Chapter 7. There's No Need to Fear, Underdog is Here

by Bob Andelman

"The team I'm rooting for becomes an extension of me. It is me. When there's an undeserved penalty, it's almost as if it's against me. It makes me mad, like almost missing a red light when you're in a hurry."

Jim Melvin
Newspaper editor
St. Petersburg, Florida

Meet Jim Melvin. He's a health and fitness writer and copy editor for the St. Petersburg Times in Florida. Jim's got a good job, two daughters he loves and a standard poodle named Bogie. Guys like to hang out with Jim because he's bright, witty and interested in manly things like sports and checking out beautiful women.

Maybe you know somebody like him.

When it comes to football, though, few men are as emotionally attached to their team as Jim is to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The Bucs don't know him from any other fan, but to him, they're family. If the team lost all its fans, coach Sam Wyche could still count on Jim to buy him a beer.

"I've always had this theory that you become more attached to a losing team than a winning team," Jim says. "I get much angrier when the Bucs lose than I get happy when they win. If the Bucs were to go 12-4 and win the Super Bowl, I'd go through the roof. Would a 49ers fan feel the same way? They're P.O.'d if the 49ers don't make the playoffs. Me, I'd be happy with 8-8.

"At the height of my attraction to the Bucs, when I sit down at 1 for a game to start, I'm an emotional wreck. My heart races, my hands sweat. I can't eat. I try to eat a brunch before the game. Because there is no way, at 1 p.m., I can sit down and eat. I'm way too happy, excited, positive.

"Then," he says, "you know what happens.

"Typically, 10 minutes into a Bucs game, more bad things have happened to us than in one entire game for any other team. I've been anticipating three hours of pure pleasure and now, after 10 minutes, I'm angry. Ten minutes into the game, anyone around me would no longer want to be around me. I develop a different personality. You wouldn't want to ask me a favor, you wouldn't want to discuss a pleasant thing. And if you don't like profanity, you wouldn't want to be around me."

Jim's first exposure to football came during the NFL's 1966 championship game. It was fourth and 1, frozen conditions. Bart Starr scored on a quarterback sneak.

"I was so excited, jumping around. That's when I got the bug." The Green Bay Packers beat the Dallas Cowboys, 34-21.

Before he became enamored with the Bucs -- and before Tampa Bay ever bowed its head and admitted possession of the Bucs -- Jim was a fan of the Atlanta Braves. Hank Aaron was the toast of the team in those days, not that he had much competition for attention. "He was great; they were terrible," Jim recalls. "That's when I first felt angry, that I was being personally wronged by a team." 

He also recalls crying at a high school basketball game when his team won on a last-second shot.

Geography rules Jim's allegiances. The closer the team is, the more he like them. Jim's choices tend to reflect the sports landscape of the Southeastern United States in the '60s, when he was a teenager: the Atlanta Braves, Atlanta Hawks and Florida State University. The Bucs came along in 1976.

Sure, he loves football. He's fascinated by the offensive and defensive strategies, the power and speed of the players. But it goes beyond that, into an emotional realm, see-sawing between heated anger and brief moments of pleasure.

"I don't like to lose," he says. "Any time that my team loses, I feel there was something more than the team's play. Officials, bad luck or the weather turned against them. But you have to look at this in the context of the team I root for. Probably the worst team in professional football, an unbelievable string of losing seasons. Every Sunday, I'm let down. But I feel like I've invested so much energy in them, it's too late to back down now.

"I think of it in terms of waiting in a real long line. You've waited in it two hours, maybe you're going to wait another hour, but by God you're not going to get out of it now. And you have a short memory. You remember the three or four good plays and forget the bad ones. By the following Sunday, you're ready to go again. And occasionally," he says, "there's a win in there."

Very occasionally.

When the Bucs are reduced to losers by halftime, Jim turns the television off and tries to find something else to occupy his mind. But he'll turn it on again later for a few seconds to make sure there wasn't a miraculous rally. When you consider that the Bucs are one of the losingest teams in NFL history, those early blow-outs actually save Jim hours of heartache.

Of course, the more typical game puts his beloved franchise ahead or within two or three points going into the last seconds of the fourth quarter. Then, having suckered Jim into believing this time it's really going to happen, they lose. Miserably. Painfully. Like being used for tackling practice by the Monsters of the Midway.

