environment in which we are living. We get exposed to maybe more violent models than they do in other cultures. That may be part of it."

* * *

American sports evolved in the early 1900s from a participation activity to a major form of entertainment, setting them apart from sports in other industrialized countries. Dr. Jay Coakley, a professor of sociology and director of the Center for the Study of Sport and Leisure at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, is the author of Sports in Society: Issues and Controversies (Moseby-Yearbook). He says that sports in England, for example, were always emphasized as participatory activities rather than entertainment or spectator activities.

"In England," Coakley says, "when sports emerged in the old private schools, there was a sense that the games were so important from a participant perspective that nobody should be excluded. If a sport was worth playing it was worth playing even badly because it was important for the people who participated. In the United States, we believe that if a sport is worth playing it is worth playing well and, in fact, trying to be the absolute best at it."

Coakley himself went to college on an athletic scholarship. He notes that Great Britain continues to emphasize participation while the United States leans toward an elitist participation of only the best playing sports in high school and college. A British college might have seven soccer teams. "You can say you play on the sixth side. Games were arranged between your sixth side and the sixth side from some other school," Coakley says. "The whole notion of one football team representing a university of 50,000 students is completely inconsistent with how the British look at intercollegiate sports."

There are other subtle cultural differences among industrial societies that lead sports to take different forms. Because sports are defined as a form of entertainment in American culture, we present them unlike any other culture. Some cultures want to emulate the commercialism of our sports but it scares the hell out of others because they think it is going to destroy the "purity" of their sports.

* * *

Isn't there something seriously missing in the lives of men who need to experience such violence?

Probably.

The second-hand pleasure we get when we witness any physical event, even within the context of a movie, satisfies a deep-seeded need. For whatever reason, as long as civilization has been around, men have been interested in the whole experience of being spectators, whether it's theater or athletics or some other art form. Men enjoy being fans as much as they enjoy being participants.

Dr. Daniel M. Glick describes a pent-up need in the psyche of contemporary American men. "A lot of men I see in my practice and that I know in the community are very, very frustrated. I think sports and athletics sometimes offer a vicarious vent for their own frustrated hostility and aggression," he says. "I think there is something primal and something cathartic in it. In all types of various cultures there have been spectator sports where there have been battles between individuals or groups in the name of sport and sometimes the stakes of the game literally meant life and death. That is a phenomenon that existed long before anybody even discovered football. There is something in the psyche, something primal, where people enjoy the spectator aspect of seeing people in battle."

Is violence good for the system? Is it bad? The answer might depend on whether you talk to a physician treating an injury, a psychologist or a sociologist. Then there are the specific issues of behavior modification, pleasure and pain, punishment and reward. When your team wins, it is a reward and so you modify your behavior and identification to reflect that.

"The deal is, kill the other team," Volney Meece says. "But I don't think they mean kill. They mean good hits."

Part of the sting of seeing men bash each other for three hours at a time on the gridiron is cushioned by the sight of their big, beefy frames insulated by pounds of padding.



"I'm not a big fan of the violence," Bill Evans says. "It's a violent sport but it doesn't seem that many people get hurt."

 

Padding and helmets keep the action from appearing too painful to the casual viewer. So do rules intended to protect the quarterback from late hits. And when someone does get hit hard -- the crowd, after all, cries for blood -- fans come to their feet and snort their approval like wild beasts.

"A pro football player said to me once, 'Football is not a contact sport. it is a collision sport,' " Glick says. "It's crazy. When those guys get out there to play they are taking some major risks. A colleague who works with disabled people told me that the average pro football player comes out of professional football after a very brief career and most of them carry a 30 percent physical disability from knees or backs or elbows or shoulders or whatever. They don't walk away from football unscathed."

But for the fan, there is an allure of collision sports that has to do with power, control and dominance.

You know your boss is being manipulative. You know a person at your work place is trying to be dominant toward you. But these things are oftentimes very subtle and veiled. One thing that people are attracted to sports is that the play is right there in front of them. It's not disguised in doublespeak or technobabble. A power struggle takes place on the field and the players understand that the moment they step out on to the turf. It's going to be brought forth with much more clarity than in virtually any other social setting because there aren't that many situations in which we allow contact and physical collisions in which two individuals or two groups are competing for some goal.

