Chapter 2. Boy's Life

by Bob Andelman

 "When I was a young kid, the reason I had favorite teams -- the Cowboys, Raiders and 49ers -- was that I liked their colors or their helmet logo."

Kenton Blagbrough
Textbook buyer
Boston University

American boys of 7 or 8 find football everywhere they turn. Dad studies the game on TV every weekend. He shushes Mom so he can hear the scores and watch highlights on the late news. Or he's trying to coax a son into playing catch in the yard.

"Put your fingers across the laces. That's the way Jim Kelly throws those long spirals. Don't worry -- your hands will get bigger! You're going to be a quarterback when you get to high school, I just know it. Won't that be great?"

Maybe the family piles in the car to see an older brother play the game for a high school or college team. Mom and Dad wear atrociously matched school colors with hats that feature the team mascot. Young boys can't see anything but ants running back and forth, knocking each other down, but even that's hypnotic.

Away from the house, teenagers play the game in the electric utility's right-of-way field under the crackle of damp power lines. The kids scream at each other. They curse and laugh. Sometimes it looks like fun. Sometimes it looks like a fight will break out.

If the boy watches long enough or often enough, he'll be invited to play when somebody goes home or gets injured. If he's lucky, one of the older kids will take him under wing and tell him exactly what to do, not having time to explain all the things he shouldn't do. For reasons of size alone, he'll get knocked on his ass a few times, roughed up. If he paid close attention from the sidelines, he'll know not to cry when he's hurt, no matter how badly. That's the first rite of passage. Even if the tears well up, he'll need to return to the huddle. If he breaks down, his place in the neighborhood picking order will be set for the next decade.

That's one of the earliest reasons why we love football. It's part of who we are as kids, who we want to be as adults.

* * *

In North America, men are taught early on to watch and play football. It's easy to relate to the guys on the field because so many of us have played the game.

Dr. Seppo E. Iso-Ahola, a University of Maryland sport psychologist and co-author (with Brad Hatfield) of Psychology of Sports: A Social Psychological Approach, says some men may even experience a "pleasurable kinesthetic stimulation" as spectators.

A what?

"A pleasurable kinesthetic stimulation," he says. "It has to do with movement. If you perform certain movements, that is kinesthetic stimulation. The point is that men (who) know the game well have this ability to relate to the performers and as a result of when they are spectating they are likely to have this pleasurable kinesthetic stimulation."

Would this be part of the reason that most women do not share men's devotion to football?

"It is definitely part of it," Iso-Ahola says. "Fewer females obviously play this game when they are little girls and that is one factor that explains why men have more interest. For example, men who hunt and fish frequently did the same thing when they were very young. It is a carry-over effect."

Studies have shown that roughly 50 percent of the leisure activities we do as adults go back to those we learned in our early years. The other half is learned when we become adults. In that light it's easier to understand why men would be so much more into football. We play early on and never stop watching.

Men watch sports because of the identification process that takes place early in our development. Dr. John M. Silva specializes in performance enhancement and aggression. He says sports are usually the first social institution that young males -- and, more increasingly, young females -- come into contact with in which they are able to get the kind of attention that is usually reserved for adults.

"There really aren't very many other social institutions where a 7- to 10-year-old can get publicity in a local newspaper," Silva says. "They get their name mentioned on a local radio station and develop a degree of status amongst their peers, their parents, their teachers and significant others."

Early on in many a boy's life, sport becomes his primary socializer and it provides him with an anchor, a strong image with which he can identity. There is no other institution, perhaps outside religion, to provide that anchor for such a young child. Other social institutions don't have the same kind of impact that sports and religion do.

"I think that's why sometimes sport is compared to religion," Silva says. "They are both very powerful socializers and they both create very strong identities in people who affiliate with them."

A lot of youngsters succeed at a lower level of sports. It creates expectations and they tend to aspire to the higher levels of competition -- high school, collegiate and professional.

