Deconstructionist at the Super Bowl

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.