Dear Cal and Stanford,

Why are you running away from California?

Yes, the collapse of the Pac-12 Conference—occasioned by the departure of eight schools seeking better TV contracts—leaves the two of you without a home for your sports teams.

But your flailing around for a new sports home on the other side of the country looks pathetic. Your desperate appeals to join the Atlantic Coast Conference would be a joke, if it weren’t such a crime against geography.

And if that doesn’t work out—and it’s not looking good, since those Atlantic schools don’t want to share their TV sports revenues with West Coast interlopers—what’s next?

Are you going to play in the Arab League?

Instead of seeking unworkable new affiliations three time zones away, please take a breath and a good look at your home state. If you stop panicking and start thinking intelligently—and intelligent thinking is supposed to be your brand—you’ll see that the best opportunity to build your athletic futures is right here in California.

You two, as educational leaders, are naturally positioned to bring together universities from every region of the Golden State to form a new college sports powerhouse.

Call it the California Conference.

This is not a new idea. Intriguingly, sports leaders also suggested it the last time your conference broke up. It was the 1950s, when you played in the Pacific Coast Conference.

As recounted in the book Roses from the Ashes: Breakup and Rebirth in Pacific Coast Intercollegiate Athletics, conference officials discovered in 1951 that the University of Oregon’s football program paid student-athletes from a secret slush fund; the University of Washington, it turned out, did too. The ensuing turmoil resulted in the PCC’s dissolution in the 1958–59 school year.

During the scandal, Los Angeles oilman Edwin Pauley—a longtime UC regent so devoted to college sports that UCLA named its basketball arena after him—suggested that California schools form their own conference. That didn’t happen. But the two of you, Cal and Stanford, helped create a new conference of schools from Western states. This became the Pac-8, and, with subsequent expansion, the Pac-10, and then the Pac-12.

You should start your own conference again. But this time, with the growth of California and its universities, you won’t have to look outside the state for partners.

Football is the revenue machine that drives college sports, and California now has 11 universities that play in the highest division. Two of these schools—USC and UCLA—have gone to the Big Ten for now. But the other nine—you two, plus Fresno State, Sacramento State, San Diego State, San José State, UC Davis, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and the University of San Diego—could make an entertaining and diverse conference for football. These California teams might be happy to jump from their current, non-elite conferences (the Mountain West and the Big Sky) to a potentially higher revenue-producing California conference.

For sports beyond football, the California conference could include more than 20 universities, including seven University of California schools, and 10 Cal State campuses. The California Conference would be a basketball powerhouse, raising the profile of outstanding but lesser-known programs, like St. Mary’s and CSU Bakersfield.

You’d remain the top dogs, academically and athletically, but by bringing in the California schools, you’d elevate them in a way that might ease resentment of your elite institutions.

You should know, though, that a number of these schools can hang with you. Take San Diego State. Its football team is often better than yours. Its men’s basketball program just made the national finals. San Diego State is also a rising academic power, second in selectivity among the Cal State schools only to Cal Poly SLO, whose graduates make nearly as much money as yours do.

A California Conference schedule wouldn’t be a big adjustment, because you already play many of these California schools in many sports. Both of you have a long history of playing football against San José State (the Stanford–San José State rivalry even has a name, the Bill Walsh Legacy Game, in honor of the late Stanford and 49ers coach, a San José State alum).

Sports media executives may question whether intra-state games will draw audiences, but that’s because they don’t understand California. College football is about rivalries between regions, and California’s regions are as populous as most states. I, for one, can hardly wait to see Cal or Stanford go to Bulldog Stadium on a Saturday night with a conference title at stake. You’ll see how Fresno State’s storied football program produces more passion than your wine-and-cheese fan bases might muster in a decade.

The new conference also could spawn cross-cultural local fights—working-class Sac State against hippie UC Davis, or the uptight Catholics of the University of San Diego against loose-living San Diego State.

A California Conference would have ancillary benefits. For example, it might revive the Rose Bowl, an essential California New Year’s tradition killed off by the same forces that exploded the Pac-12. Instead of becoming just another quarterfinal game in a national college football playoff—its current fate—the Rose Bowl could pit the California Conference champion against the best team it can get from the rest of the country.

And with any luck, this new athletic union would forge more academic collaboration between California-based schools, who face the same threat—a United States that is increasingly hostile to higher education, non-partisan teaching, and California’s liberal values.

The California Conference would start with one void: It wouldn’t have USC or UCLA. But if the conference could launch and perform well, it’s easy to see those schools leaving the Big Ten and coming home. USC and UCLA athletes, after a few years in the Big 10, may discover that they prefer less travel, fewer missed classes, and better game weather.

It’s also going to be hard to justify, to the state of California and on-campus constituencies, the climate impacts of burning all that additional jet fuel. Teams in the California Conference could get to most games by train or electric bus.

So that’s the pitch—save the planet, save college sports, connect California. Why not take a swing?

