“Football is a celebration of a not innocent and not rational and not liberal human condition. That is its attraction.” — Michael Novak, “The Joy of Sports”

* * * * * * * *

There is a young man who grew up in an upscale suburb of Atlanta, located not far from me, and where his professional-class parents held out for him the aspirations of an excellent education and bright career prospects that are common for their peers in the community.

He did excel in high school, academically and athletically, good enough at both to earn a football scholarship from an elite university with an outstanding, BCS-level sports program.

Most recently, he starred in a major bowl game victory in his last college game and has a reasonable shot at being selected in the NFL draft this spring. The current mock drafts I’ve seen don’t have him going in the first round, but being taken in the second or third rounds is a distinct possibility.

If football doesn’t work out for him, he’ll hold a degree from an institution of higher learning that confers more advantages to its graduates than most.

In every way, this young man is the embodiment of an American ideal that has vexed cultural critics of the game he loves like never before.

What isn’t written about him that much is the ferocity of his competitive beast. He also played lacrosse, which like soccer has become popular for suburban boys as an alternative to the innate violence of football. Both of these sports are rough and physical too, and concerns over concussions and other injuries, while not on the same scale as football, do exist.

He became aggressive enough in lacrosse for the state high school sports association to assign extra referee monitors at some of his games.

For his senior season, he was persuaded to stick to football, where his savage instincts were at least placed on a longer leash.

* * * * * * * *

When President Obama remarked recently that he’d be reluctant to let a son of his play football, I instantly thought of this young man. Obama, a noted Chicago Bears fan, has no son, of course, but two daughters. It’s easy to make such a comment when it’s unlikely to affect you.

We all know that the president does enjoy the occasional pick-up basketball game that has been known to get hyper-competitive. His former aide, Reggie Love, played basketball and football at Duke. His brother-in-law, Craig Robinson, is the men’s basketball coach at Oregon State. These were not casual encounters around the backyard basket.

There’s even a photo taken during the 2008 presidential race of Obama, campaigning in North Carolina, hooping it up with the Tar Heels during a practice. The aspiring commander-in-chief was taking it to the rack against then-UNC All-American Tyler Hansbrough, nicknamed “Psycho T” for very good reason, and the photo reflected this.

Hansbrough, in temperament and upbringing, is not all that different from my hometown guy. Thankfully for Hansbrough, his sport of choice, while being a physical, contact sport, doesn’t come with the rash of hand-wringing that is currently suffocating our national discussion about football.

Obama’s remarks, made during the run-up to Sunday’s Super Bowl, reflect a consternation that isn’t new, in the sense that football has been the subject of rules changes, reforms and organizational imperatives since its rise to prominence in the late 1800s. Another emphatic football fan and commander-in-chief, Teddy Roosevelt, called the leaders of college football to the White House in 1905 to address deadly violence in the sport.

The result was the creation of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, and while concerns over violent play weren’t eliminated, college football eventually rivaled baseball in popularity for many decades after that.

That it took the NCAA more than a century to create a sports science center to study the effects of injuries on college athletes is one of many points brought up by those alarmed by football violence and the toll it takes on the human body. In his interview with The New Republic, Obama expressed greater concern for the fate of college football players. But like many statements issued by perceptive politicians, his broader comments reflect the cultural anxiety of his times:

And I think that those of us who love the sport are going to have to wrestle with the fact that it will probably change gradually to try to reduce some of the violence. In some cases, that may make it a little bit less exciting, but it will be a whole lot better for the players, and those of us who are fans maybe won’t have to examine our consciences quite as much.

* * * * * * * *

The National Football League is drawing all the heat over football violence, and the possible concussion-related suicides of celebrated former players, most recently Junior Seau. The NFL, where unionized, well-compensated players, as Obama mentioned, is under considerable scrutiny — and media outrage — for not doing enough.

Or in the case of the New Orleans Saints and the bounty-hunting incident, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell is accused of doing too much of the wrong thing for the sake of public relations. And getting savaged for it, in true Big Easy style.

At his Friday state-of-the-league address, Goodell says he’s committed to player safety, which didn’t satisfy many among the media horde as being honest or original. The NFL is facing years, if not decades, of litigation from former players, or their families.

One columnist in New Orleans made sure to paraphrase, in the second paragraph, a Baltimore Ravens player suggesting that enacting further preventative measures “would leave fans discontented, their hunger for carnage and thirst for blood going unsatisfied.”