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"If it goes down to the wire and they lose, I'll be depressed about it until mid-Tuesday," Jim says. Lots of opposing players have vanquished Bucs hopes over the years, but Jim recalls one especially painful Sunday when Detroit Lions quarterback Rodney Peete stepped up as designated spoiler.

"I dangled my feet in the shallow end of the pool, facing the deep end. I didn't move for half an hour."

That's Jim's post-game show. During the Buc games -- which he watches alone because no friends or family members can endure his misery and tantrums -- Jim transforms.

He's never physically attacked anyone. But objects have potential. The Soloflex is supposed to be indestructible. Jim says it's not. He got so angry during one game because of a Bucs touchdown being called back by a holding penalty that he broke the exercise unit's bench by pounding on it with his fists. Another time he wrecked a coffee table. He hit it so hard that the metal frame bent. "I get so angry that I almost take on super-human strength," he says.

"When things go well, I run around the house, dancing, jumping. Once I somersaulted into the pool, only to be cursing 10 minutes later because the other team ran a kickoff in for a touchdown.

"My (ex-wife) did not like it. She thought it was stupid, silly. It scared the kids, the animals. And she was right. I would waste three hours on a Sunday afternoon for something that would make me mad. But your love of a sports team goes beyond your ability to control that. It's very intense. She'd leave the house. She'd go by herself and I'd have the kids. I would get real angry and when I'd come out of my rage, they would be in a corner standing behind a chair. They weren't scared of me, they thought it was funny. And if something good happened, they'd scream and leap around with me. Beth Ann even made up a board game: 'Act like a dog . . . Act like a cat . . . Act like dad when he gets mad at football games.' "

* * *

Dr. William J. Beausay, a Columbus, Ohio, psychologist and founder of the Academy of Sport Psychology International, understands the Jim Melvins of the world.

"I'm a clinical psychologist," Beausay says, "and I have often said that people, rather than going to a psychologist and paying $90 to $100 an hour, would find it so much cheaper to buy a football ticket for $10 to $15, get fabulous psychotherapy in two and a half hours and solve all their problems if their team wins. It's better than going to see a psychologist."

On the other hand, if their team loses and they really strongly identify with it -- and fanatics do project themselves onto their teams -- then they get double trouble. But they only have to wait three or four days until the prospect of recovering or righting a wrong begins to present itself. "It's worth all the time that you have to wait and the money you have to spend," Beausay says.

Guys like Jim Melvin lack other sources of positive reinforcement in their lives, according to the experts. Football provides a temporary reinforcement -- a sense of security and a sense of meaningfulness.

Men, because they are competitive, have to test themselves to see if we are, "acceptable," "very good" or "Number One." That's what matters to men; that's the nature of men. Women don't have to do this. "If you put a bunch of little girls together in a sandbox," Beausay says, "they'll start to work and function together. You put little boys together and soon they are throwing sand at each other. It starts very early on."

Men have to test themselves to find out if they are good enough or just adequate. Psychologists call that the male ego. They are just testing their own identity. "Am I lovable?" "Am I acceptable?"

We project ourselves into their football team and that test is then performed by proxy. If a man's team wins that means he is No. 1. For one small moment he is a Master of the Universe and it was worth that $25 admission price or three hours invested in front of a television. He has met the need to test himself through his team. If his team wins, the guy will mouth off all week long about how tough "we" were, how great "we" were. "Did you see that play?" A man needs to be heard and known. He is going to let everybody know the Seahawks are his team.

"The general spectator is a middle class to lower middle class individual," says Dr. John M. Silva, a professor of sport psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "Given the socialization of that class of individuals, where they feel that they often have to succeed against difficult odds, it is a pretty natural social phenomenon that they are going to identify with an underdog team and hope that underdog team can succeed in spite of the odds. The other team is stacked and they have all the ability. They have the high-paid players; their management bought the best team possible. I think it is a very natural thing to make analogies between the fan's everyday life and the situations and obstacles that they have to overcome being in the particular social strata that they are in and what is being symbolized on the TV screen for them."

You don't have to root for a loser to feel lost and adrift, though.

The Denver Broncos and Buffalo Bills enjoy winning records year in and year out. They regularly appear in post-season play, carrying ecstatic fans all the way to the Super Bowl three times apiece by 1993 -- for a combined record of six losses, no wins. The Bills pulled that stunt three years in a row.

Despite going to many NFL championships, many fans of both teams feel like losers.

