Is Football like Nero’s Fiddle?
My 14-year old son loves sports. Though he has been following Basketball and is obsessed with watching Colin Cowherd, Nick Wright, Chris Broussard, and other sports commentators talk smack on TV, he LOVES football. So we ensured that Thursday night was sacrosanct. We huddled around the TV with snacks and pizza. The game was good — I mean who doesn’t like watching Patrick Mahomes — and it was clear that despite the difficulties, football is back.
Lest you believe that the rest of this piece is about the “awesomeness” of the return of America’s religion, it is not. If you think that anything outside of a celebration and veneration of the gridiron is heretical, then stop reading now.
Let’s start at the beginning. It is after all, a very good place to start. Before the game, both teams stood together in a display of unity. While such acts might seem performative only, they are an incredible advancement for a sport known for conservatism and blinders when it comes to race. In a country both literally on fire and figuratively in a hot cauldron of racism, such acts are welcome. But, the non-Covid-fearing fans at Arrowhead Stadium decided to reward the players with boos. Class-acts, those fans.
As messages for social justice adorned the t-shirts of the anthem singers and animated the live commentary, so many Americans still want “politics out of sports” because “politics ruin sports.” It’s hard to comment rationally on such sentiments because anyone who espouses them operates on a different axiomatic plane than I do. How can any organized human activity, in which real people do real things, and in which massive amounts of money and resources are involved, NOT be political? How many stories of racial discrimination, of the inequality of opportunity, of differential pay across race and gender, about the violence visited upon players of color, about the manipulation of poor athletes of color, about the schism between White owners and Black players…..how many stories do we need to hear before we realize how political sport is. Not to mention that pretty much all the great sports writing in history came to the subject from a narrative, historical, and political angle?
No, football fans, sorry. You don’t own the players or the sport. You are merely voyeurs.
Worse still, is something far more insidious than the conservative behavior of football fans. For a short period, a glimpse, a quarantined ephemerality, Americans talked about things other than sports. Even in normal neighborhood get-togethers, issues of justice, history, and politics came up. Whatever the opinions held by Americans, many of them were talking. One person I spoke to said he discovered reading during the brief hiatus from sports- “It’s weird how much time I have now that sports aren’t on TV now,” he said.
I fear that will end now. We will see a massive diminishment in discussions about anything but football and with that, a massive reduction in critical thought and that too right before the most important election in American history.
Many people will disagree. Many will find this piece unfair, even condescending. That’s fine. Everyone is allowed an opinion. All I can hope is that some people, even one or two, will take this for what it is. It’s not that one cannot enjoy a game, be in awe at the athleticism displayed, or even be obsessed with a particular team or player. The sad part is how much we cede to sports and how sports can be our fiddle as our world burns.