* * *

If you sell widgets for 60 hours a week it takes a lot of pride and energy out of you. All of us, to some extent, are cogs in the occupational/professional hierarchy. For some men, watching football is a way to vicariously experience physical empowerment.

We don't have to be the one hitting the other guy but we can really feel good about watching our hero and cheering him on for making a great tackle or a great block. Boxing is probably an even more extreme identification with violence. "Punch that guy! Get him! Knock him on his ass!" It's what we'd like to do to a boss or an enemy. The feeling is that we are, in a limited way, satisfying our own need through this figure we're watching on the tube.

The football field -- and the stands around it, to a certain degree -- are places where men are allowed, even encouraged, to act out their aggressions. It's a setting in which the contestants have agreed to allow certain actions to take place that are forbidden in any other social setting. There is nothing like football in this way. Duplicate what the defensive lineman did on the field to a complete stranger in the parking lot after the game and it's illegal. If you try to get out of the boss' office and he tackles you to the floor, you are going to charge him with assault.

"A lot of times we have to restrain these actions," says Dr. John M. Silva, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sport psychologist. (Silva once played tight end for the University of Connecticut Huskies.) "In collision sports there is a lot of release of restraint. Sometimes you might want to do something physical but you cannot do that. We're socialized in a civilized society most of the time to restrain those actions and sport allows us to exhibit some of those, within control."

Most experts argue that football provides a healthy catharsis to most men and even some women. Go ahead, scream, yell, jump up and down. Blow off steam. It's good medicine.

But football does not provide any psychological solution to the cause of your physical tension. You are still going back to your job on Monday morning, and if your boss was manipulative at 5 p.m., Friday, he or she will still be a manipulative bastard or bitch when you return.

Football fans fall into a cycle where tensions build all week. Football allows us to blow off steam for a few hours, but a day later the pot is whistling again. We haven't changed the actual source of our tension so the dynamics repeat.

"It is a sad commentary," Silva says. "Football is almost like an opiate for the masses. That is why a lot of people just can't wait till Wednesday -- Hump Day. One or two more days and they live for the weekend to get their little drug, their little release, and then they go back into the work place. They haven't really developed any better skills for dealing with their communication problems and the conflicts that exist at work."



In this way, Silva sees television as a cheap drug. Men think watching football makes them feel better because it provides a little release, but it may not necessarily be time well-invested.

Football is a distraction, Silva says, not a solution.

Through catharsis, men feel relief if they watch people hit each other. But an opposing theory suggests that seeing violent acts exacerbates a man's need to see or commit violence. At the end of the game we are even more hyped to clobber somebody. Sometimes it occurs because a guy's team wins, rather than loses. Need an example? How about the January 1993 riots in downtown Dallas that greeted the Super Bowl champion Cowboys? Fans were so worked up they overturned cars and broke through storefronts to vent their glee. The same thing happened a few months later in Montreal when the Canadiens won the NHL Stanley Cup, and in Chicago after that, when the Bulls won their third straight NBA championship.

"Aggression begets aggression," Dr. Bruce C. Ogilvie says. "There isn't a spilling away or draining away. What there is, is a laying of groundwork or bedrock to the aggressive or angry man. It certainly frees him from the basic human being that he is. He is an inadequate, insecure asshole. They can 'act out' this way but it doesn't translate into any constructive use of self-assertion in real life."

Do we really have a need to watch people hit each other?

"TV depicts violence -- the number of people that get in car wrecks, punching people out, the physical atrocities. Gangs are shooting at one another. If you watch the news you really are talking about reality," Dr. Thomas A. Tutko says. "They dictate the violence. Sport reflects what goes on out there.Whether sport promotes it is another question. It's the chicken and egg routine, and I'm not sure which caused which."

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Chapter 21. She's No Woman, She's My Wife

by Bob Andelman

"Why do you bug me during football? Did I bother you during childbirth?"

Tim Taylor
TV Host, "Tool Time"
Detroit

Mothers. Daughters. Wives. Sisters. Women in-laws.