"There was a big debate," Broncos fan Jeff Spear says. "Do you want them to go to the Super Bowl again, knowing that they are going to lose? Do you want to see this again? You know what is going to happen. You know the pain associated with getting so close and just getting killed. It's traumatic because you go from such a high to such a low. There is no middle ground.

"Before the Broncos played the 49ers (Super Bowl XXIV, 1990) I knew they were going to get crushed, but I was still excited that they were there. You can always think something great is going to happen and wow, maybe this time it's going to be different, but the odds are against you. It's part of the struggle that attracts you to that team and the game. Just maybe, one time, a miracle will happen and they'll do it. But there is a voice in the back of your head saying, 'Look out.' "

Spear, a comedy writer for Tonight Show with Jay Leno, lived in the Denver area for a dozen years until leaving in 1989. He is still a Broncos fan, although he thinks of himself as rooting for the underdog.

"There is a huge stigma attached to the team," Spear says. "I see myself following the Broncos as much as I can for as long as I can. I have always felt that when and if they ever do win the Super Bowl I might go on to something else. It's something that they obviously need to accomplish. It's the only thing left. Maybe I'll give them one more shot. Lose it once more. I'll stick with them until they win it all."

* * *

It's one thing to be so involved in sports but quite another to be so attached to a loser. Is there something seriously lacking in the lives of such men?

"It gets harder to explain how you would get attached to a loser," says Dr. Edward R. Hirt, an Indiana University social psychologist.

A lot of people in Hirt's part of the country bring up Cubs fans as a counter-example. The Cubs break hearts every year. It seems like they will win. In August, they may be in first place, but they will inevitably choke. Talk about summer traditions! Yet their fans are incredibly loyal and stick with them through all that. In some ways, they pride themselves as being real fans because they stick by the team. They are true fans.

Thick-and-thin fans develop a charming elitism by sticking to teams like bubblegum on the bottom of $100 running shoes. They scoff at the people who come out of the woodwork only when the team wins. Career fans waggle a cynical finger and snub their noses at late arrivals who rejoice in the team's Cinderella comebacks. Where were you when . . . ? The diehards feel that only they have the right to enjoy the long-awaited successes, whereas these other people just jumped on the bandwagon.

"It would be real interesting for me to understand how these people cope," Hirt says. "I can't imagine that they sit there and just let themselves be miserable. I'm sure they have to funnel their energies toward more constructive things. Maybe people do that by playing the armchair coach and quarterback, talking about what their team needs to do. They call the sports talk shows or talk to their buddies and friends about what the team needs to do and how to turn it around."

Naturally, there are men who just happen to gravitate to underdogs. Nobody questions their psychological underpinnings or wonders if their elevator goes all the way to the top. They pick long shots because it's more rewarding if they pull out a miracle and win it all. What a thrill to be one of the few people who saw it coming.

They set themselves up as being unique. We all like the underdog to come through. Think of the NCAA. People just love the Cinderella teams coming out of nowhere and knocking off one of the big guys in the Final Four. There is something indescribably delicious about seeing the underdog come through.

* * *

Back to Jim Melvin. He and John Cimasko could be brothers. As obsessed as Melvin is with the Bucs, Cimasko is only a notch away in his total devotion to the Indianapolis Colts.

"I get pretty wound up," Cimasko says. "I don't watch the away games with anybody. My wife doesn't let anybody come over. If the Colts are having a real bad day, my wife will tell the kids (Jack and Jill -- really) to go downstairs. I don't sit. My legs are flying, my arms are flying. Or, if it's third and inches, I'm on my knees in front of the TV. I don't throw anything at the TV that might break it. My wife laughs. It'll be the first few minutes, the other team's first possession, and I'll say, 'It's the most important play of the game!'"

Cimasko's father-in-law is a quiet and reserved man, so Cimasko usually tones down around him. Ten minutes into a game, he once said to John, "You live and die on every play, don't you?" Later in the same game, the Colts scored a touchdown and Cimasko leaped out of his chair and nearly hit his head on the ceiling. His father-in-law's eyes popped out.

"My feeling is, anybody can root for a good team," Cimasko says. "Back in '86 and '90, New York Giants fans came out of the woodwork. I think it's more impressive if you root for a team that stinks. When the Colts were 0 and 13 people used to call me up and say, 'Are you going to hang yourself?' If you're loyal, it has to be whether they're good or bad. When they win, maybe I had something to do with it when I stirred the crowd up on third down. Who knows? My loyalty is unconditional. I'll tell you what, one win makes up for 20 losses. As long as they try 100 percent, I'm behind them 100 percent."

