How Football Explains America - book

How Football Explains America, Sal Paolantonio (Triumph Books, 2008)

Inspired in part by Franklin Foer’s bestselling book, How Soccer Explains the World, Paolantonio attempts to explain how football, growing out of rugby and soccer, grew into American football, how it is intimately related to the history of America itself, and why it has not caught on in other countries as it has here at home. He manages to relate it in a general way to Manifest Destiny, Daniel Boone, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Coltrane and Jackie Robinson, West Point, the Battle of Midway, Father Knows Best, the 1960’s, Show Business, and finally to us all. It is an interesting attempt and does manage to inform us at least in part about the history of America and football. His discussion of the origin and purpose of the huddle I found of particular interest, as with some of the formations. But most interesting of all is his account of the creation of the position of quarterback and the reasons for it. The anecdotes are fascinating, his insights are worthwhile, and in general I found it well worth reading.

Paolantonio is a national correspondent for ESPN and hosts a football show on Sunday morning. He is a former sportswriter and political correspondent for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Having been around football for a long time he obviously knows a great deal about the game itself as well as its history. He explains in detail how the different rules of the game originated, how they deliberately attempted to make the game more and more interesting to American audiences, and how it became a savior for the budding television industry which it now virtually dominates (during the season). It is most interesting to see how the changes to the game over time were carefully planned with specific purposes in mind, and did not arise merely as random ideas or changes of necessity. It is an interesting and insightful look at what has become America’s sport, overshadowing even baseball and basketball.

I do believe, however, it might have been more appropriately titled “How America Explains Football,” as the author tries to relate the development of the sport to many of what he believes are the basic values of American life: values such as fair play, teamwork, camaraderie, competition, strategy, energy and emotion, with added emphasis on the quest for perfection and the triumph of the underdog. I must say that for me the book is much more about America as we like to think of it, or as it perhaps once was, or as we would like it to be. It is far too idealized to explain America as we are presently experiencing it. Where, for example, is the teamwork in the current rough-and-tumble of American politics? Where is the fair play and camaraderie? Paolantonio does, I think, make an excellent case for why football became the quintessential American sport while at the same time not catching on well in other countries.

There are, of course, inevitable comparisons to war and fighting, but Paolantonio is wise enough to know that trying to compare football to our troops actually fighting and dying is quite inappropriate. The main emphasis is on the masculine, macho character of the game. He writes how, when one or more teams tried to get the players to hold hands during the huddle, they simply refused. It is not surprising then, that in a book that idealizes American culture and emphasizes the masculine features of football, you would not expect to find, and will not find, any mention of what others, like the great Berkeley folklorist, Alan Dundes, suggested, are obvious homoerotic elements in the game. His well-known paper on this subject, “Into the Endzone for a Touchdown” resulted in a number of death threats. I might point out the same or similar homoerotic themes run through much of America literature, at least according to Leslie Fiedler, one of the best of the postmodern critics. See his famous and controversial essay, “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey.” Also missing, or at least neglected, is the American obsession with violence and how, or if, it relates to the violence of football.

Whether you subscribe to such arguments or not, there is no doubt that in the 21st century football has become a dominant American institution, even obsession, like no other. It is just beginning to appear in a few other cultures, whether it will be successful away from the American cultural context I think is doubtful. If you like the game, read Paolantonio’s book.