The same columnist, in his own words, asked a question that has been posed many times before, and will again:

So, can we really watch Sunday with a clear head? Sure, just as long as we also watch with open eyes.

He’s suggesting that we’re not really doing much of the latter, I think. This is a common inference from our sports media establishment: We insist on being blind to this.

But are we really?

There are many valid concerns about the damage that football is doing to the best players in the game, and the lack of a forthright response from the NFL. Especially as the professional game is being played today, with bigger, stronger, faster and more athletic players than ever, and who are layered with more dangerous equipment than ever, the helmets and padding designed to protect them from violence.

As I wrote near the start of the season, existential explorations of the nature of the game have been prompted in part by these latest headlines. As Rich Cohen wrote — also in The New Republic, and I highlighted at the time:

Football is violent by design. It became a sensation because of television, yes, but also because it expressed certain truths about American life: the dangers of the mines and mills, dirt, struggle, blood, grime, the division of labor, the all-importance of the clock. But we’ve changed, which is why white middle- and upper-middle-class fans recoil at the cascade of injuries that can make ESPN resemble the surgery channel: not because football is different, nor because the injuries have gotten so much worse, but because we’ve become increasingly careful as our society has become increasingly safe; we’ve lost our tolerance for risk. Football is the perfect game for the country America used to be.

Former NFL agent and current New York University professor Robert Boland more recently picked up on the same theme:

This is the first time in 70 years, since the end of World War II, when the majority of the men who are consumers of the game of football, at the NFL, collegiate or high school levels, have never played in a competitive tackle game at any level. Changes in population, where new Americans come from and the availability of the game have changed it from a sport many have played to one merely watched by many.

Among President Obama’s Oval Office predecessors, Eisenhower, Ford, Reagan all played the game in college. There is even a photo of a frail, thin John F. Kennedy, whose youth was beset by physical ailments, in a JV uniform at Harvard. But our public life has fewer examples of that kind of commitment to the game as a source of vigor and learning and negative examples abound. This, so far, has not diminished fan avidity or the popularity of the NFL. But separating the former player, who has direct experience of the many great qualities of the game, from the fan who sees it merely as a mode of association is a threat.

* * * * * * * *

So where does this leave my hometown football hero, with his sights set on playing in the very same NFL that’s under siege from lawyers and whose demise is being projected by journalists — and not for the first time? He’s from a white, upper-middle class family, and has found football to be, in Boland’s words, “a source of vigor and learning.”

He grew up in the same community as I did. In it is a popular public park where most days youngsters are pedaling around on bicycles, helmets tightly fastened around their tiny heads. Some of the bikes have training wheels, and sometimes these kids are tooling around gently on tricycles. Because the flat bike path doubles as a walking/jogging trail, none of these kids are motoring very fast. But I’ve seen a parent occasionally labor to place protective headgear on a querulous child who just wants to ride, to be free at play without meddlesome intrusions, even if they’re for his, or her, own good.

Maybe this was the budding football star I’ve been referring to, some years ago.

So what do we tell this now grown-up young man to do? Should we tell him to loosen his football chin strap for good and put on a tailored suit and play it safe? Should he heed the warnings of Bob Costas, channeling fellow baseball geek George Will, that football may be impossible to reform?

What would that “reform” look like? And why are baseball pontificators most eager to spring forth with dystopian portrayals of football? Because their “pastime” — while still in a very healthy financial state and enjoying the majesty of a history that football does not share — doesn’t hold the same cultural cachet that the NFL does today?

I write this as someone who as a fan prefers baseball over football without hesitation.

You don’t have to subscribe to the old nostrums about football, or any sport, building character and camaraderie and teamwork and blah blah blah to realize that there’s a magnificent denial at work here.

In all the fulminating over violence, concussions, brain damage, suicides, lawsuits, bloodlust, carnage and bounty-hunting, what’s missing is an acknowledgement of an aspect of human nature that draws young men to the game, including my hometown standout, and always will.

It is, as the Michael Novak quote at the top of this post suggests, largely ungovernable and absolutely eternal. In his book “The Joy of Sports,” referenced here often, he gets to a point that has been completely ignored amid the tens of thousands of present-day words of commentary. The “ritualized, well-controlled” violence of football is deeply archaic, he argues, for player and spectator alike:

One of the game’s greatest satisfactions is that it violates the illusion of the enlightened, educated person that violence has been, or will be exorcised from human life.  .  .  .

While girls were being good, boys were beating the shit out of each other. Women lack direct access to part of their own natures. Their rage is no less real; many have been educated away from it.

