Deconstructionist at the Super Bowl

By LANCE MORROW

Intellectuals love baseball, and they read sweet meanings into it. The game "has a mythic quality," Bernard Malamud thought--the myths being innocent democracy, recovered childhood, a harmless, universal cast of heroes (from Ruth and DiMaggio long ago to McGwire and Sosa in last year's memorable season) and a sentimental reconciliation, over peanuts and Crackerjacks, between the college-educated and the working man.

Overeducated fans turn baseball into "text." One historian sees the game as an American fertility rite. A professor of English at the University of Rochester, George Grella, has written that "while (baseball) radiates a spiritual transcendence, it also expresses a parallel paradoxical quality of sadness...it instructs us in two crucial American concepts, the loneliness of space and the sadness of time."

I'm concerned that professional football has no such mythic dimension. I think that explains why football's television ratings have fallen off; ABC's Monday Night Football, for example, has just wound up the worst season in its 29 years on the air. I have located the problem. Pro football remains in bad odor among thinkers. It needs a richer intellectual tradition.

Pro football's old reputation lingers: it runs on steroids and brute force; its model is militaristic (with a vocabulary of "aerial attack," "offense" and "defense"), is aggressively over-male ("penetration") and seems somehow stupider than baseball because its energy is raw and violent.

I was surprised several weeks ago at dinner when a friend of mine, the writer Ted Morgan, born French as Sanche de Gramont but years ago Americanized, launched into a rhapsody about professional football. Ted, whose Sundays are lost from September to Super Bowl, loves what he calls "the beauty" of pro football--its power, its grace, its intelligence. Ted explains that football is a symbolic re-enactment of America's westward conquest of territory--while baseball is a "post-settlement" enterprise in which each team by turns pacifically yields the field to the other.

You don't run across this sort of profound reading of football every day. Ted inspired me to renew a lapsed relationship with the game, and eventually, as a favor to football, to cast about for an interpretive metaphysics. (Ted disavows the drivel that follows.)

I start by embroidering an obvious difference between baseball and football: the role of time. A baseball game may in theory go on forever: it ends only with the last out. Football binds itself to the existential tragedy of the clock. Did not Nietzsche write of "acting against time and thus on time, for the sake of a time one hopes will come?" Fleeting time aligns football in metaphysical parallel with life itself: All mortals play with the clock running. Football faces up to the pressure and poignance of its deadline, the official's fatal, final gunshot. Or something like that.

Surely the French deconstructionist Michel Foucault must be deployed. Football enacts the Foucaultian paradigm wherein all actions, even involuntary motions or "fakes" or failures (quarterback sacked), coalesce in meaning, and everything that the game organizes in the way of objects, rites, customs (the superstitious butt slapping, the narcissistically erotic Bob Fosse touchdown dances) constitutes a coherent whole--the game lui-meme. Foucault saw pro football as the quintessential mutation of the Classical quadrilateral of language into the Modern anthropological quadrilateral. Actually, he didn't. But it amuses me to think he might have. Ha ha, Boomer Esiason!

What I mean is that a professional football game is the mutation of inert muscle (noun) into pure historicized act (verb), framed in a matrix ("gridiron") of time and space. At the precise pencil-point of time, the quarterback's cogito presses urgently upon the possibilities of the unthought.

Let us improve upon the hermeneutics of chalktalk pundits and initiate pro football in a richer obscurantism. The thoughtful spectator will see the players as nodes through which institutionalized power relations are transmitted. From the flip of the coin, the stark binary "Either/Or" ("heads" or "tails") introduces us to a divided universe (kick off or receive? offense or defense?), a jockstrap yin-yang played out in a temporal dynamic of four quarters in a cycle of Sundays that recapitulates Vico...or is it Ibn Khaldun? I forget.

That's a start, anyway--football as text. Papers for future discussion: "The Huddle: Gemeinschaft or Gesellschaft?" "The Snap from Center: A Buried Semiotics of Homoeroticism?" "From Cosell to Madden: Pedants and Blowhards in the Booth."

End with a conundrum: A gain for one team is a loss for the other. One side's good, pari passu, is the other's evil. Such are the stakes. One side has "possession." Who, or what, then, is "possessed?" And with what satanic implications? This is a question that drives postmodern man to crush an empty beer can on his forehead--and even to open another one!