He makes a point of seeing the Colts off at the airport when they leave for away games and welcomes them back on their return. "There have been times when they come home from a loss and I'll be the only one there. It'll be a Sunday night in December, snowing, I'm on the way to the airport and I feel like the last, lonely Colts fan."

Cimasko was 10 years old in 1965 when the bug bit him. That was the year the Colts lost a playoff game 13-10 in overtime. He wrote Johnny Unitas a letter wishing him luck. It was the first time he uttered those infamous words: "Wait till next year!"

"To me, football is more than a game and the Colts are more than a football team," Cimasko says. "I've lost interest in so many things growing up and changed my opinions on so many things. But down at the Hoosierdome, I'm 10 years old. There's nothing like seeing a horseshoe on the side of a helmet. I get so excited."

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Chapter 18. 57 Channels

by Bob Andelman

"I typically watch games by myself. Particularly while I'm watching the Giants. I'm not too receptive to other people's comments, particularly if they don't like the Giants. I get a little intense. I'm fixated on the TV. When the Giants were in Super Bowl XXV in Tampa, I watched it with my wife, my mother-in-law and her husband. I kept turning up the TV every time they started a conversation. My mother-in-law was undaunted. She kept reminding everyone that Buffalo was making a comeback. I about threw her out the window."

Mark von Dwingelo
Management consultant
Atlanta

Football became America's darling in the late 1960s and early '70s when NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle made television a partner in his sport. Little did Rozelle imagine what would happen two decades later when remote control clickers, cable and home satellite receivers joined the fray.

The vast majority of football fans these days prefer to watch their teams charge on to fields of glory from the comfort of their living rooms. The explosion of televised games broadened some geographic boundaries and erased others, creating legions of fans whose loyalty knows no state lines.




Millions more watch football on TV (or listen on radio) than could possibly fit into all the college and pro stadiums ever built in the United States. And even if there were enough seats to accommodate them there are plenty of other limitations -- distance and cost, to name two. People who live in the middle of Nebraska, South Dakota or Wyoming can't get to many pro football games in person. However, they, like transplanted New Yorkers living in Miami, can still catch most of the Jets and Giants games, while Bostonians are at ease praying for the fortunes of the Cowboys and Oilers.

Football, far and away, is the sport that translates best to television. The slow stop-and-go grind works wonderfully on the home screen. Hockey must be the worst for TV, because the puck moves so fast and suddenly the camera fails to accurately follow it.

• "I like watching on TV because you get to watch more than one game at a time," Eric Berger, a lawyer in Sunrise, Florida, says. "I'm a remote-control madman. In Fort Lauderdale, my cable company carries the NBC and CBS affiliates from both Miami and West Palm Beach. Sometimes the affiliates show different games. It's so enjoyable. Doing it as long and as much as I have -- with the benefit of instant-replay -- you can watch all that without missing any important parts of the game. And yes, it drives my wife crazy."

• Browns fan Bill Evans grew up in Cleveland and lives in Columbus today. "I watch football on TV; I've been to very few games in my life," he says. "Even if I lived in Cleveland, I wouldn't go to every game. The weather is crappy. On TV, I can watch other things, I can watch two or three games and get replays."

• In college, Andrew Spear found it impossible to get tickets to see the Denver Broncos. It was much easier -- and cheaper -- to watch the games on television. It turned into a ritual; now living in San Francisco, he watches up to four pro games a week.

"I don't watch every game on television," Spear says. "But I do set aside time to watch the teams I follow: the Broncos, 49ers and the Vikings. In that order. I watch with close friends or alone. The best is when I'm with somebody, but it has to be somebody who pays attention to the game."




A brilliantly choreographed 1993 commercial featured Dallas Cowboys running back Emmitt Smith complaining that football moves so fast he never gets to meet anybody new. With Smith as our guide, we see the football field through his eyes: Speeding down field, he introduces himself to opposing players while streaking past them. "Hi, I'm Emmitt . . . Hi, I'm Emmitt . . . "

TV games differ significantly from the ones ticket buyers see while wedged in the stands at the Metrodome or the L.A. Coliseum. Multiple cameras and angles -- overhead, on the sidelines, in the end zones and even strapped to the helmets of players -- bring the game to the home viewer from every possible point of view.

"I'd much prefer to watch a game on TV where I can see replays and not have to catch a bus to the stadium and back," Larry Mayer, managing editor of the Chicago Bear Report, says "I had season tickets for 10 years until I got this job. Maybe it was my seats; I used to tape the games, rush home and see what I missed."