Since Novak wrote that more than three decades ago, America has become a society in which current generations of young males are being strongly “educated away” from such expressions, while girls, through the changes brought about by Title IX, are being steered explicitly toward them.

We applaud these developments as necessary for females to have access to the full range of options in our society. Female athletes are now being fed a litany of blah blah blah character-building nonsense, taught that sports are a gateway not only to an education and good health, but also to exciting professions and the corridors of high power. If believe too much of this, you might be inclined to think that girls who don’t play sports are just losers.

Meanwhile, the primitive urges of young men remain unreconciled and very strongly discouraged.

They are as unreconciled as they were nearly four decades ago, when in “Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl,” Hunter S. Thompson revealed what he had in common with Richard M. Nixon.

Coming out of the 1960s, when some former NFL players turned not only on the culture of football but also on the nature of the game, Thompson’s undoubtedly mescaline-laced confessional love of the game punctured the heart of everything the Lombardi-loathing, anti-authoritarian critics were saying.

Nixon met his political demise and the NFL roared into full splendor in the early 1970s, but without seriously addressing the unspoken essence of the attraction of the game.

Thompson blew his brains out in early 2005, three months after George W. Bush was re-elected and three weeks after the New England Patriots won another Super Bowl. At the top of his suicide note, Thompson scrawled “Football Season is Over.”

Gonzo-obsessives still argue about what he might have meant in the final piece of writing in his life.

And we still can’t turn away from the game while we profess to be horrified by what it has wrought.

* * * * * * * *

All this week I’ve had a browser tab on my iPad opened to The New York Times obituary for John Mackey, the Hall of Fame tight end for the Baltimore Colts who later helped usher in free agency as the head of the NFL Players Association.

(I was surfing for something else and came across this link and haven’t been able to look away from it as I prepared to write what has become an overly long and rambling discourse. My aim is to write tightly and get to the point, but my thoughts have been scattershot and the writing flabby as a result. I thank you for your patience if you’ve read this far.)

Mackey was 69 when he died in July 2011, and the story mentions high up that his wife thinks his dementia was caused by concussions from playing football.

He was a physical marvel of his time, a big and powerful, but rangy and speedy tight end who could catch a deep pass and do something with it. As Richard Goldstein writes:

His most memorable play came in the 1971 Super Bowl, when a pass by Colts quarterback Johnny Unitas went off the fingertips of a Baltimore receiver and a Dallas Cowboy defender into his hands. Mackey ran to the end zone, completing a 75-yard play. The Colts defeated the Cowboys, 16-13, on a field goal in the final seconds.

At the top of the story is a big photo from another game, of Mackey grasping a pass, with two Buffalo Bills defenders several steps behind. In the distance is the fuzzy figure of Unitas, already having gone through his throwing motion, watching downfield.

This was a thing of beauty, a classic split-second of splendor that I think is the real draw of football to its fans and players more than the violence. At least I know this is what really makes me watch, even the Super Bowl, which has become a cloyingly corporate hot mess of pop culture, military homage and inane chatter about television advertisements and how much they cost.

Just give me the game, any game, well-played, aesthetically rewarding and dramatic. Not all games can be this way, of course, so we keep watching. We can’t get enough, and it really isn’t just about the violence.

It is hard to reconcile the many football pleasures created by Mackey with the lifetime of pain and illness that he suffered afterward, and that many NFL veterans have endured. Some have found their lives so unbearable that they ended them.

But in our zeal to make football a kinder, gentler sport — including quite a bit of attention paid to the subject of homophobia in the game — we refuse to acknowledge another reality Novak understood long ago, and that remains unreformable. It’s one that my local football star probably understands without having to read something like this, and what will continue to magnetize so many young males like him:

So long as rationalists dominate the public symbols of society, football will have the added delicious taste of necessary counterbalance: the taste of forbidden fruit.

]]> http://www.wendyparker.org/2013/02/the-eternal-lure-and-brutal-eloquence-of-football/feed/ 1 http://www.wendyparker.org/2013/01/sports-as-the-antidote-to-mere-entertainment/ http://www.wendyparker.org/2013/01/sports-as-the-antidote-to-mere-entertainment/#comments Mon, 14 Jan 2013 17:29:51 +0000 Wendy Parker http://www.wendyparker.org/?p=6210 Tweet

Were this weekend’s NFL divisional playoff games entertaining, in the most generic sense of the word?