The post Let’s Create a California Conference appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Camp worked on the game his entire adult life, a devotion that began in the second decade after the Civil War. On November 13, 1875, standing on the sidelines as a high school senior in New Haven, Connecticut, Camp watched the first-ever Harvard-Yale football game, which was based on rugby that had been taught to Harvard a couple of years earlier by a Canadian team. By the following year, when Camp was a student at Yale and was chosen to play in the second Harvard-Yale game, he had already studied rugby’s rules sufficiently that Yale’s captain took him along to help negotiate game rules with Harvard’s captain.

Later in 1876, student representatives from Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale met to organize the Intercollegiate Football Association (IFA), a rugby league comprised of and managed by college students, within which Camp initially would work and the American game would begin and grow.

America’s college players quickly broke away from rugby. Rather than trying to blast forward in the swarming scramble of a rugby scrum, often causing the ball to bang out of the scrum at unpredictable locations, the American college students spontaneously started kicking the ball backward—an invention Camp credited to Americans’ “idea of order and preparation.” The backward kick involved calculation and a plan, to get the ball to selected players who could run around the scrum-bunched players.

Camp was a leader as the American game continued to distance itself from rugby. He was Yale football captain as a junior and senior and was dispatched as a delegate to the IFA’s annual rule-making conferences. Camp also kept studying football, making his “knowledge of the game and his resourcefulness so great,” one Yale player said, that “we were easily ahead of any other college.” As American players refined the game around the backward kick, Yale was generally first to adopt new practices that became widely used.

For example, during Camp’s playing days and captaincy, more organization was added to the game, including a more distinct separation of opposing teams during a scrimmage, alignment of players along a scrimmage line, and an accompanying separation of teams into distinct offensive and defensive roles. (This was in contrast to rugby scrums, where teams were on both offense and defense.) Player positions were developed, with names and functions, including a “middle rusher” on the offensive team, who initiated a new down by a backward kick at which he had become proficient (foot on the ball, sharp downward pressure propelling the ball backward in a quick “snap”). Another player, drawn in to gather this rolling and bouncing snap, was named “quarterback” for his close location.

Camp attended IFA rules-making meetings even after graduation, providing continuity in rulemaking as other students moved on. And he worked outside the meetings to build up the game with the zeal of an inspired entrepreneur. Camp initiated the All-America team of the best college players. He developed an annual rulebook supplemented with game-promoting information, wrote and published playing instructions in pamphlet and book form, gathered and kept records of rule interpretations and decisions made in actual games, and developed a book of rule interpretations for referees. He taught playing techniques both at Yale and at other schools, and coached Yale’s team, making him the first “head” coach in American football, and later the first “athletics director.”

Most important of all, in 1882 Camp made a major breakthrough, the “downs-and-distance rule,” which allowed a team to retain ball possession for a set of three downs, but only if they had previously completed an advance of five yards in three downs. Years of usage has obscured the novelty and creativity of this rule, but it was a truly out-of-the-blue invention without precedent. Camp’s fellow rule makers considered it unworkable. The rule was enacted by aid of the IFA president, who had known and worked with Camp, but only on the condition it would be removed early in the fall if it proved not useful; fortunately, the rule was immediately successful.

The new playing goals of the downs-and-distance rule—to achieve (on offense) or prevent (on defense) a five-yard advance in three downs—remade the developing game. Constant and imperative, operating on almost every down throughout the game, these goals establish the basic structure, procedure, and driving force of the game. At the same time, the game is infused with tension and interest. Each play becomes important, a limited opportunity to advance toward the needed yardage gain—five yards then, ten yards now. Viewers watch with greater awareness and suspense, knowing the yardage goal and waiting eagerly for the outcome. Each play tells a story, with winners, losers, and sometimes heroics.

The downs and distance rule also expanded the need and opportunity for preparation of distinct tactics and strategies, designed for each down’s goals and parameters. The potential for innovation was open-ended, providing what Camp considered a primary appeal of the game: “the fact that it is constantly developing and admits of new combinations, strategies, and surprises.”

Camp had a life beyond football. Two years after inventing the downs-and-distance rule, Camp began work at a worldwide clock company headquartered in New Haven, a full-time job that he somehow carried out—eventually serving as the company’s chief executive for 20 years—along with his full load of football activities. In 1888, he married Alice Sumner, the half-sister of William Graham Sumner, a famed Yale University professor. In addition to having two children, Walter, Jr., and Janet, Alice was an active helpmate who even spent time at Yale football practices in Walter’s business-related absences. There she became appreciated as “Mrs. Walter,” reporting to Walter in the evening. When the Yale players came over in the evenings for discussion, instruction, and planning, she entertained as a “generalissimo of high spirits” paired with the quiet-mannered Walter.

Two other fundamental features of American football would come after the downs-and-distance rule—first, interference, or blocking in front of a ball carrier (installed in 1888); and second, forward passing, added in a halting, stepwise process from 1906 to 1912.