The attrition rate is not bad in the first couple of years of sport participation. It's not until the age of 11 or 12 that coaches and parents see a lot of kids dropping out. They get a good four or five years of socialization in sports and start aspiring to a higher level. They don't know whether they could even play in high school at that point but they see other people playing in high school and college and professional sports and they tend to start modeling themselves after these people. They develop a keen interest in what they do, what types of moves they have and how they play the game. An identification bond and an information-seeking takes place.

Another rite of passage comes as the levels of play become more intensely competitive. The games are still fun, but they require hard work and long hours, too. A teen realizes, "Geez, I'd like to continue playing football but I've gone from starting on my Midget team to 29th man on the junior varsity team." Some teams carry everyone who wants to play; others introduce kids to the survival of the fittest. Young men see reality gaining on them from behind in the form of bench splinters. They're not going to play on the high school varsity team, be the team captain, get a football scholarship or write a humble speech to accept the Heisman Trophy at the Downtown Athletic Club.

"I think if the disengagement is somewhat gradual and the child sees it coming, often times they will try to move into another activity," Silva says. "But they may develop an even stronger bond to the sport that they were rejected from."

Football is a club where men are always welcome.

Retired Oklahoma sportswriter Volney Meece grew up surrounded by football. He lived in a small town in northern Oklahoma and it was the big sport there. "Oklahoma, like Texas, is very into high school sports," Meece says. "Football became the thing to do and to participate in if you could. I doubt if it had anything to do with impressing women or girls. It was just a manly sport."

One of the real emotional hooks of football is that it was one way males established relationships, sometimes the main way. This is particularly true of relationships between fathers and sons.

"Watching sports, going to a game, is a way for some men to recreate some of the feelings they had as a child, going to a game or watching a game on TV with their father," says Dr. Michael Messner, a sociologist at the University of Southern California at Los Angeles and author of Power at Play: Sports and the Problem of Masculinity (Beacon Press). "For some males, doing something related to sports was the one arena in which they felt some closeness with their father consistently. That creates an emotional basis throughout the rest of their lives for some sort of connection with sports. It also creates a motivation to use sports to connect with other males, be it their own son or their male friends."

As boys and teens, males discover it is gratifying to achieve and master football skills and play the game. It is a fun game to play. Then, when they get to be older, whether they consciously recall it or not, that memory is there. You see some evidence of that when men watch a game as adults. They tend to watch the player in a position that they played as a youth. There's a little more focus, some sense of vicarious participation. They feel comfortable in being more critical of that position because they understand its mechanics. There is also some degree of vicarious re-enacting of the childhood experience of playing the game.

Dr. Bruce C. Ogilvie, a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at San Jose State University, says, "I think that very high on the list of reasons men watch football is to recapture and relive their early adolescent years and, through their identification and emotional participation, vicariously live out again this period of their life. For most of the men who have played football or been athletic, these sorts of vicarious satisfactions have very, very positive reward/effects."

University of Florida graduate/attorney Eric Berger and Dr. Rick Weinberg, a University of Michigan grad/clinical psychologist, link their college and college football memories very closely.

"Being at Florida was something that got in your blood," Berger says. "You can't believe, even at 34, the sense of closeness I have with a university that I haven't been to in 13 years."

"I still feel very much a part of the University of Michigan," Weinberg says. "When Michigan football games are on it helps me feel vestiges of my undergraduate days when a bunch of us would all go out and watch the games at Michigan Stadium. Watching the games again is an emotional bridge across to those old days again. It brings a lot of pleasure. There were fine friends and fine moments. A number of us will still talk to each other by phone before certain games. I had a buddy who went to another university that has a real rivalry with Michigan, so whenever Michigan plays Ohio State, he and I will call and exchange our loving insults."

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Chapter 3. Cat's in the Cradle

by Bob Andelman

"I'm going to keep an open mind. I'm not going to force my sons to be Gators or Dolphins fans. But I expect they'll pick it up. I'm not going to pick their schools for them at 5 and 3 years old. I want them to go to Yale and Harvard. Unless they can play. Then I definitely want them to go to Florida."

