Chapter 12. Fly Like An Eagle

by Bob Andelman

"I enjoy seeing the best of anything. And professional sports provide the best athletes in the world. My wife and I go to the ballet. We like to see the best ballerinas in the world. It's exciting. And in professional sports, you get to see the best athletes every week."

Dick Williams
President, The Derrick Club
Houston Oilers Fan Club

Not every man is turned on by the violence in football. Many are drawn in by other elements. The pitchers of beer, video replays, the synthetic fibers straining to contain the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders . . . and the bona fide grace of the athletes.

Image via Wikipedia

The challenge of a football player pushing his way against a formidable obstacle -- the other team -- involves skills of instant acceleration, pinpoint passing (that's why we call it "threading the needle") and delicate agility. You can see great moves, strength against strength. The bomb, the quick strike. That's the stuff that makes many men scream in ecstasy.

"I'm not animalistic or anything," Miami Dolphins fan Shawn Cahill says. "I might go, 'Oooh' or 'Yeaaah!' But I don't see football as an outlet for violence. I much prefer seeing a great pass or run or catch. A great hit is not what I look for in a football game. I'd rather see a deep bomb or a catch over the middle. Because everything's got to be perfect for it to happen. You've got to have good protection, the receiver has to get open and catch the ball. A great hit -- many times it's a defensive lapse or the quarterback is hit on the blind side. More and more people are getting hurt; it's not good for the game when the stars are out."

Most people think of basketball when they think of grace in the big four men's sports. But more than a few guys stick by football's aerial displays and majestic strategy. Seeing a classic 60-yard Hail Mary pass spiral leave Joe Montana's cocked arm as a defender takes him down, watching the football majestically arch high above Candlestick Park before slipping perfectly into a zigzagging Jerry Rice's cradled arms at the moment he leaps across the goal line cannot be compared to mere sex. It's bigger that that.

It's a combination of intensity and finesse. Passing is a kind of weird science, seemingly understood only by the game's best-looking, more articulate philosopher-kings. It's a cauldron of magicks that Merlin could but stand by and admire.

Speed, elusiveness, cunning, strategy, teamwork and organization as well as raw athletic skills like jumping, catching, throwing, kicking and running are what make football irresistible to men with a distaste for the hitting, crunching and bone-grinding that also makes up the sport. Beauty to these guys is watching an O.J. Simpson, Herschel Walker, Emmitt Smith or Deion Sanders fly down field, stepping left, stepping right, hurdling over would-be antagonists to gain yards and score touchdowns.

"I watch the ball," Volney Meece says. "I've heard for 50 years that you ought to watch the pulling guards and the center and all that technical stuff but I just can't do it. I watch the ball and I watch the quarterback. Oklahoma, for so many years, ran the wishbone and split-T formation -- you had to watch the quarterback to find out what was going on. There is nothing more beautiful than when the quarterback comes down the line, fakes the pitch and the end takes the fake out with the running back and the quarterback cuts down field and it's just wide open. To me, that is the beautiful play in football."

To Meece, there is no greater poetry in the world.

"I have seen enough football," he says, "that I am aware of what's going on and how many people they flank out and what the backfield formation is when they come to the line of scrimmage and things like that. I don't try to think about it till it hurts my head but I do try to get into the strategy of the game."

Conversely, if your favorite team -- or the one you happen to be watching -- features a player like Billy Sims, Barry Sanders or Thurman Thomas, you're going to watch the halfback and see where he's going. Because when that man gets the ball, it's showtime.

The real glory in the game goes to those who avoid getting hit, thanks to natural talents, speed, peripheral vision and fast thinking.

It's easier for men to talk about how the Bills were last weekend or how mean the Dawgs are in the trenches in Cleveland than to acknowledge that the sport, played at a very high level in certain positions, is very, very skilled and almost ballet-like. The greatest players in the game are phenomenal athletes. They are very gifted at what they do and everybody appreciates it. Some may appreciate it on a conscious level and be able to talk about it. Men don't particularly talk about the grace and beauty because that isn't the kind of conversations men have. Men allow themselves to talk about how tough their team is but they really don't talk about what a terrific athlete, or how graceful Jerry Rice might be, even though he exhibits the kind of athleticism that an ice skater or a gymnast has. Men don't talk about stuff that way.

"The grace of these athletes amazes me," Dr. Daniel M. Glick says. "These guys are wearing 20 to 30 pounds of equipment and yet they go out and make leaping catches, jumping and rolling over people. Look at defensive linebackers and defensive players like Lawrence Taylor. I don't know what the stats are on him but he has got to be somewhere close to 275 pounds. He does the 40-yard dash in 4.3 seconds and he moves around people like they aren't even there. The man is a giant, and at the same time, extremely graceful. He doesn't get the kind of publicity that an acrobat might get when they jump up into the middle of three defensive backs and pull down some passes from a quarterback on a Hail Mary."

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Chapter 14. Odds 'n' Sods

by Bob Andelman

"I pride myself on being a trivia expert. I challenge my friends. If they can beat me, I'll take them to lunch. I know basically every number for every Bears player. The most obscure the player, the more I remember. I guess it helped me get my job and I guess it helps me do my job better. It's weird because I don't otherwise have a good memory. My sister remembers things from childhood. I don't."