The forward pass was proposed as a way to counter increased massing of blockers and open up the game, but at first it produced an impasse on the rules committee. Camp wanted simply to double the needed advance in three downs to ten yards, forcing innovation in running plays. But others insisted on forward passes, which Camp opposed as potentially too disruptive of the existing game.

The committee impasse, coupled with a jump in injuries and deaths from football, got the football-loving President Theodore Roosevelt involved. A friend of Camp, Roosevelt gradually sided against him and with those who wanted further change. In 1905, large multi-college conferences were held, at which West Point representatives, including a friend of Roosevelt’s who had just served as a military aide at the White House, led an enlargement of the rules committee that reduced Camp’s role. But even this new, larger committee moved gradually to approve forward passing, and it was 1912 before a full-scale passing program generally similar to today’s was enacted. By that time, Camp also was a supporter.

In 1917, Camp wrote in his annual guide that the football rules committee was satisfied with the game and ready to let it “crystallize” in its then-present form. By that time the United States had entered World War I and college football was minimized, with young men leaving college for military service. However, football was played under recreational programs for armed-services personnel, some of whom were new to the game. Camp, then serving as athletic director for the U.S. Navy, reported that at one Naval base 15 football teams had been organized.

The war’s end in November 1918 unleashed a huge and surprising surge of interest in American football. Various reasons for the surge have been offered—pent-up demand from limited war-time civilian play; increased exposure to football through military programs; new publicity from movie newsreels and radio broadcasts; and what Camp-had characterized as the “crystallization” of the rules, which allowed players and fans to build familiarity with the game. But underlying the growth was the inherent appeal of the basic game-defining features built in by Camp and other early rule makers.

The 1918 surge began a new era of increased play and spectator interest. Camp was astonished upon learning that on a single Saturday during the 1921 season, nearly 10,000 players were in action for colleges across the country. University administrations faced the new challenge of accommodating a greatly increased demand for tickets. The response was a stadium boom—over 50 permanent concrete stadiums were constructed during the 1920s, some with giant capacities like the University of Washington’s 46,000-seat facility in 1920; Stanford’s 60,000-seat stadium in 1921; and Ohio State’s 63,000-seat stadium in 1922. Most are still standing, often prominent in the midst of the campus, a striking witness to the unique American coupling of football and academic life.

Camp witnessed only seven years of American football’s post-1918 growth before he died during the night between sessions of a March 1925 rules-committee meeting. His death was reported on newspaper front pages across the country, with headlines such as, “Busy to the End with Game He Loved.”

Now he has been gone for nearly 100 years, but the game he set on its way lives on, still defined by his contributions. It has grown far beyond what he might have contemplated but continues to change and adapt to new concerns—as he predicted it would.

The post The Quiet Yalie Who Invented American Football appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the 20th century, Samoans, native Hawaiians, and Tongans gravitated to the area to seek a different sort of refuge. They soon found direction from a new priestly caste—a cosmopolitan group of football coaches who crafted a micro-culture of football excellence at and around Kahuku High School.

Over the decades, Kahuku has developed hundreds of collegiate and pro players, including winners of several Super Bowl rings. Just since 1999, Kahuku has played in 12 of Hawai‘i’s 19 state championship games, winning eight times.

Along the way, football became the North Shore’s civic cement.

This is a sports story that began with a sugar plantation and a Mormon temple. As the Kahuku Sugar Plantation fired up its boilers in 1890 and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) built a temple in nearby La`ie in 1919, the area attracted an array of proletarian wayfarers, including Samoans, Tongans, and Mormons from Utah’s Great Basin. Driven by different agendas, plantation managers, and Mormon elders saw sport as a way to shape those they recruited to work and worship. These newcomers to the North Shore and their descendants embraced sport and built an ethos of their own.

Today Samoans constitute the most disproportionately overrepresented ethnic group in the NFL. This trend dates to the Samoans who began playing football on the North Shore before World War II, decades before their brethren in American Samoa adopted the game. Many were Mormons who came when the LDS decided to consolidate its La`ie beachhead with the new temple. Thirty-five miles north of Honolulu, the once aboriginal fishing village of La`ie sits between Hau`ula and Kahuku.

Hundreds of Samoan converts came to build the temple, making La`ie a close approximation of a Samoan village. They adapted on their own terms in a church-owned, plantation town, retaining a culture of fa`a Samoa—in the way of Samoa. The temple, the first dedicated outside the continental United States, became a gathering place for the faith’s South Pacific converts. One can hardly overstate its importance—a temple is the only place where the ordinances required for salvation can be conducted and redemption sought for family members who died before completing the sacraments.

The North Shore’s Samoan community expanded after the U.S. Navy closed its base in American Samoa in 1951, sending another wave of migrants to refuge in La`ie. Youth from the town of La`ie came together at Kahuku High with their counterparts from Hau`ula, Kahuku, and the more northern shorelines where the Banzai Pipeline attracts some of the most intrepid surfers in the world.