Harold Hyman
Property manager
Tamarac, Florida

Football became an American family tradition the morning after the first quarterback tossed the first touchdown pass and a sportswriter published the play-by-play.

Few games move as aggressively from father to son and brother to brother. Seeing his son score a touchdown for the first time in a Pop Warner League game is a much more satisfying rite of passage to most fathers than potty training. (And football uniforms are entirely more manly to clean than diapers.)

Some men live their own football dreams vicariously through strangers on their favorite college or pro team. And some dads are pretty overt about proselytizing to their sons about their own football careers, usually to the point of exaggeration (and leaving out the downside such as injuries), pushing them biceps-first into football. Not a one wouldn't wish their own flesh and blood to have the agility of Jerry Rice, the strength of Reggie White or the precision of Warren Moon.

If that fails, dads will settle for a knowledgeable companion to share the game watching experience.

"My dad, when he was 10, was at the first Packers game ever played," Green Bay banker Jerry Pigeon says proudly. "You look up to your parents. He would go to the games and we wanted to go, too. My brother and I, growing up in the '60s, the Lombardi era, were brainwashed. We grew up supporting the team. Now my brother has one room in his house that's all dedicated to the Packers. He's got files or videos of every game, newspapers from every city the Packers played in. He's into it."

Unlike the Pigeon brothers, a lot of men might not know why they like football. They may reason that Dad played or older brothers played or they saw it on TV. But that is not a one-to-one relationship; not everybody's father or older brother played football. It is not an automatic thing. Therefore, football must resonate good feelings.

Sometimes it's inexplicable because it's on an unconscious level. That starts because kids are very sensitive to their parents' wishes. Dad's subtle interest in things like that, they always pick up. You might call it "psychological genetics." It sets the stage for later on, when men continue to both play the game or vicariously enjoy it. It continues to be an avenue of discharge for the aggressive drive.

There is a fairly strong body of literature in the sport sociology field that indicates that parents are incredibly significant in socializing children into particular sports. Most kids play Pee Wee football because their dads bring them down and sign them up. It's not often that a 6-year-old kid says, "Dad, I want to go to fencing school," or, "Dad, I would like to play lacrosse" -- unless dear old dad fenced or played lacrosse. Parents expose their children to different activities that they either participated in or they have an interest in. Experts says it's usually not until late adolescence when a person starts to make these selections for himself.

"This is a funny example," says Dr. Mark Unterberg, a psychiatrist and executive medical director for Green Oaks Medical City in Dallas. Unterberg is also a consultant to several NFL and NBA teams. "I played football in high school and I played one year in college. Linebacker. I got injured and after that I quit. I wanted to go to medical school and I wasn't getting bigger like the pros. As much as I can tell, I'm not one of these people who talk a lot about their football careers. Partly because I played varsity and I started and all that but I wasn't an all-conference or one of these outstanding players. There was nothing really to talk about, if you want to know the truth. As a matter of fact, I'm not even a fan. I've never been a fan. If I went to one football game a season it would be because somebody had tickets and wanted me to go. I'm not a TV watcher. If a game came on I would watch it for a little bit. My father used to watch it but I would be bored.

"Well," Unterberg says, "I have two sons and they both decided they wanted to play football. But the interesting thing is they both ended up playing linebacker -- the position I played. They actually did much better. Both made all-conference. What really caught my attention was that I talked even less about baseball because I stopped playing baseball when I was in the ninth grade. I switched to tennis. Varsity tennis and football were my two sports. Low and behold, both of my sons play catcher. Coincidence? I'm not sure on what level. Many times it just seems that kind of thing goes on."

• Ralph Weisbeck used to take his kids to Bills game when Jack Kemp was quarterback and Lou Saban was coach. He remembers those days fondly, screaming and yelling side-by-side, pulling for the Bills with his offspring. Time proved the best investment he ever made.

"My kids are all gone now but they call me up after a game," the retired tool company executive says. "They know I'm watching."