Perhaps the greatest unspoken reason that men love football is because it gives many of us a few precious, uninterrupted hours away from those wonderful women in our lives.

Football presents one of the last great places where men can hide out. It's a game that women are not going to start playing any time soon and that few women care to attend in person, so men can still be men and watch the games, hootin' and hollerin' and behaving like jerks. Like Three Stooges movies, women just don't get it.

"Has football gotten in the way of relationships? I'm sure it has," Barry Dreayer says. "Past relationships didn't have a clue what was going on, didn't want to to have a clue."

Love 'em, hate 'em, can or can't live without 'em, men feel that women often complicate their lives at all the wrong times. Twelve-forty-five on Sunday afternoon is not the time to ask the man in your life to get up and do anything. It is not the time to engage him in deep conversation about Junior's grades or suspicions that Muffy is a lesbian. And it is definitely not the time to complain that he hasn't been showing you enough attention lately. Because for the next 6 hours, it isn't going to get any better.

Some women threaten their husbands with divorce because they can't bear the thought of losing them to football one more week. Some women do more than threaten.

Retired Nabisco Brands sales management executive and Los Angeles Rams superfan Jim Runels decided two could play that game. He divorced his football-hating wife and married a woman who not only tolerates the game but loves it.

"My first wife? I had to sneak off by telling her I was going to play golf," Runels says. "Then I'd go see a football game. I'd come back late and she'd bitch and complain. She'd get mad at me. I'd never hear the end of it. I could never get her to go to a football game."

Runels' home office in Yorba Linda, California, is packed with all manner of Rams paraphernalia -- hats, phones, umbrellas, helmet telephones, directors chairs, pins, cards. "Plus I have jerseys -- Bob Waterfield's No. 7 with my name on the back!" he says. "My first wife, I could never get through the front door with this stuff. When I met my second wife, Marge, I made it clear I was a Rams fan. I sent her a Rams card and she sent me back a Rams magnet and a note that said, 'See? I'm a Rams fan, too!' We clicked."

The new Mr. & Mrs. Runels -- members of the Rambassadors fan club -- make annual sojourns to Hawaii for the Pro Bowl and have even been to the Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.

The day before he got married, Joe DiRaffaele, owner of Labor World, a Coconut Creek, Florida, chain of temporary help services, told his bride there were a few things about him that she needed to know.

"One day, I'm moving back to New York," he said. "And Saturdays, I watch football. And Sundays, I watch football. I don't go out."

She knew what she was getting into, DiRaffaele felt. "You know how things change when you got married and have kids? She had to understand."

Then, an amazing thing happened. One day, Kim turned to her husband and said, "You have to teach me about football." And she got into it. One Monday night, the Dolphins were playing the Jets and Joe set the VCR to tape the game while he was out. "But my wife watched it," he says. "When I got home she said, 'The Jets really got hosed.' " Joe decided right then and there that he was a lucky man, married to a rare woman.

Time passed and the DiRaffaeles' daughter was born, on a Saturday. Joe, of course, was watching college football at the time.



"Every time football is on, my daughter watches," DiRaffaele says. "She's 20 months old. I call 'Touchdown' and she does the referee's touchdown signal. She does clipping -- she bends and puts her hand behind her knee. When commercials come on, she walks away. I guess she likes the action of it. My wife has a black shirt with Joe Montana on it going back to pass. My daughter points to it and says, 'Football!' We're a football family."

Ralph Weisbeck's wife likes football, too, but she doesn't watch many games.

"She gets too excited," Weisbeck says, laughing. "She only comes in if we're three touchdowns ahead. She won't watch the game from the beginning; she's afraid they're going to lose. She can't stand losing."

Modern women discover a number of ways to cope with their men on NFL Sundays. They:

• Leave for a few hours.

• Stay, bitch and moan.

• Learn the game.

The rest of Why Men Love Football might be subtitled And The Women Who Want to Kill Them as we suggest possible responses for women struggling with man who plan to watch football come what may.

In the Berger household, Eric's love of football led to separate TVs and separate activities on Sunday. "My wife doesn't get into sports," he says, "but she tolerates it because she knows it's important to me. She knew how it was when we got married and it's not going to change."