Football quickly became entrenched at Kahuku High. During the 1940s, coaches Mits Fujishige, a Japanese American, and Art Stranske, a Canadian expat, led the school to its first titles. And, in 1945, Alopati “Al” Loloati, born in Samoa and bred in La`ie, debuted with the Washington Redskins, becoming, with little fanfare, the first Samoan in the NFL.

The Polynesian wave that would reconfigure collegiate and pro ball was still decades away. But back on the North Shore, Kahuku’s teams were becoming more and more successful. In 1956, Kahuku won a state title under coach Harold Silva, a Portuguese American, who infused the program with a tough, principled athletic code and showed the community that its boys could compete with anybody in Hawai‘i.

With the sons and grandsons of earlier Samoan immigrants at its core, Kahuku became the first mostly Samoan squad anywhere in the world. As the sugar industry declined along the northern coast, football gave generations of boys a way to find their place in the world.

A few years after Silva retired, native son Famika Anae returned and became the first Samoan head coach at any level of the game. Famika was the son of a Mormon from Western Samoa who had answered the call to build the temple. Both Famika and his half-brother—that Samoan NFL pioneer Al Lolotai—were the products of La`ie’s tough blend of religion, fa`a Samoa culture, and football discipline.

Famika’s father was initially skeptical of the game’s value. “Can you eat the football?” he asked. Famika eventually would have an answer when the game took him to Brigham Young University, where he played on an athletic scholarship. Famika returned to Kahuku in 1966, believing that excelling at the game was a way for local boys to go to college.

Famika, who led Kahuku until 1972, won two titles and brought Samoan players to the fore. During the summer, he conducted clinics in American Samoa with Lolotai. Famika appreciated how growing up in Samoa readied boys for football. “A Samoan boy starts hard physical labor even before he reaches school age,” Famika explained. “He must climb a coconut tree 100 feet tall, barefoot and carrying a machete, tear the coconuts loose and even cut away the fronds… By the time a boy is ready for high school football, his muscles often are as defined as those of a weightlifter.”

For training and bonding, Famika took his Kahuku players to a nearby island, Lanai, which the Dole Company ran as a plantation. They picked pineapples for six weeks each summer and returned with money in their pockets, in shape to play. He knew how much that money meant to boys whose families lived so humbly.

Upholding fa`a Samoa on the North Shore was demanding. “It is very hard on a Samoan kid who doesn’t do well, or what his father thinks is well,” Famika acknowledged. “He is felt to have disgraced the family.” A tongue-lashing and beating were often his punishment. “A loss,” Famika said, “reflects on the parents, the chiefs, and the race.” As their coach, he channeled his boys’ fear of failure into a relentless attacking style. “Samoans are very physical people,” he underscored. “They simply can’t stand losing—either in sports or in life.”

Sport meant battle and players readied themselves for games by performing the siva tau, a war dance. Their younger fans made Kamehameha Highway, the only way out of town, a gauntlet for opposing teams, pelting buses with gravel and coral stones from the shadows.

In the 1990s, Kahuku often reached the championship but repeatedly lost to Honolulu’s Saint Louis School. To be crowned king of Hawaiian football, the school had to dethrone Saint Louis and its legendary coach Cal Lee, which had dominated state football for two decades.

In 2000, Kahuku was coached by Sivaki Livai, who had played for the school after migrating from Tonga. Thousands traveled to Honolulu for Kahuku’s championship game with Saint Louis. After Kahuku delivered a historic victory, a caravan of buses, cars, and pickups snaked its way northward past cheering crowds gathered along the black-topped road. The buses stopped in each town so that players could perform a siva tau. Arriving home after midnight, they were greeted by supporters basking in a sense of fulfillment.

Since 2000, Kahuku football has maintained an almost unrivaled level of excellence. It’s become the story that many tell about their town to the world, a story about people who work hard and play harder, who lose but persevere, and in the end are heralded for their accomplishments. The flow of boys to college football has not slackened and many use football to gain an education and launch careers in and out of sport.

“I don’t think there’s a high school program in the United States that has benefited more from sport than Kahuku,” Dr. Allen Anae, son of the former Kahuku coach Famika Anae, argues. Eighty percent of its current student body participates in interscholastic sports. “Now we have parents thinking, if I support my kids’ football—and not only football but women’s sports—they can get a college education,” Anae observed. Maybe you can eat that football after all.

The post Why Samoans Are So Overrepresented in the NFL appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Roosevelt did not extend that consideration to professional football players, whose sport did not register politically. As a result, the NFL nearly shut its doors during World War II. So many players were called to serve that several franchises had to merge. In fact, the league didn’t take off until it closely associated itself with national politics. For the last half-century, the intertwining of American football and politics has sustained both pastimes, and no one played both games more enthusiastically than Richard Nixon.

By the 1960s the United States was involved in a different war, and the politics of sport had changed, nowhere more so than in the nation’s capital. Washington was “a male town, and football is its game … the right metaphor for its politics,” journalist Hedrick Smith wrote. “Not to possess Redskins season tickets spells a fatal absence of status,” observed Mary McGrory, an astute observer of local mores. The Washington Post detailed David Broder, its prizewinning political columnist, to cover a preseason game. The Harris poll named football America’s most popular sport in 1965, the Gallup poll in 1972.