Absolutely, whether or not you had a particular rooting interest. The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Gay writes that it’s hard to beat the NFL’s entertainment value, despite that many problems plaguing the league and the sport and that will continue to trouble them both.

But if you did have a team involved — raising my hand here — then you understand that these matters were about much more than entertainment. A final, inexplicable, moment of joy, aborting what figured to be a long, gloomy winter, could never, ever be scripted the way it turned out, no matter how much time the Falcons and Seahawks spent practicing just such a scenario.

Nick Hornby years ago delved deep into the fan’s soul to illustrate, as well as any writer ever has, why for so many this can never be mere entertainment:

One thing I know about a fan is this: it is not a vicarious pleasure, despite all appearances to the contrary . . . But when there is some kind of triumph, the pleasure does not radiate from the players outwards until it reaches the likes of us as the back of the terraces in a pale and diminished form; our fun is not in a watery version of the team’s fun . . .

The joy we feel on occasions like this is not a celebration of others’ good fortune, but a celebration of our own; and when there is a disastrous defeat the sorrow that engulfs us is, in effect, self-pity, and anyone who wishes to understand how football is to be consumed must realise this above all things.

Hours after Tony Gonzalez admitted that “I was on the ground crying, like a little baby,” one of many celebrity award shows was underway, summoning all kinds of social media snark, sass and empty banter that is no stranger to conversation about sports, except for this important point: Nobody was really commenting on how the TV programs, or movies, affected them.

But there was plenty of commentary about the dresses and fashions and hairstyles of the stars and Jodie Foster’s coming-out speech.

Was “Argo” a terrific movie? Certainly, to those who had seen it and raved about it. Was Daniel Day-Lewis superb in “Lincoln?” I think so, but it’s first film I’ve seen in the theatre in some time.

But there weren’t the disquisitions about why these excelled as movies, or as individual performances, since the context wasn’t about examining them as pieces of cinematic art.

In moments like these, I turn, as I usually do, to the early pages of “The Joy of Sports,” where many years ago, as the sports television age was rounding into the dominant position it continues to hold, Michael Novak offered the ultimate rejoinder of resistance.

Novak was taking aim at a 1960s-influenced generation of sports journalists who looked at their subjects through the prism of politics and social issues, instead of only sports, and tried to trivialize them as a result.

I have referred to some of these passages before but they are essential to the approach I’m taking with this blog, and they perfectly sum up a game that still has me trembling with emotion like few ever have in my many years of watching all kinds of sports:

The motive for regarding sports as entertainment is to take the magic, mystification, and falsehood out of sports.

Sports are far more serious than the dramatic arts, much closer to primal symbols, metaphors, and acts, much more ancient and more frightening.

Those who think that sports are merely entertainment have been bemused by an entertainment culture. . . I don’t watch football to pass the time. The outcome of the game affects me. I care. Afterward, the emotion I have lived through continues to affect me. Football is not entertainment. It is far more important than that.

All of this national media attention being foisted on my hometown team, after a regular season of obsessing over the Giants, Jets, Redskins, Cowboys, 49ers, Eagles and Packers — and more or less in that order — is making me very, very nervous.

The Atlanta Falcons have home field advantage in the NFC playoffs, which is anxiety-producing enough. Now the team known more for its litany of losing and the sordid Vick-Petrino saga is in the crosshairs of a sporting press that’s fixated on a singular theme — why success has eluded the Falcons recently.

Yes, the Falcons haven’t won a playoff game under current coach Mike Smith (0-3), who became the franchise’s winningest coach during the regular season.

And so the headlines have gone like this:

• “Falcons hope for something different, a playoff win” — Gee thanks, Atlanta-based CNN and Terence Moore, my former AJC colleague

• “Russell Wilson tops Matt Ryan in playoff trustworthiness” — Adam Schein, NFL.com, trollin’ trollin’ trollin’

• “Falcons primed to rewrite history” — Ashley Fox, ESPN.com, who didn’t go back far enough in time

But hey, no pressure. None at all. Not for a franchise that didn’t even appear in a playoff game until its 13th season of existence. The following week, after that first, glorious, one-point victory, came an especially painful moment, a loss to Dallas in the divisional playoffs. My season-ticket-holding father was hopeful we were fated for better things.

We were, but it took another 20 years.

The elation was off the charts when the Falcons reached the Super Bowl after the 1998 season. John Elway was very, very good in a Broncos rout, but in Atlanta we couldn’t get past the prostitution-related arrest of Falcons cornerback Eugene Robinson the night before the game.