• Dr. Rick Weinberg, a clinical psychologist at the Florida Mental Health Institute at the University of South Florida in Tampa, went to Chicago Bears games with his father. "He taught me the ins and outs of why you pass on third down," Weinberg recalls. "He really enhanced my appreciation of the game. We would sit all day, Saturdays and Sundays, and get popcorn and Cokes and we'd watch together, the way that a father and son can do things and relate to one another in a very loving, father/son kind of way around sports. That was very special to me and it is the sort of thing that I want to try to duplicate with my own son. It is important to me."

Weinberg took his own son to a game for the first time in 1991, when the boy turned 6. He was more interested in the cotton candy man and the Coke vendors than he was in the game. The next year he paid more attention to the game, responding when the crowds cheered and when a player spiked the ball. The color and pageantry lent itself even to a 7-year-old's vantage point. Dad contributed to his son's seduction by buying him a University of Michigan (Weinberg's alma mater) sweatshirt, Tampa Bay Bucs hat and shirt.

An educated, intelligent man, Weinberg tries to balance the love of sports he seeks to share with his boy against the rampant aggression and violence found in games like football.

"But I have to be honest," he says. "The hitting and the hurting -- I don't pay much attention to that until there is an injury. There is such enjoyment watching the successes of your team and cheering them on that you kind of forget about that other element. The thing that helps you overlook it is they are so well protected and well padded. For the amount of physical contact they have, there doesn't seem to be as many physical injuries as you would expect."

• Harold Hyman picked up the game from a brother 14 years his senior. Hyman was 6 when his brother took him to a University of Miami Hurricanes-University of Florida Gators game in 1963 at the Orange Bowl. "Since that time," Hyman says, "I've been crazy.

"My brother was in school, always telling me about the games," he says. "It was the colors, the excitement. I always played football in the house, throwing balls. I became a Gator fan because of my brother and anti-Hurricanes. As I grew up it was more than a passion. Like a war."

• Another South Florida football fan, Coral Gables banker Shawn Cahill, also was influenced by a brother's involvement in football. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio, under the sway of the Ohio State University Buckeyes and Cleveland Browns.

"My older brother played football," Cahill says. "I enjoyed watching football every Sunday with my brother and my father. Every Thanksgiving, we went to my uncle's and we made sure dinner was served between games or at halftime."

Now a father himself, Cahill isn't losing any time with his infant son's indoctrination. Kyle was given a Florida State Seminoles football shirt before his first birthday in honor of his dad's alma mater. "He's on his way," Cahill says. "I'm looking forward to it."

• Dr. Stanley H. Teitelbaum's son is fully grown today, but as a child, he naturally gravitated to his father's love of football. "When Larry was 2 years old," Teitelbaum says, "he saw me shaving and he wanted to shave so we got him a toy plastic razor. I'd put shaving cream on his face and he would shave along with me. When he was 8 years old and he saw me watching playoff games, he joined me in the living room, watching. That was the beginning of his interest in football."

As with many kids it became important to the younger Teitelbaum to identify not only with his local teams, the Giants and Jets, but with a winner. He delivered his youthful passion to the Pittsburgh Steelers, the super team of the 1970s. Larry got yellow and black Steelers hats, shirts and scarves.

One of the biggest touchdowns Dad Teitelbaum ever made in his son's life was when he gave a paper at a conference in New Orleans. "I was in a restaurant and at the next table was Terry Bradshaw. This was a month after a Steelers' Super Bowl victory. We talked a little in the restaurant and I brought his autograph home to my son. That was bliss. That was the best gift anyone could have gotten for him because Terry Bradshaw was his hero. That won me a lot of points at that stage in his life. As he got older and I acquired seasons tickets to the Giants and Jets games, he couldn't get enough of that. He was very hot to go to all those games and he still does."

Sharing a delight in football gave Teitelbaum and his son a unique bond the boy would not have with his mother. Whatever problems or conflict they might have in life, football will always be special between them.

"Larry doesn't live at home anymore," Teitelbaum says, "but when we talk on the phone we always talk about sports. He will say, 'Did you hear about the latest trade?' I don't have that communication with my daughter and I don't have that with my wife so it's great that I have it with my son."