What had changed? The NFL, to grow its business, spent the post-war decades single-mindedly pursuing cultural currency. Under PR-conscious commissioner Pete Rozelle, who took the job in 1960, the effort resembled nothing so much as an advertising campaign: in Rozelle’s mind, “anything that caused people to connect with pro football” would do. Conveniently enough, that’s exactly where politics were heading. “We’re moving into a period where a man is going to be merchandised on television more and more,” a Nixon aide explained to a reporter in 1968.

The NFL published its own books, made its own movies, and eventually sponsored an essay contest officially certified as part of the 1976 bicentennial celebrations. NFL Creative Services’ books depicted professional football as the essential expression of a complex and multifarious America. NFL Films sold viewers a vision of the game as a spectacular, vivid, and heroic showcase for passionate excellence.

The NFL’s intention was to persuade audiences both popular and elite that the sport deserved support because it was quintessentially American, perfectly in tune with the contemporary world, and deserving of solicitude should it encounter any legal roadblocks.

But the NFL never stopped politicking. Its cultural productions went global, usefully extending American soft power while cementing the association between NFL and Americanism.

Politicians benefited as well. Just as the NFL grew more adept at selling itself, so too did political figures begin to cultivate an interest in sports figures. In 1960, the John F. Kennedy campaign “put celebrity-gathering into mass production,” as one veteran consultant put it. A Nixon campaign organizer noted that “round[ing] up practically every All-American here” had helped the Republicans carry California.

Soon every politician was seeking out jocks. In 1968, Bobby Kennedy’s recruiters noted that athletic endorsements paid big dividends because “you are dealing with people who usually get press on their own steam.” Hubert Humphrey directed his campaign toward sympathetic sportswriters, attempted to get an article published in Sports Illustrated on the virtues of competition, and even scooped up Kennedy’s “top recruits” two days after his assassination. “With luck, if Teddy doesn’t run,” they could be enticed to hit the campaign trail for Humphrey.

Politicians across the spectrum hobnobbed with players and coaches, endorsed the campaigns of former players, and exerted themselves to win new franchises for their states. By the mid-70s, the collective intertwining of what one reporter called the “sport of politics and the politics of sport” had become inextricable.

The coziness between football and power rendered lobbying almost unnecessary: Lawrence O’Brien, Lyndon Johnson’s special assistant for congressional relations, recalled “inordinate efforts on behalf of the NFL in the Senate” by Senators in “constant quest…for a franchise location in their state.” No wonder that, when House Judiciary committee chair Emanuel Celler stalled a bill allowing the NFL to bypass the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and merge with the rival AFL in the fall of 1966, the House and Senate majority whips, Louisianans Hale Boggs and Russell Long, schemed to push it through the Ways and Means Committee. All it took was for the NFL to establish a team in New Orleans. “Pro football provides the circus for the hordes,” a disgusted Celler remarked.

In 1973, the House Interstate Commerce subcommittee “rammed through” without debate an NFL-backed measure preserving TV blackout rights for games that had not sold out 72 hours before their scheduled start. That blackout rule created incentives for fans and even cities to buy up unsold tickets. Without a sellout, TV stations would not show the home team’s games.

“It’s not true that Congress is divided, paralyzed, and unable to act with decision and leadership,” the journalist Nicholas von Hoffman acidly commented. “The pro football fans of America will be able to see their teams’ home games this year on television.”

Football on film sold America in ways that politicians liked. NFL Films perfected its craft with its magnum opus, They Call It Pro Football. Made in 1967, the 25-minute documentary neatly served the propagandistic, promotional, and political needs of both the league and the Defense Department. A number of reviews recognized the film’s social significance without fully grasping its extent, one extolling the “beauty and violence of the game—and its impact on the entire country.” At a briefing discussing how to sustain the morale of soldiers in Vietnam, General Creighton Abrams told Defense Secretary Melvin Laird that the men wanted football games.

“These films are important to them,” Abrams said.

“We better call Rozelle up tonight,” replied Laird, who quickly pledged “a two-minute bureaucratic drill” to ensure that the Armed Forces Network provided servicemen with more televised football.

Their bosses enjoyed these movies just as much. Secretary of State William Rogers brought a supply of NFL films on tour to show to foreign diplomats in the Far East in 1969. Air Force One flew an NFL film to Lyndon Johnson’s ranch in Texas, and Nixon later ordered a big-hits special for the White House. NFL Films’ productions were shown at the Continental Hotel in Paris, where homesick fans could savor the national pastime while munching hot dogs. They became a staple of life at military bases and on Navy submarines; and even in Saudi Arabia, where oil companies ordered copies of the films to console “American workers far from home.”