This is how it has gone for the Falcons — from purely awful to rare moments of splendor followed by humiliating, utter devastation, typically coming away from the field.

The absolute lowest moment — lower than drafting Aundray Bruce No. 1 or trading away Brett Favre — was Michael Vick heading off to federal prison after pleading guilty to dogfighting charges in 2007, two years after a glittering ride to the NFC finals and a $130 million contract extension. The Face of the Franchise, in handcuffs, bound for Leavenworth.

The day after that, and after promising Falcons owner Arthur Blank he was staying put, Petrino bugged out for the Ozarks, seen on a midnight “SportsCenter” calling the Hogs.

We all know what eventually happened to Petrino, which is to say he isn’t mourned around here.

My friend Ray Glier, co-author of a new Falcons fans-oriented book, recently told an Atlanta TV station:

“The Falcons, frankly, for 42 years or so didn’t have a lot of big moments. Now they’ve got a lot in the last five years with Mike Smith and how things have gone out there. So, you pick the big moments and you immediately pick the biggest stage they’ve been on and it’s the Super Bowl and that’s number one in there.”

While those aspirations are certainly in the air once again, so is an abnormal amount of unusual tension. Of having to live up to expectations, of all things.

For Falcons tight end Tony Gonzalez, the playoff drought is even more pronounced, since he never won a post-season game during all those years with the Chiefs. Former Kansas City Star columnist Joe Posnanski writes about the future Pro Football Hall of Famer this way:

People keep asking Tony G. if he will REALLY retire after this season, and he keeps saying that he’s 95 percent sure that he will. Why 95 percent? Well, I think he can’t help but wait to see what happens in Sunday’s playoff game at home against Seattle. Gonzalez wants it. He needs it. He keeps saying this is the best team he has ever been on, and they are at home, and, yes, he needs that victory. He wants to retire, of course. He doesn’t even want to think about the pain if he loses in the playoffs again.

Of course, no pressure. None at all. Especially when you’ve been written off by Nate Silver.

Actually, there’s also spirit of celebration here, given the city’s deep rudders of defeat, its historically warm embrace of the college game, nearly two decades of the Braves’ renaissance and the fact that we’re bloody surrounded by neighbors, co-workers and fellow parishioners from somewhere, anywhere, else, whose allegiances are to teams in towns they’ve permanently left behind.

Jason Kirk of SB Nation explains why perceptions of Atlanta as a bad sports town are all wrong.

Atlanta-based Sports Illustrated writer Thomas Lake has professed his Falcons addiction, shared with his brother, in a story apparently fit only for print.

A Falcons fan message board reprints it here:

Maybe we’ll fall short again this year. The experts have already written us off. We have 46 years of losing behind us.

This better not be a back-door jinx.

On The Daily Beast today, Buzz writes that the league is trying too hard to compensate for the sport’s innately violent nature, and it’s leading to a crummy brand of football:

One of the NFL’s all-time tough men, Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis, says he’s calling it quits at the end of the season

Bizzinger’s calling his six-month talk radio stint quits, saying the format is “fundamentally trivial.” There is also this:

According to one well-placed source, Bissinger was involved in two separate F-bomb-filled office confrontations that resulted in him being charged with “creating a hostile work environment.” Once CBS Corporate in New York was poised to get involved with the second incident, Bissinger resigned, says the source. Bissinger would not comment on the record about the disputes. But clearly the station knew he was volatile. It’s one of the reasons they hired him.

NFL head coaches out today before lunchtime, all times local: Andy Reid. Romeo Crennel. Lovie Smith. Pat Shurmer. Norv Turner. Ken Whisenhunt.

Not sure if he got to eat first: Chan Gailey.

Mike Munchak has been told he’ll be back. So has Rex Ryan.

Almost as many GMs are getting the boot: Mike Tannenbaum. Tom Heckert. Gene Smith. A.J. Smith. Rod Graves. No word yet on Scott Pioli.

I may be missing some names here.

USA Today has started a tracker that figures to be updated.

So has SB Nation.

I watched the “The Immaculate Reception: A Football Life” doc on the NFL Network last night, and it revealed some interesting nuggets to me that I hadn’t known before.

Such as how the now-famous moniker, coined by a Steelers fan standing on a table in a bar after the game, took a couple years to truly catch on, even in Pittsburgh.