Mayer's got nothing on Bill Price, however.

When the Buffalo Bills are on the road, the season ticketholder sets his VCR to record the game on television and goes out to a movie. He finds that watching the games live on TV makes him too tense. Radio is even worse. When he returns from the movie, he'll catch the end of the game, listen to post-game commentary and reaction, then rewind to the beginning and watch the whole thing.

"People find that odd," Price says, "but I'd rather find out the result all at once and watch the game slowly. Even if they lose, I watch it." In fact, he also tapes home games and rushes home from Bills Stadium to watch the whole thing over again instead of watching a second game. "It's very enjoyable to watch your team win, I'll tell you that," he says.

Another Bills fan, retired tool company executive Ralph Weisbeck, appreciates guys like Price who buy enough tickets to ensure sell-outs of Buffalo home games so Weisbeck can watch them from the comfort of his easy chair. "You get better seats at home," he says.

* * *
Why do men sit glued to the tube every fall, watching hour after hour of football, cheerfully excluding everything around them? Hint: It ain't the shoes, Spike.

One of the things that happens with football -- and this is probably true of other sports as well -- is that we don't continually lose and we don't continually win. We may be in the middle, where we win more than we lose, or vice versa, but it's the concept of partial reinforcement. What that means is that our team wins just enough so that the hook is set and we're going to be interested in it. Even if our guys didn't win today, there were a whole series of great passes, great hits, good defense and good offense. We get enough within the game to build hope.

Part of the repeated viewing is a man's identification with his team. He becomes very possessive of "his" Colts or "his" Chargers. That's a positive identification. There is also negative identification, when a person is against the other team, as in "I'm for whoever plays Minnesota."

"There is also a third kind of identification," Tutko says. "These are people who just love the game. They could go to a high school game and not even know who the two teams are and still enjoy the game."

That description would fit Harold Hyman: "Oh, man," Hyman says. "Saturday, all day, and Sunday, it's the same. I watch bits and pieces of whatever's on. I don't know if I'd watch three hours of Oregon-Oregon State, but if it's on TV, the game is on in our house. Monday night, I'm doing other things, but the game is on."

Dr. Thomas A. Tutko believes that this form of ultrafans, the ones who live to watch NFL, college, Canadian Football League and Arena Football League games, may be overdoing it.

"It can become an incredible escape," he says. "There are some people who are absolute sports buffs. It is a retreat from reality. It's identification outside their jobs. They're hunting for other places that they can have some kind of tie or emotion. Thoreau said men lead lives of quiet desperation. I think that is true for a number of people. The sport allows them an adrenalin rush, a bit of excitement."

Dr. Daniel Begel, a Milwaukee psychiatrist and founder of the International Society for Sports Psychiatry, agrees. He calls football "an antidote for despair."

* * *
Just as an entire tailgating culture developed around seeing football games in person, so do rituals take place for those who watch on television.

"I won't schedule things for Sunday afternoons," Boston's Kenton Blagbrough says. "Sunday afternoon is for football games. I plan prior to the 12:30 pre-game show to make sure I've eaten lunch so I'm not making noise and miss anything. I make sure whatever has to get done gets done so I have uninterrupted viewing pleasure. I reserve 12:30- 7 p.m. for watching football."

That's what most of us do: Buy some chips and beer and invite the guys over to watch the game on a 30-inch set, preferably one with picture-in-picture so we can monitor a second game. Or show up three hours before kickoff to secure our favorite table at the neighborhood sports bar, the one with the 6-foot screen and smaller TVs everywhere you turn.

Dan Jiggetts says there is even a certain etiquette to be followed when the guys come over to watch a game: "If they're over your house and eating your chow, chances are they want to be for your team," he says.

* * *
Another reason football is such a hit on television is that it is finite in terms of the time commitment each game requires. An NFL game takes three hours. Set your clock by it, unless the contest goes into overtime. College games last almost as long. It isn't hard to plan a day knowing that from 1-4 p.m. or 4-7 p.m., you're going to be in the living room, watching the Dolphins-Bills game. Try scheduling your day around a baseball game. It's impossible because the games can be as short as 2-1/2 hours or as long as 4 hours.

That element of predictability appeals to us. Rules and parameters exist to control what can and can't happen. We take comfort in knowing what the limits are. A script determines the number of acts and duration but at the same time we bow to the excitement of not knowing how it's going to be played out. In that respect football resembles soap opera.