• One more story about football fathers and their sons:

Banker Dave Schwarzmueller married in 1966. He and his wife loyally attended Buffalo Bills home games. Over time the couple had two children, both girls. When their third child, a boy, was born, the doctor came out to the fathers' waiting room and informed Schwarzmueller.

"I went in to see my wife," he recalls. "The first thing she said was, 'Well, it's a boy. There goes my season ticket.'"

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Chapter 6. Play the Game

by Bob Andelman

"I played one year of football in junior college. I played for the same coach that I had in high school. When he went to the single wing, I was a 'blocking back.' When he went to a split-T there was nothing for me except the line. I went through one spring practice on the line and figured that was enough of this football stuff for me. Then I was a sportswriter for 41 years."

Volney Meece
Executive Director
Football Writers Association of America

There are a number of things in life that every man is expected to do:

Drink beer.

Talk about sex.

Dream about sports cars.

Play football.

The great thing about the last expectation on the list is that we can play the game at any level and easily relate to guys who play it at higher levels. It's a joyous -- and jarring -- shared experience that men come back to our entire lives.

"Football is the single most attractive sport we have," Dr. Thomas A. Tutko says. "Baseball is too slow. Basketball is too fast. Hockey and soccer are too confusing. But football stops just enough so we can analyze it and think about it."

Football also exploits many American values. Hard work, competition, territoriality. It represents, in a symbolic way, all of the tough things in America that we look upon as high values.

"At some point in their lives, guys either play football or know guys who do. It's the All-American experience," former Chicago Bears offensive tackle Dan Jiggetts says. "That shared experience is something that draws people back."

"It's a sport I grew up playing and still play every Sunday morning." Larry Mayer says. "We play two-hand touch, but it gets pretty rough. These are guys I've played with since the seventh grade."

Even Bill Evans, a marketing manager for Compuserve in Columbus, Ohio, returned to the sport, despite rocky beginnings as a participant. "I played two weeks of Pee Wee football and gave it up," he says. "The coaches were blue-collar, ex-high school linemen who took out their anger on kids. It was terrible what they put us through. Just a bunch of washed-up people reliving their youth."

No matter what the quality of their individual experience, men who have played the game enjoy a bond, even if they never played in the same game or at the same level. A stockbroker who played flag football in phys ed class knows the joy of catching a game-winning touchdown or third-down conversion pass as well as his auto mechanic who played ball at a Division III college.

A lot of men watch football because they played it. They've been involved in it as a sport themselves on a sandlot or on an organized level. They reach a point where it is hard to participate anymore so they become fans. They develop a fascination for it as an athletic event or as a form of entertainment.

Men gravitate back to the sports and activities they enjoyed as youths. Football provides a bonus: There is little or no possibility of women being involved with football because it is the last truly male bastion of strength, violence and speed. That's important because much as men love women, they love their time away from them, too.

Many men are former school and college athletes who seek to recapture the echoes of their youth by watching the sports they used to play. They connect to yesterday -- no responsibilities, no debt, no obligations, no shaving -- by watching others play sports they still love. It's kind of a Walter Mitty thing of seeing themselves out there, dashing across the chalk lines, being heroic, athletic, drawing a crowd, being admired.

Of course, along with all that is our eternal fascination with standing in awe of the skills of the best. On TV we see those who have the tools we lack. There is an envy, a fascination with the Heisman Trophy winner, just like there is when an average musician stands in awe of the best musicians.

And between those who never played the game and those who did, there will always be an invisible wall.

"If you are in a group of men where one or two have played the game and the others have not," Dr. Michael Messner says, "the ones who have played the game will have a sense of having knowledge that the others don't. Depending on how secure or insecure they are, they use that or not. There is always that thing that until you have been out there and felt the blows and had the blood on you and sweated and cried with your teammates, you can't understand the game. People say that about war, about football, about whatever."

The game appeals to us because it's so neat and tidy, leaving few loose ends.