I was only 12 years old when Franco Harris made his famous (or infamous, if you’re from Oakland) catch for a touchdown in the dying moments of the 1972 AFC championship game, so my recall isn’t quite what it would be for an adult with stronger memories of that game, and the magnitude of that improbable moment.

I get how the Raiders still feel they were jobbed, and how the lack of replay cameras that are now everywhere contributed to the controversy. I completely understand why John Madden, still embittered by the result and the way it was allowed to stand, wouldn’t sit for an interview with filmmaker Neil Zender.

It is still debatable whether the catch was a legal one (did Terry Bradshaw’s pass hit Jack Tatum or Frenchy Fuqua?) and there’s some slight credence, because of the grainy footage that still exists, that the ball may not have been picked up by Harris completely on the fly.

Here’s what Zender should have left out: The interview with “Freakonomics” co-author Stephen Dubner, whose 2003 family memoir “Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper” is an awkward account of his fanaticism for Harris that The New York Times reviewer said amounted to “literary stalking.”

In the doc, Dubner likened the footage of Harris’ catch to the Zapruder film, and Zender admits in a Q & A with Ed Sherman that he set out to make that connection. Which is unfortunate.

But that’s not the most ill-fitting component Zender includes in his hour-long film.

It’s interviewing former CIA director Michael Hayden to offer his “expertise” on the play.

While I appreciate the time Zender and his crew took to investigate the controversy, those two elements just don’t work. Neither does an interview with a retired Carnegie-Mellon professor who slows the Immaculate Reception video down on his computer to reach a conclusion that makes every Pittsburgh fan happy. The promised “scientific” approach falls apart when he outfits his wife in a Steelers jersey and helmet to help him re-enact the play.

I wouldn’t call that empirical research, but it’s about the best Zender could do given his determination to put this play on the same level with film footage of a presidential assassination against a backdrop of CIA dark ops.

The Immaculate Reception, which officially turns 40 on Sunday, didn’t really need all that embellishment.

Given the paucity of old NFL Films availability on television — this helps to explain why — I consider it a feat when I come across an episode I didn’t know existed.

It’s been nearly 42 years since the NFL split off into the NFC and AFC, with the winners meeting in the Super Bowl. For the 1970 season, three longtime NFL teams — the Baltimore Colts, Cleveland Browns and Pittsburgh Steelers — joined former AFL teams to even out the AFC.

This time period comes right after the cut-off point covered by Dan Daly’s new book, “National Forgotten League,” that I wrote about yesterday.

The Colts were coming off the bitter disappointment of being the first NFL team to lose in the Super Bowl to an AFL team, the Joe Namath-led New York Jets, and the firing of coach Don Shula.

Don McCafferty guided the revamped 1970 Colts. On a chilly day in January 1971, two aging quarterbacks — Johnny Unitas of the Colts and George Blanda of the Oakland Raiders, the latter coming in for an injured Daryl Lamonica — served up a classic, along with John Facenda’s narration.

Baltimore went on to win its first Super Bowl as Jim O’Brien booted his way to history against the Dallas Cowboys. Like Blanda, he was among the last of the straightaway placekickers, another relic of a time in Daly’s account that was soon to become history as well.

The University of Nebraska Press is a treasure trove of terrific books about sports and sports history, and a new issue about the early days of pro football by Washington Times sports columnist Dan Daly looks to be a real treat.

In the “National Forgotten League: Entertaining Stories and Observations from Pro Football’s First Fifty Years,” Daly comments that “it’s amazed me how little literary attention has been paid to pro football’s early days.”

In the days before the creation of NFL Films, and the arrival of Pete Rozelle and the television age, there was virtually no literature to speak of. Daly, a co-author of “The Pro Football Chronicle,” points to the lack of newspaper coverage. By the time the NFL was created in obscurity the early 1920s, baseball and college football already had enjoyed decades of flattering prose by some of the best stylists in sportswriting and beyond.

As George Halas once observed: “The history of pro football will forever be preserved on film and not by the written word a la baseball.”

This 424-page volume is Daly’s effort to rectify that, after two decades of painstaking research, including the discovery of hard-to-find newspaper articles and other materials on tucked-away microfilm reels: “Up to now, the game’s early days have been a silent movie. I’m trying to turn them into a talkie.”

Daly breaks down what he calls his “scrapbook” by decades, and ends promptly at 1969, and not just because that year winds up his 50-year survey:

“At that point, in my mind, the party was over. Pro football will never be as fascinating as it was from the ’20s to the ’60s. It’s all about maintaining success now, protecting everyone’s investment. And that breeds conservatism. The league moves so slowly these days that it took thirty-six years to fix the obviously flawed overtime rules (for the playoffs, at least). If the AFL were still around, prodding the NFL into being better, the correction would have come much sooner.”

