A Fan's Notes

New York Post Editor James Wechsler set out in his column one day last week to try to justify the hours of stupefaction that he, like millions of other American husbands, spends watching football on the tube. To many women, an even greater mystery is how their husbands pick the teams to root for. With wondrous invention, Wechsler explained that his choices are determined by his social conscience.

Thus he rooted for Notre Dame against the University of Texas in the Cotton Bowl on New Year's Day because Notre Dame President Theodore Hesburgh stands against "racism and repression." And the game was played in Dallas, where "football is the plaything of oilmen and their right-wing political friends" and where John Kennedy was shot. In the Rose Bowl at Pasadena, Wechsler was pulling for Stanford against Ohio State because Stanford Quarterback Jim Plunkett is the son of blind parents, his mother a Chicano, and Ohio State Coach Woody Hayes is a middle-American "martinet of the old school."

Would football have lost its savor if each side mustered a ghetto black at tight end, a scholarship Indian at quarterback and a defensive secondary of Third World recruits? Mrs. Wechsler has yet to be heard from.