Drama lures many men to the game. While it may be an overstatement to suggest that on any Sunday, any team could beat any other team, miracles do occur. And sometimes the best contests occur when not just the best teams go head-to-head but when the worst slug it out.

No matter who plays, the final score of a football game isn't a certainty till the fourth quarter gun is fired. Suspense and the ever-present specter of a comeback are what keep the games fresh.

"Every game is like a new story, an individual drama being played out," Harold Hyman says. "I've sat in games being a Gator or Dolphins fan thinking there's no way they can win, and yet they do."

That drama is what keeps the real fans' butts glued to the seats of their La-Z-Boys. But the real appeal for the stay-at-home set is their interaction with the TV.

• "Yes, I do scream at the TV set. Occasionally," Eric Berger says. "Whether it be a bad call or a bonehead play or just a great play by the team I'm not rooting for. It's been ingrained in us since we were young kids to scream at the TV like it's going to have some affect. It doesn't of course."

Berger does not yell at the television for anything other than sports. He says.

• Bill Evans says that of all the televised sports, football best fits his lifestyle.

"Because of the way the game is structured -- action/time-out/action -- it fits what I do on a Sunday," he says. "I can do dishes, I can look away if I have to, as opposed to basketball, which constantly demands your attention."

Some guys are not big TV fans, but they will watch football all day long. Dave Schwarzmueller is one of them.

"I pound the hell out of chairs," he says. "I have an easy chair and I have a tendency to pound the armrests when I get mad. I'll swear when the Bills blow an easy play."

* * *
Baseball, which Dr. Allen L. Sack refers to as a "pastoral game" is more consistent with the values of an earlier, slower-paced America, a country of expansive green fields and grazing cattle.

"Baseball resonated quite well with that kind of life, just before or after the Civil War," Sack says. "But our society has gotten increasingly bureaucratized and industrialized. We have gone from a task-orientation where people worked at a craft and were not preoccupied with assembly line production, to a time-orientation where people work in industries."

Frederick Taylor, the father of scientific management theory, wrote and influenced managerial thought in the early 20th century. Taylor felt industry could achieve greater productivity by studying workers very closely. He instituted time and motion studies to eliminate waste.

"Football is more consistent than baseball with Taylor's highly rationalized approach to life, business and society," Sack says. "Whereas baseball is of a slower pace, football fits better with modern industrial values. Especially in notions of time and the passing of time and the tremendous importance we place on every minute that is wasted by inefficiency. First and 10 -- you've got 10 yards and 4 downs and everything is very rationalized. You've got a field laid out in grids. You've got time-outs and sometimes they don't even go into a huddle. The quarterback goes right to the line of scrimmage. It gets faster and faster and the action is constant. It's not the subtlety and the grace and the slowness of movement that you find in a baseball game. You don't have to be particularly subtle to understand and to enjoy football. You can enjoy it without subtlety because every couple of seconds there is another really devastating tackle or shrieks from the crowd or halftime or firecrackers or pageantry or a player being hurt and carried off the field or a fight."

This leads into another major theory of why men love football: instant gratification.

Men long for action. Women provide action. So does gambling. But the easiest, cheapest way to action requires a TV.

For quick stimulation, football beats other sports, cleats down. Hockey and soccer can go whole periods without a score. But in football, you can have an explosive play any minute. And instant replays. Over and over again. Americans prefer action over defense.

"The reason I like football is the excitement," Larry Mayer says. "It mixes a lot of variables: strategy, violence, great athleticism. It's not scripted. You don't know what's going to happen. Anything can happen. In basketball, the game doesn't matter until the last few minutes. In football, teams can come back. "

Football looks like human pinball on the video screen, especially the way young men surf from channel to channel with their remote controls looking for the next big hit. They drive the older guys crazy, punching buttons faster than Dad and Uncle Morty can focus on the last image. They only stop on action.

Adults appreciate slow intrigue but that's not what the kids stop on. They stop on the first murder they see or someone doing a ninja drop-kick on somebody and knocking their lights out. Or they stop on a football or basketball game. It doesn't take much patience to enjoy that. They're not going to stop on baseball because a pitcher is standing on the mound, rubbing a ball or a conference is taking place or, more likely, just endless pitch after pitch and nothing happening. Kids pull away from that.

"Football, because it gives you rapid and instant gratification in terms of seeing action, is far better than other sports," Sack says.