Men play football in high school in deference to their aggressive drive, the ability to express that in a sublimated, safe way. "Nothing happens at the end of a game," Dr. Mark Unterberg says. "Only one team wins and the other loses and everybody goes off to take a shower and goes home. It becomes a safe way for one group of men to kill another group and become victorious. Sometimes the image of the old Roman Coliseum or Roman Empire analogy and the gladiators may not be too far off."

What about able-bodied young men who didn't play the game? Dr. Allen L. Sack is dubious that there are any.

"It is pretty hard to avoid," the sociologist says. "They probably tried out for a team or were involved very closely with males who were involved in it. Somewhere along the line, even if you hated it, you were probably pressured into playing it. I don't know if that is true of all social classes but it is certainly true of the working class. It's tough. If you go to school in a place like Odessa, Texas (made famous by H.G. Bissinger's 1990 book Friday Night Lights {Addison-Wesley}) it's very difficult to envision a young man, even those who despise and loathe the very nature of the game, not in some way or other feeling pressure to be involved. Even if that was coming out for practice and trying out for the team and not liking it, walking off and having a negative attitude toward it. In the years that follow, when those really rotten memories start to go away, you start romanticizing what it was like. You still have some experience with the game."

Part of the mystery of football is the great divergence between those who play and those who watch. Baseball fans commonly participate in adult softball leagues and bar leagues. But there aren't many amateur adult football leagues.

The downside of becoming a fan without having experienced football, or only being exposed to it on television, is that you don't appreciate the athleticism. TV better captures a basketball court or boxing ring, but a football field is 100 yards long. The close-up is adequate, but it doesn't put the game in perspective.

"That is why it's difficult for women to learn football from watching it on TV," says Dr. Daniel Begel, a Milwaukee psychiatrist and founder of the International Society for Sport Psychiatry. "And that's one of the reasons women can't get into it. They can't learn it from watching on TV. You have to have played it."

The difference could be in who you know. Certainly there are disabled men who become great and learned fans of the game without ever taking to the field. There are scores of people who did not necessarily participate but maybe had a parent or an uncle who participated so they had some vicarious exposure to it early on and developed an attraction to and interest in the sport.

* * *

Men associate with the aggressiveness of football and the violence. Yet we see a lot of people at games in wheelchairs. Some may have played the game before being disabled; some may have been disabled by football. Many of these men will never have that experience on a football field and yet they still associate with the game.

"It gets back to identifications," Dr. Stanley H. Teitelbaum says. "There is a pull, identifying with those who can run when you yourself can't. I have a friend who was paralyzed in childhood from polio. His greatest love became watching the ballet. It's the same phenomenon of being able to watch others who can glide gracefully or who can run and do the things you can't do. For some people that is very painful, but for others it becomes a way of identifying with the players and seeing yourself in them."

* * *

David Johnson is a special case. The Chula Vista, California, fan of the San Diego Chargers is about the same size as your average defensive tackle. In high school, the football coaches couldn't wait to get him on the playing field. And he wanted to play. But in the 10th grade, Johnson developed spinal meningitis. Since then, he's spent a lifetime wondering "What if?"

"The main reason I love pro football is I never had the opportunity to play it," he says. "I'm one of the biggest fans you'll ever find. I absolutely love football. I marvel at these people, how the quarterback can complete a 60-yard bomb to a receiver running down the field, hoping to hit him with pinpoint accuracy!"

(Silva empathizes with Johnson's plight. "When the ability to participate is taken away," he says, "particularly if it is not taken in a traumatic fashion, a lot of people will yearn for those things that they can't have.")

Johnson, an unemployed truck driver, relocated to Southern California from Indiana after a Navy stint in San Diego. He came to the Chargers' attention several years ago because everywhere they went, so did he. This superfan leaves the mobile home he shares with his parents 10 miles from the Mexican border and drives his '69 Chevy to daily training camp workouts, mini-camps and regular season practices. He's always positive and encouraging to his team.

"I give the guys a hand, a good round of applause. I appreciate the athletic ability of these people. They can do things I could never do in high school," he says.