By the 1972 election, the merger between politics and football seemed almost complete. In April 1972, George McGovern announced an athletes’ committee heavy on football players. Its chair, Redskins guard Ray Schoenke, a history major and academic All-American at SMU, had walked into McGovern’s office the previous summer and volunteered his services. Schoenke made himself a one-man political operation. He handed out campaign literature at training camp, obtained rosters from the league office, and worked the phones every night.

But McGovern got crushed by Nixon in what a disappointed journalist panned as “one of the dullest political football games ever played before a nationwide TV audience.” No surprise. He was up against the country’s most football-friendly president.

Richard Nixon was a football fanatic who did the most to turn the game to political ends. Nixon’s connections to the sport ran deep. He frequently credited his coach at Whittier College, Chief Newman, with teaching him never to quit. He officially kicked off his first campaign for president on Whittier’s field before 20,000 roaring supporters and thanked Newman when accepting the Republican nomination in 1968. In his final memoir, In the Arena, Nixon recalled that “I learned more about life sitting on the bench with Chief Newman than I did by getting A’s in philosophy courses.”

He was not averse to putting those lessons to use. Nixon and his staff invoked football and attended games at strategic junctures throughout 1969 and 1970 with clear political intentions.

In November 1969, the administration countered nationwide anti-war marches with “National Unity Week,” featuring flag displays and what a White House memo called “a patriotic theme or event” at halftime of every televised college football game. Nixon told reporters that he was going to spend the Saturday afternoon of the march the right way: “It was a good day to watch a football game.”

The next fall, he kicked off his campaign for a Republican Congress before an enthusiastic crowd at Kansas State by contrasting the school’s football team (good) with youth protest (bad). He followed that up by sharing a podium with Ohio State coach Woody Hayes, celebrating the recently-deceased Vince Lombardi as “an apostle of teamwork,” and accompanying the Secretary of Defense and Wisconsin’s Republican candidates for Senator and Governor to Bart Starr Day, an event honoring the legendary Packer quarterback in Green Bay. A reporter traveling with the campaign found Nixon’s rah-rah approach utterly predictable: “It may be hard for some politicians to reduce a major political campaign to football terms, but not this one.”

In 1971, Newman’s successor at Whittier, George Allen, became coach of the Redskins. Nixon and Allen had supported each other’s endeavors since the 1950s, and the relationship deepened in Washington. Allen campaigned for Nixon and attended White House functions, and Nixon sent Allen a shoebox-full of notes, called him at home, and even attended practice at Allen’s invitation in 1971 to encourage his players.

The 1972 convention ratified what Nixon’s Republican detractors termed “game-plan politics.” “The President likes football analogies, and the relationships of field position and ball control were the essential elements of what the campaign organization tried to do,” the head of his advertising agency explained about the smoothly-run spectacle.

Bart Starr introduced convention chair Gerald Ford, and newly-elected New York Representative Jack Kemp, a former NFL quarterback and “No.1 [political] draft choice,” as a Sports Illustrated reporter following his campaign had described him, gave an “electrifying” speech seconding the nomination of Spiro Agnew. Numerous Republican power brokers nurtured Kemp’s political ambitions for a decade: Herb Klein, Nixon’s communications director, gave him a newspaper column, Reagan and the RNC hired him, and the White House publicly supported (and graced him with a congratulatory phone call after) his first run for Congress.

Despite Nixon’s electoral dominance, football’s triumph wasn’t partisan. No single participant succeeded in cementing a dominant political meaning for the nation’s most popular sport. Instead, football’s popularity provided a new language for politics and debate. Was one candidate trying a Hail Mary with a last-minute attack? Was another running out the clock with a lead? Had miscommunication in the Congressional huddle made a key bill fail? A political scientist complained in 1975 that “the discourse of politics” threatened to be “completely absorbed by the language of sports.”

The NFL, a profit-minded entity, both cultivated and profited from all this political attention. So when Richard Nixon told the crowd at Bart Starr Day that “the 1960s will be described as the decade when football became the No. 1 sport,” that sport’s number-one fan was merely adding a presidential signature to what a broad popular referendum had already decreed.

The post How the NFL and American Politicians Politicized (and Helped Merchandise) Pro Football appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As a sportswriter, during my visits I instinctively gravitated towards athletics venues. I would drive by the crumbling Astrodome, dwarfed by the gigantic NRG Stadium, home of the NFL’s Houston Texans; the Houston Astros’ new downtown baseball playground, Minute Maid Park; Rice University Stadium, the site of Super Bowl VIII in 1974, still holding up near the Medical Center.

Nothing about the changes in those venues fazed me. Houston’s dynamic progress was to be expected. But I was disturbed, as I made my rounds one summer morning in 2015, to see a shiny new stadium for University of Houston Cougars football. I entered Third Ward, the city’s historic African American cultural hub, drove past the Cougars’ new den for the first time, and was so shaken by the sight that I narrowly avoided veering into oncoming traffic.