Larry Mayer
Managing editor
Chicago Bear Report

If there's one thing sure to drive a non-football fan batty it's the ever increasing treasure trove of statistics. Thanks to computers and new information gathering techniques, fans of numbers can track virtually any aspect of the game.

Under the category of passing alone, we follow attempts, completions, completion percentage, yards, touchdowns, touchdown percentage, longest touchdown pass, interceptions, interception percentage, average gain and overall rating.

What about kicking? For punting alone there's number of kicks, total yards, longest kick, gross average, touchbacks, kicks inside the 20-yard-line, blocked kicks, number of kicks returned by opposing teams and the total and average returns. Field-goal accuracy typically breaks down into distance: 1-19 yards, 20-29 yards, 30-39 yards, 40-49 yards and the very thinly populated 50 yards or more.

Let's assume the point is made and skip defensive examples.

"I love sports because of the numbers and the statistics," financial accountant Larry Selvin says. "As I grew up, I won arithmetic contests. I have like a photographic memory for numbers and dates. I can tell you every Super Bowl off the top of my head -- who was in it, what was the score, who won the MVP, where they played the game."



Stats are a way of dealing with one's mastery of the game and not just as a passive participant. Keeping statistics -- on paper, in our heads -- is a form of activity.

 
It's a form of competitiveness -- knowing more stats than the next person. Sometimes obsessive behavior becomes a way to deal with affective emotions. Sometimes it's a way for an underachiever to finally become an overachiever. Maybe part of the person fears that if they don't do statistics they might get too excited over the game. They understand what is going on. It's their way of being active and showing that they are really part of the game.

Dr. Bruce C. Ogilvie calls it exhibitionism, legitimized by what comes into our living rooms via the TV.

"I think that would be a terribly neurotic thing to do," he says, "to quest for some exaggerated attention. 'Hey, look at me, dad!' It's an incredible need to become involved in something that has some meaning for them, that has some influence in the way they feel about themselves and sometimes the way they feel about the world. These are spectators to life. All they get is whatever they can abstract from what is going on out there. That becomes living for them. That goes to such extremes when you talk about the couch potato. What a termination of life."

"Pathetic, isn't it?" Dr. Daniel Begel scoffs. "Hanging out through the TV with football or anything else."





Sometimes people do things unconsciously. Deep down they may believe the more they memorize Thurman Thomas's stats, the more they know him. The more some guys know about Thomas, the more they can identify with him or enjoy what he does on the field.

There are so many facets of football. A guy can be master in one segment but not the other. Some people, their whole life is tailgate parties. They drink champagne, they crank up the car tunes. Some of them don't even go in until the game has started and even then they follow the action on portable TVs.

Trivia buffs create games within games. They envision themselves as part of the game because they are game historians. They remember the details.

"Some people like that. Kind of an obsessive-compulsive behavior," Dr. Thomas A. Tutko says. "There is a place for those individuals as well. The memories that come up provide an emotional charge in some way. Good play. The great hit. All of it gets relived because it fulfills a need inside them."

Bill Price teaches statistics at Niagara University but he, for one, has had enough of the growing statistical obsession among fans, sportscasters and the NFL itself.

"I think they're overdone," Price says. "I've seen players get good numbers but they play lousy."

William J. Winslow, president of the Institute of Athletic Motivation, blames stat-mania on ego-involvement. "I've often said to myself that if these people could put the same attention to their careers as they do to memorizing football numbers, they'd be more successful. They spend evenings gathering stats and reading newspapers instead of reading journals.

"Take kids," he says. "They remember batting averages but can't put 2 + 2 together in school. You get minority athletes who can't get passing grades in school but memorize whole playbooks. If you're memorizing something you like, it's no longer a chore, it's something you like."

That's it, exactly.



Players stats are something that a guy can easily consume with a modicum of interest because in a man's life, he knows sports trivia or trivia dressed up as information will always pass for conversation with other men. It's something we can relate to others and groups who share our same interest. That serves our self-esteem.

The more knowledgeable we supposedly are about this game -- it doesn't matter whatever else we do. The knowledge is ego-boosting and self-esteem boosting. Men know what their guys did and how they played. It's another twist on basking in reflected glory phenomena. We can boost our ego and self-esteem not by performance itself but by being knowledgeable about it.

* * *

Aaron Vaughn, a copy editor at the Valley Daily News in Kent, Washington, didn't pay much attention to football until his late teens. Then he couldn't get enough: he needed NFL, college, even high school games to slake his thirst.

As the years went by and he neared his 30th birthday, Vaughn's interest deepened. He stopped going to pro games in person because he didn't care for the Seattle Seahawks and all he ever got were lousy seats. But at work, he started hanging around sportswriters and editors who honed his technical understanding of football.

Now he's more interested in the annual college draft than the game itself.

"Every year, I buy three draft guides," he says. "I study players and who the teams need. It's something I find fascinating, how they make their decisions. I really am a behind-the-scenes guy."



The first player Vaughn followed was University of Oregon quarterback Chris Miller, researching his background and plotting his prospects. He became an Atlanta Falcons fan when they drafted his man. After that, Vaughn was hooked. He conducts his own mock drafts. He videotapes the draft on ESPN, watching it over and over again, comparing and critiquing his selections for the NFL teams with their actual choices.

"I try not to hold it against teams that don't pick a guy," Vaughn says. "It's technical and boring to a lot of my friends. But it's a lot of fun."

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!