Women often feel that football transforms their men into spectators in their own lives. They're probably right. But as one wife put it, "Football keeps him home. It's a hobby. My women friends say, 'Thank God he has something to keep him busy.' "

The same woman almost divorced her husband when he lost his job and filled his days as commissioner of a fantasy football league. They worked that out, but she became a staunch advocate of being anywhere but the living room when her husband pitches camp to watch football. She has no interest in the game. Rather than pouting and tapping her foot, waiting an eternity for the game to end, she'll go out with other disaffected women. Or she'll tackle paperwork brought home from the office.

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Dr. Seppo E. Iso-Ahola says women should accept football as part of their man's behavior. "If you start arguing with that, especially if it's with somebody highly, psychologically invested in football, that is only going to lead to problems," he says. "It is much easier to accept that and say, 'Okay, my husband or boyfriend likes that and chose that and I accept that.' That doesn't cause problems."

"I think each person should have a parallel life," Dr. John M. Silva says. "If I'm going to sit at home all afternoon and watch TV, I shouldn't hold my wife prisoner and make her watch TV. If she wants to go out and tend the garden or go shopping, I think it's important for two things to go on. One, that the woman develops some appreciation for the interests of her spouse, and two, that they also have enough independence in their relationship that they can pursue some separate interests."

There's another good reason for women to flee on NFL Sundays. If they stay, men may expect to be waited on.

A lot of husbands want their wives nearby, even if they are not watching the game. They want them in the house to serve them, answer the phone, keep the kids quiet, get the beer and run to 7-Eleven for more when it runs out.

Hey, doll! We're out of pretzels! Are those nachos ready yet? How 'bout some beer!

"I can see the argument or displeasure with each other," Dr. Bruce C. Ogilvie says. "What can you tell women? Have a women's Sunday, doing things that please them. Leave the home scene because you are not going to change these apes. Do something that brings you pleasure. Be selfish. Go out and do something very, very selfish so you come home and feel totally good about what you have done."

Dr. Stanley H. Teitelbaum recommends that women construct more of a life of their own and develop independent interests so that while their man watches the game, they can do something besides family chores.

"There are couples who can do that," he says, "but there is also a risk, too, because the more people do that then the more they go their separate ways. After a while comes into play new questions: 'How much do they really need each other? How much do they really have with each other? Would they rather go separate ways and get involved in their separate activities and interests or do they really have shared interests and things in common? Do they really want to be together?' Going their own way is okay on Sunday if it's really important to him or on Saturday to watch the game. She can make that accommodation and do other things provided that there are enough other times in the course of their week that they have more mutuality, togetherness and harmony. In that scenario, the relationship probably can work."

Women can find themselves in a no-win predicament if their husbands and boyfriends don't take pains to understand the potential for conflict on Sundays. It doesn't speak well for the survival of these relationships if, to survive, a power game develops in which the husband/boyfriend is in control of the relationship and dictates, "This is what I want to do and this is what I like. Either fit in, go along with it or don't."

Every woman has her own way of dealing with separation anxiety on game day.

Chicago Bear Report managing editor Larry Mayer's second date with the woman he eventually married was at the Bears' 1987 season opener, a Monday night game versus the New York Giants. The Bears won the two previous Super Bowls and Mayer couldn't think of a more exciting place to be. His future bride didn't let on at the time than any place else would have been more exciting to her.

"My wife hates sports," Mayer says. "She was just being polite. She can't stand sports. She only travels on the road with me because the Bears play in good cities. In Tampa, she goes to the mall across the street from the stadium. In New Orleans, she brings a paperback to read in the stadium."




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Railing about a toilet seat perpetually left up would probably prove less aggravating and more constructive than trying to talk a man out of watching football on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon.

"If a woman asks her husband to do things other than watch football, he won't find that acceptable. That can very easily lead to arguments," Iso-Ahola says. "In that context, I can see why violence would happen. These males are very highly invested, psychologically, in this game. Their tolerance level for other things is low. There is psychological data that has shown that when we watch or observe somebody else perform aggressively then our own behavior tends to become aggressive as well.