One of the Chargers coaches took note of Johnson and "adopted" him, making sure a ticket is always available for him at Chargers home games.

Among Johnson's heroes of the game are the grand old man, George Blanda, and Dick Butkus. "Butkus exemplified the ferocity and violence that is football," Johnson says. "Seeing somebody tackle like him is a way to let out your frustrations from the week. When you've been unemployed as long as I have, you need something."

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

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 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.

Image via Wikipedia

"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!

Chapter 22. The Post-Game Report

by Bob Andelman

"I'm always interested in the sportscaster who says, 'This is going to be a screen-pass to the right' before it happens. I'm still trying to figure out how they know that."

Bill Evans
Marketing manager
Columbus, Ohio

If this book were a TV show, this would be the place we'd recap the action. Feel free to play along at home.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

So, why do men love football?

• Action. Crunching bones, banging heads and huge men flying through the air with the greatest of ease. That's what we want to see. Over and over and over again. It's not just a job, it's an adventure.

• Violence. The natural hangover from too much action. "Kill him! KILL him!" We don't want anybody to actually die on the field, but would it be so wrong to temporarily disable a few of the other team's guys? At the height of passion, a strong hit in the backfield sends us over the edge.

• Skill envy. What's the big deal? Anybody could do that! Yeah, right. In our dreams, maybe we can dodge and weave like Emmitt Smith, sideswipe a quarterback the way Santana Dotson does or throw a Hail, Mary bomb like Warren Moon, but in our waking hours we pray long and hard to be granted such skills. Being a star in business or politics doesn't end our yearning to be football heroes.

• Military correlates. In an era of American men with less battlefield experience than any previous generation, football brings us as close to being warriors as we care to be. And for our fathers and grandfathers, it takes them back to what they remember as glorious battles of right over might.

• Early socialization. Some of us are so swamped by football images when we're young boys and teens that we couldn't dislike football even if we wanted to. Not that we do.

• Community support. Our football team -- high school, college or pro -- represents who we are. The North Brunswick Township (N.J.) High School Raiders carry the pride of that community's residents on their shoulders when they clash with the much hated South Brunswick High School Vikings every Thanksgiving. It's an event that draws disparate elements of the community together for a single reason. Once a year, side-by-side, they raise a paper cup and cheer their sons as one.

• Escapism. Every weekend, Saturday and Sunday, we put aside the mundaneness of daily life and commune with men who are bigger than us, stronger and wealthier than us. We forget our problems, our families, our overdue bills, and enter an astral field where nothing matters but winning and cold beer.

• Statistics. By carefully tracking the Chicago Bears' winning percentage in games when they're down by a touchdown going into the two-minute warning, we become better people. No, really.

• Hero worship. Beyond the art of skill envy lies hero worship, the process through which we identify football players with whom we can identify. We then deify these men beyond all rational thought, putting them upon pillars of righteousness that we then chip away at until their careers go up in smoke. Gotta have heroes.

• Male bonding. Five days and six nights out of the week we'd rather be around women. But on Saturday and Sunday afternoons and Monday nights, we'll be hangin' with the fellas, eating fried foods, drinking by the pitcher, screaming language unrepeatable elsewhere and acting like idiots. That's what friendships are made of.

• It goes well with beer. And pretzels. Gotta have pretzels.

For women struggling to understand men who sacrifice their lives to football, the best advice is this: hunker down on the couch with your own bowl of pretzels, pop the top on a cold one and get educated.

Ask questions; demand answers. What exactly is the quarterback reaching for when he puts his hands under the center's rear end? Who decides who gets to catch the ball? And what the hell is the referee talking about, anyway?

Get mad when your guys screws up; celebrate when they score. (Think of each touchdown as an orgasm; your enthusiasm, however contrived, will sound more convincing.) Take cheap shots at the announcers, the coaches and the players -- it's expected. Look for some element of the game with which you can connect, even if it's just that beefy running back who looks great in tight pants. Know that it's not just whether you win or lose; it's how you watch the game.

And don't ask for the remote control until the post-game show credits are rolling.

The End.  

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!