Something was terribly wrong. This was not just any new testament to collegiate athletic funding. This was a state-of-the-art, gentrified grave marker, covering—no, unashamedly hiding—a significant monument to Houston’s African American history, now bulldozed to oblivion. Underneath this 60-acre plot, my hometown had buried a place called Jeppesen Stadium. Along with it, Houston silenced the athletic ghosts of a Jim Crow past that prevailed, for decades, throughout Texas.

Segregation had necessitated the formation, in 1920, of the Prairie View Interscholastic League (PVIL), the governing body for black high school athletics, academic, and music competitions in Texas. The University Interscholastic League, which oversaw the same activities for white students, denied membership to African American schools. So the PVIL became the guiding force behind African American high school gridiron action in the region. Its football was highly competitive and thrilling to watch.

In Houston, from the 1940s through 1967, the league’s Wednesday and Thursday night football games took place at Jeppesen, the school district’s public football facility. Jeppesen was the last and most visible connection to a past that saw Texas’s African American community defy a racist system and produce some of the best high school coaches, athletes, and teams in the state’s football-mad history. For me, it was also an enduring link to my adolescence.

Jeppesen had none of the engaging architectural features of its successor, the new University of Houston stadium; it was just a dirty beige-colored concrete edifice. But even if it was homely, Jeppesen had glamor. Houston was the PVIL’s largest market, and the league fostered cultural and community pride. Jeppesen drew fans from black enclaves—Fifth Ward, Fourth Ward, Third Ward, Kashmere Gardens, Sunnyside, Acres Homes, and the Gulf Coast—to cheer for their teams, which included great players like Bubba Smith, Eldridge Dickey, Mel Farr, Gene Washington, Otis Taylor, and Warren Wells.

As many as 40,000 fans gathered in Jeppesen’s stands for the annual Thanksgiving Turkey Day Classic game between heated crosstown rivals Jack Yates and Phillis Wheatley High Schools. Attendees dressed in their Sunday best, and then some, for the social event of the season. The day included pre- and post-game events, parades, alumni and family breakfasts and dinners, and flashy halftime marching band performances. Yates fans still talk about the 1958 halftime show, when Miss Yates and her court arrived in a helicopter. It landed on the 50-yard line to a deafening roar from the crowd.

A number of PVIL players went on to dominate professional football. Six of its alumni were inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, including “Mean Joe” Greene (from Temple Dunbar High School), defensive back Dick “Night Train” Lane (from Austin Anderson High School), and safety Ken Houston (from Lufkin Dunbar High School). In 1965, wide receiver Jerry LeVias, from Hebert High School in Beaumont, became the first African American football scholarship player in the old Southwest Conference when he decided to attend Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

Charles “Bubba” Smith, at 6 feet 7 inches, terrorized PVIL opponents in the early 1960s as a lineman at Charlton-Pollard High School in Beaumont, east of Houston, and later became one of the most feared defensive players in college football history at Michigan State, and in the National Football League with the Baltimore Colts. In 1992, Smith recalled playing in the PVIL to a Houston Chronicle writer: “You’re talking about people who could righteously play the game. None of the teams were diluted back then. Everyone on the field could play. If you blink, they were gone. It was more physical and tougher. And it always meant something if you could outrun somebody because everybody could run.”

Case in point: Cliff Branch was a four-time All-Pro receiver and three-time Super Bowl champion with the Oakland Raiders, and a world-class sprinter for the Colorado Buffaloes. At Worthing High School in Houston, he was a two-time PVIL 3-A state sprint champ and the first schoolboy in Texas history to run the 100-yard dash in 9.3 seconds, a record that stood only as long as it took the very next heat, for 2-A boys, to conclude. When it did, Wichita Falls Washington speedster Reggie Robinson was the new record-holder, breezing to a 9.1 second finish.

That kind of speed only mattered in athletic contests. None of the PVIL players could outrun racism and segregation, the wedges that maintained the misguided myth of white supremacy even in athletics. While there would be no shortage of newspaper and magazine articles, books, and movies about high school football in Texas, none focused on the teams and players from the PVIL. Few on the outside were willing to acknowledge the abundance of talent bursting from the under-funded schools of the “Negro League,” or the “Colored League,” as some called it in polite company. One former PVIL player spoke with disdain about the term “Friday Night Lights,” explaining, “That’s white folks.”

The Prairie View Interscholastic League governed athletic, academic, and music competitions for black high schools in Texas from 1920-1970. These athletes played football during the 1930s. Photo courtesy of PVILCA.

“There was the black side of town and the white side, and you just dealt with what was laid out there for you,” Smith would add. “You didn’t have time to think, ‘Why can’t I do that, or why is it like that?’ Sometimes I think a large part of my life was lost by that. But you could always show what you had on the football field.”

And there was so much to show. The PVIL created lasting passionate school rivalries, and instilled confidence in its athletes and students. Teachers and coaches were short on resources but eager to be mentors, and accepted the task of preparing black children for citizenship in an environment that neither welcomed nor encouraged them.