Therefore when these men are watching football -- an aggressive and violent sport -- their feeling of hostility in general tends to significantly increase. If you have an opportunity or situation at home that lends itself to arguments, then it is easier for the man who is already aggressively aroused, or in a hostile mood, to act."

The expression "football widow" refers to spouses of football fans who become invisible to their families from October to January. If yours is a busy family, working all week or busy with the kids, there is the expectation -- not unfairly -- that on Sunday you'll have some time together. But if the guy is more excited and interested in watching the game on TV than in having an outing with his family, he better expect trouble.

In that kind of stereotypical situation, a wife may feel aggrieved and neglected, that "This is our one day to really be together and go out, but you'd rather sit by the tube and watch football! You'd rather be married to football than me!" The husband retaliates: "Hey, I've worked hard and busted my butt all week. Finally, I have a chance to relax, drink a few beers and enjoy the game. But you won't give me space and the room to relax." He feels nagged and a mutual resentment builds.

One of the things that tends to help women a lot is trying to understand not only their own point of view but to get in the other person's shoes. One of the ways couples can do this is to switch roles. Stand back from being so hot under the collar and role-play with each other, assuming the other person's lines. Have a dialogue with the man expressing the views that he thinks the woman has and the woman expressing the views that she thinks the man has. If they can do that, they are in a position to better understand how the other one feels. Once there is greater appreciation for that, there is more of a foundation for negotiation.

Smart, experienced couples don't wait for NFL Sunday to arrive. They anticipate it before it happens, negotiate their needs ahead of time and trade off. "This Sunday, I'm going to watch the 49ers game and next Sunday we are going to do something else together." Or they'll structure Sunday so that at 4 p.m. she knows he is going to be watching the game. "I'm going to be watching the game but let's do something together in the morning and the afternoon before 4."

Dr. Michael Messner says discussion in social science circles about the viewing of violent sports revolves around whether it is something that helps men blow off steam or something that makes men more aggressive and prone to violence. Most of the evidence compiled by psychologists suggests the latter.

"Viewing aggressive and violent sports like boxing or football is more likely to de-sensitize men to violence and victims of violence," Messner says. "In terms of domestic violence, one of the things that is important to recognize is that when fans identify with teams, half of the fans are losing all the time. So if a man watches an aggressive, violent sport coupled with drinking some alcohol with his friends and his team loses, his aggression and frustration level both simultaneously go up. The tendency, once the game is over, to turn that aggression and frustration on someone close is what explains the fact that women's shelters always report much more activity and business on Super Bowl Sunday. In other parts of the world, during World Cup soccer, the same thing happens."

During the media hype leading up to Super Bowl XXVII in Pasadena, California in 1993, much was made of a report that Super Bowl Sunday is the busiest day of the year for women's shelters. An author of the report, Garland F. White, a sociologist at Old Dominion University, immediately claimed the report's findings were taken out of context. But many social scientists and psychologists nonetheless believe Super Bowl Sunday is a very dangerous day for women.

Some women want to learn about sports and get involved as much as possible themselves so as not to leave this as some sort of exclusive male territory. Other women do the exact opposite and on football Sundays they take shopping days with their women friends and get out.

"Rather than seeing this as something that women need to respond to," Messner says, "I think it's something that men need to think about and talk to each other about. Not necessarily that we should quit liking or watching sports together but I think we should try to understand the way it is connected to other parts of our lives. What it means to us in terms of our relationships to women. Does watching sports and the way we watch sports contribute to more supportive and intimate and peaceful relations with women? Or does it separate us more and make us more likely to be antagonistic and even violent towards women?

"Those are questions that men need to ask themselves," Messner says. "Until we do, women are going to be left trying to find ways to keep themselves safe rather than participating with us as equals."

A completely different school of thought suggests that women can never fully appreciate the game, no matter how hard they try. It's just not in their makeup.

Dr. William Beausay says that the large majority of women found at football games go there not to watch the game, but to accompany their companion. "I used to know the exact percentage of women who go because they love football -- it was about 8.6 percent," he says. Even that small number was made up of women who liked the sport for its pageantry, the atmosphere, the colors, the music and the spirit, Beausay says.