An excerpt published on ESPN.com in October recounts the NFL saga of one Steve Belichick, who started the 1941 season as the equipment manager for the Detroit Lions and wound up starring as a fullback. And later became the father of you know who.

The National Football League we know today took dramatic steps in its current direction in the 1970s, when lucrative television contracts finally elbowed aside the dominance of Major League Baseball and as American corporate life moved into an age of high finance, filling its ranks with a Baby Boom generation of mobile and ambitious strivers.

But according to author Kevin Cook, two teams that embodied blue-collar, roughneck styles — the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Oakland Raiders, respectively — played key roles in helping usher in the new NFL in its break from the old-school, Vince Lombardi past.

Cook’s recently published “The Last Headbangers: NFL Football in the Rowdy, Reckless ’70s — The Era That Created Modern Sports,” spans a decade in the pro game from two unforgettable touchdown catches: Franco Harris’ “Immaculate Reception” for the Steelers against the Raiders in the 1972 AFC title game, and Dwight Clark’s “The Catch” for the San Francisco 49ers against the Dallas Cowboys in the 1982 NFC finals.

During this time, traditional running-oriented attacks and 4-3 defenses were giving way to more wide-open passing offenses and the “flex” schemes of the Dallas Cowboys.

Off the field, the corporate ethos of the NFL, with its new-found fame and riches, set the stage for an era of expansion, more ruthless competition, labor strife, painkillers and steroids and the establishment of gaudy spectacle.

This is well-traveled book terrain, most notably in fiction (“North Dallas Forty,” “Semi-Tough”).

But Cook is keen on letting the light shine on a cast of raucous real-life figures, in uniform and on the sidelines, many of whom he interviewed: Terry Bradshaw, Jack Tatum, Mean Joe Greene and Kenny Stabler. Finally, the rise of “Monday Night Football” is presented as further evidence of the NFL’s move to the center of American entertainment experience.

The headbangers in the title are literal. In a cringe-inducing sequence, Cook explains the brutal technique Raiders linebacker Phil Villapiano used to get his head to fit into his helmet. Do not try this at home, or anywhere else.

In a major review in The Washington Post, Greg Schneider is impressed with Cook’s vivid retelling of the Steelers and Raiders of the 1970s. But he concludes the author doesn’t live up to the subtitle’s billing, and his timing is off:

“But the problem with Cook’s book is that the Steelers-Raiders rivalry doesn’t really explain how football became the modern product that today brings in billions upon billions in revenue. The creation of that money machine during the 1970s was more of a backroom affair, with Rozelle negotiating ever-higher TV broadcast deals and the networks cooking up more and more elaborate presentations. As for the game itself — the modern version, as Cook notes in the latter part of the book, actually developed in the early 1980s with the rise of the San Francisco 49ers and the complicated, air-oriented West Coast offense. And it didn’t change overnight.”

Cook is interviewed here by NPR’s Scott Simon about the heavy toll the game took on the players. (The late Steelers’ Hall of Fame center Mike Webster, a key figure in Pittsburgh’s dynasty, suffered from dementia and was discovered to have had chronic traumatic encephalopathy.)  In an op-ed piece in The New York Times that coincided with the book’s publication, Cook eloquently raised concerns that continue to be echoed, ever so loudly, and as they involve one of his book’s chief characters:

“Fans may wonder whether they should support such a sport. Many parents face a more practical question: Should our kid play football? When the Raiders’ Phil Villapiano, one of the hardest hitters in N.F.L. history, watched his son Mike get his bell rung in a high school game, they had a father-son talk about it. Mike dreamed of playing college football, maybe even making the N.F.L. They both felt he wouldn’t get there by sitting on the sidelines, waiting for a doctor to send him back in. Father and son agreed: Mike kept his mouth shut and his options open. He stayed in the game and led his team to a state championship.

“I’m not about to second-guess the Villapianos, whose fortitude I admire. But no family should face such a choice.”

The Perfect Season

The last team to win a Super Bowl before Kevin Cook’s book timeline is the last team to go undefeated in a season.

Veteran sportswriter Mike Freeman’s “Undefeated: Inside the 1972 Miami Dolphins’ Perfect Season,” includes the personal recollections of the men who went 17-0 and reversed the fortunes of a franchise with little previous success.