"They would never say the powerful team or an effective team, a great athletic prowess or winning. Those weren't the reasons. There were usually aesthetic reasons for women," he says.




So, according to his research, most women at football games are there because of their men. If the men didn't go, they wouldn't be found dead there.

"I don't think women are socialized in the same way as men," Dr. D. Stanley Eitzen says. "They are raised in the same type of society but they are raised to be feminine. To be feminine is to not be aggressive and not be dominant and they also don't play football. They haven't had that experience for the most part and, in fact, when it comes to football, they are on the sidelines being the supporters, cheering and all of that kind of thing while men are the doers. I think this represents a very sexist kind of society, but that is, in fact, what we are.

"Many women get into football and enjoy it, too" he says. "I don't think they have the same depth of feeling that men do because we have played it. We understand the intricacies of football and the precision that it takes to really have a play work well as well as the level of aggression. I don't know that women understand that because none of their sports in our society really are that way. They can be a little bit aggressive in field hockey and things like that but it is not the same."

Silva says he's intrigued by the way football coaches encourage their young men to develop aggression to be hitters, blockers and tacklers, giving rewards for the "best hit of the week." Best hits are bone-crushers, where the opponent who was tackled does not get up for a while. Players gets decal on their helmets for causing that.

"An ex-Denver Bronco told me that every Monday, some people had envelopes in their lockers with money in them," Silva says. "It was for extra hard hits. That's against league rules but it's just part of this macho thing. I said, don't you realize that if every team does that it increases the level of people getting hurt? He said, 'You don't think of it that way. You think of it on an individual basis and you are being rewarded.' Men have been socialized to understand this mentality; I'm not sure very many women do. In many ways women have been robbed because our work world is an aggressive, tough, rock 'em-sock 'em kind of place where men have the advantage of this kind of experience that women don't."

Men get really upset when their mates cannot identify with something that is as crucial to them as football.




"It is important if you can develop some appreciation and some knowledge for the sport," Silva says. "I don't care which way it goes, male/female, female/male. If the wife is interested in some sport, it behooves the husband to develop some interest and vice versa. Some games, I really do enjoy having my wife watch with me.

"I'll say, 'Do you know what happened right there? Do you know what that call was? Why did the team that recovered get to keep the ball?' " he explains. "Sometimes men watch and we know what is going on but our spouses don't. I find that the more I ask questions, the more knowledgeable my wife gets about the sport and the more knowledgeable she gets the more interested she is. One of the reasons a lot of women are not interested is they don't have a full understanding and appreciation. And when they ask a 'stupid' question, especially in front of your friends, they get ridiculed. What is that going to do?"

Some women gravitate to the game and meet with resistance if they get to liking it too much. They start watching it with their boyfriends, husbands or friends but find that men have a really hard time talking to them about it and taking it seriously.

"My sister told me that it took her husband's friends 10 years to accept the fact that she knew as much as they did about the Raiders," Messner says. "They did eventually learn to respect that she knows the game and she is very happy now that occasionally they will even ask for her opinion on something.

They didn't even know how to talk to a woman about those things. There is an assumption among men that women will not be interested, aren't interested and aren't knowledgeable."

That's been Larry Selvin's experience. Sort of. "Either women don't understand the rules or they don't know the players. If they know the rules and a few of the players, they're tolerable," he says.

"Actually, that goes for men or women."

Dan Jiggetts, the former Chicago Bears player turned sportscaster, enjoys talking football with women. "Most guys will seek out a woman that wants to watch a football game with them," he says. "They're very understanding. When you want to sit down and talk strategy, the women listen. They lock in. The guys say they understand, but the strategy goes over their heads. They're watching who gets knocked on their tail."

"My wife is a Cleveland Browns fan," Atlanta management consultant Mark von Dwingelo says. "When we watch games, she occasionally asks, 'Why'd that happen?' Or, 'Why'd they call that penalty?' I appreciate it. It's only annoying if the Browns are playing the Giants. If the Giants are on, she knows the game will only last three hours -- she can hold her questions. She'll say something to me and I'll say, 'Gretch, what am I doing?' And she'll say, 'Okay, I'll ask you later.'"

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!