On Tampa Bay Online, Bob D’Angelo praises Freeman for finally giving those Dolphins, on the 40th anniversary of their singular feat, some belated respect. It started with the respect that coach Don Shula gave to his players in laying the foundation for a strong team concept:

“Freeman does more than provide a blow-by-blow account of the perfect season. He gives the reader the necessary background to understand the 1972 season, and notes how Shula was able to integrate his locker room and had blacks and whites rooming together on the road. He also put black hair products (like Afro Sheen) and hair picks inside the individual lockers of black players.”

Tough Game to Write About

Here’s an interesting post from blogger and author Lance Mannion about the sports books he’s reading, and the sports he enjoys reading about the most: baseball and boxing, in that order.

He’s got the books by Cook and Freeman on his lengthy to-review list, but also makes this frank admission about what he thinks of the literature of football:

” . . . more than other sports football emphasizes strategy and violence, and both topics are inherently dull to read about. Strategy because it easily degenerates into sheer wonkery. Violence because it gets repetitive.”

But Mannion likes both accounts for what they don’t contain:

“Never mind the talk about heart and character that creeps into all sportswriting and sentimentalizes the most cynical writers’ prose. For a lot of fans and players and coaches, football is about will. The essential spirit of the game expresses itself in power and the will to dominate. This isn’t what I like about the game. In fact, it’s what keeps me from loving it anywhere near as much as I love baseball. I don’t even think it’s necessary to appreciating football as a sport as opposed to a spectacle. But it’s there, whether I like it or not. It excuses the violence. Worse, it encourages celebration of the violence. Watching thugs inflict pain on each other becomes the point. Writers who accept this as intrinsic to the game, even resignedly, as well as writers who are seduced by it, become dull and stupid in a hurry. And they resort to cliches more often and easily to help them disguise what they’re doing, which is either apologizing for bullies or out and out cheerleading for them.”

And there’s this:

“Writing about football is full of personalities, usually outsized ones. Writing about baseball and boxing is full of characters.

“Joe Namath was a personality.

“Ty Cobb was a character.

“And this is the case with Undefeated and The Last Headbangers.”

There’s plenty more to ponder in that post, so treat yourself and read the whole thing.

The death of Alex Karras on Wednesday, just weeks after that of NFL Films impresario Steve Sabol, has those nostalgiac for the days of pro football’s past reflecting even more deeply on the state of the game as it is now.

ESPN.com’s Jeff MacGregor continues his exploration of the nature of football while remembering the legacy of Karras, known better to younger generations of Americans as a “Monday Night Football” analyst, Mongo from “Blazing Saddles” movie fame and a television personality. At least his ferocious persona as a Detroit Lions’ defensive lineman — a good one, but not a truly great one — was nothing but authentic, during a time when that was all that mattered:

“The NFL has long since been streamlined and sanitized. The game itself is faster and bigger and stronger and more brutal than ever, but the aesthetic now is sleek and frictionless, corporate, artificial, no sleeves on the jerseys or mud on the fields. Somehow there’s more of it amounting to less and less. I understand this has as much to do with me growing old as it does with the game or the league.

“But as a matter of ticket sales and public relations, the NFL tries now to hide its violence. This is dishonest. Football is the last Great Circus and the last of our epic American fables.”

MacGregor gently takes issue with Kansas City Chiefs’ lineman Eric Winston’s insistence last week that football players aren’t gladiators, in the true Roman sense. Winston was irate, and understandably so, that his team’s fans cheered as struggling quarterback Matt Cassel was carted off the field on Sunday.

With the constant news of concussions and on-field violence all around them, Winston and his fellow football professionals are stuck in an increasingly hysterical morality play in which their own humanity is an afterthought. The most popular spectator sport in America is becoming a crucible in which vast sums of money, enormous television ratings, bounty-hunting, concern over medical ethics and an aversion to acknowledging the sport’s undeniably violent roots are making it difficult to have an honest discussion about what’s at stake, and what can be done.

While Karras and his generation of players accepted the game as it was, they anguished about the consequences in their later years.

George Plimpton’s 1966 book, “Paper Lion” later became a film in which Karras played himself, and launched his acting career. Though Plimpton’s Walter Mitty-like experience with an NFL team was the core of the story, what also couldn’t be denied was the brutal toll the game took even on its most rock-ribbed participants.

Karras, who was 77, had been diagnosed with dementia brought about by head injuries sustained during his playing days. The cause of death was kidney failure.