The league’s relationship with historically black colleges fortified it. Black colleges provided the only options in the South for African Americans seeking higher education, and Texas had several HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), including Prairie View, Wiley, and Bishop. Black coaches and teachers had earned degrees at black colleges—often starring as players, then returning home to work in black high schools. In turn, coaches would send their best players to their collegiate alma maters, creating a string of black men guiding young black boys to adulthood.

“I knew all the mommas and poppas,” Joe Washington Sr., father of former Oklahoma Sooners and NFL running back Joe Washington, recalled from his days as head coach at Bay City’s Hilliard High School and then at Port Arthur Lincoln High School. “They used to tell me, ‘Coach Washington, take him and do what you have to do, just don’t kill him.’ ”

Some look at the loss of those nurturing relationships as a tragedy of integration, which brought about the fall of the PVIL, the closing of black high schools, and erosion in black communities.

In the fall of 1967, black and white schools competed against each other for the first time, previously all-white programs added black players, and Texas could legitimately claim playing the best high school football in the country. White coaches had quietly salivated, waiting for the moment when they could welcome all of the most talented players to their programs, and the newcomers did not disappoint. The infusion of black athletes to UIL teams made instant winners of longtime losing teams, allowing coaches to gloat about their new black superstar: “I got me one.”

I graduated from Worthing in the spring of 1967, just as the PVIL and UIL “merged.” It was closer to a hostile takeover. As the PVIL began shutting down, so did most of its member schools, although some smaller schools lingered for another three seasons in the league. (From a high of 500, only eight former PVIL schools remain in operation today.) Successful PVIL coaches with state championships under their belts lost jobs. Other coaches retired or left the profession rather than take demotions to work as assistants on predominantly white staffs.

At first, I didn’t appreciate the sea change that integration would deliver to the PVIL. I thought it was great that black players would finally get a wider audience, and get to compare skills with white players. But when I returned that fall for our homecoming football game, against a white team in a different setting, I felt wistful and restless. The new stadium lacked the Jeppesen atmosphere. I left at halftime, thinking what PVIL folks surely had already figured out.

“You just have to have integration, we knew it all along and we wanted it,” said the late Luther Booker, a former head coach at Yates. “But you miss those days because it was such a high. It affected the black community. It was an electrifying time. There’s nothing like it now. And maybe there never will be.”

Certainly, there will be no more beacons like Jeppesen.

The post When Black Texans Gathered Under “Thursday Night Lights” appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Perhaps without even realizing it, the president had engaged in an age-old tradition of playing the dozens, the term for an African American game involving the exchange of insults before an audience. Or did he just think he’s playing the politics of distraction-as-usual, and playing to his base?

Whether he knew it or not, the bully, Trump, went after one group that has spent their lives beating bullies: black male athletes. And, in this new-age mix of politics and sports, these men also possess a pulpit as powerful as the president’s and a combined Twitter following that far exceeds his. Had he met his match?

It remains an open question whether Trump understood the game he had started to play. For one thing, his tone was off. On playgrounds you rarely hear as circuitous an insult as “son of a bitch,” the phrase Trump used when urging NFL owners to fire players who protested during the national anthem.

No, the dozens are more direct.

“Your mother is a bitch” is what a truly street-hardened president would have said to the players, as he anticipated the return blow and stood ready to dish out more. But Trump has clearly stumbled into this unfamiliar territory. He was just using the so-called genuine language that has brought him political success.

Meanwhile, the athletes’ response to Trump on social media was massive and direct. None that I saw took the traditional path of going after his mama, but sometimes that phase is skipped, in favor of going straight to the source spewing the dozens, delivering a punch in the face. In that vein, Buffalo Bills running back LeSean McCoy just tweeted the unambiguous: “asshole.” LeBron James of the NBA’s “u bum” tweet at Trump was viewed by more people than any single tweet by the president himself.

President Trump greets the Super Bowl champion New England Patriots. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Among the many ironies of this exchange is the unity it has brought, if only momentarily, between professional players and team owners, between player unions and the leagues. The moment goes beyond football. Basketball players have been brought together by Trump’s decision to rescind his invitation to the NBA champion Golden State Warriors to visit the White House. Baseball players have joined the protests, and golfers, tennis players (including the icon Billie Jean King), and even the NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt, Jr. have tweeted in favor of the right for peaceful protest.

Although it’s new for a president to engage (consciously or not) in the dozens, athletes are also facing new expectations and responsibilities. We are witnessing many of our athletes coming of age to fulfill a new requirement of contemplation and intellectualism. They need an opinion, whether they choose to express it or not. They need to know what they are going to do or not do.

LeBron James has been the leader in this new era; he spoke out during the Trayvon Martin homicide back in 2012. But today, the political decisions facing athletes are more complicated, and the expectations for fast and meaningful responses have been raised.

The difficulties of navigating this athletic-political minefield were exemplified by two players on the same team. When the Pittsburgh Steelers decided to stay in the locker room during the national anthem last Sunday, an offensive lineman and former Army Ranger, Alejandro Villanueva, chose to come out alone and salute the flag. Ben Roethlisberger, the team’s star quarterback, stayed in the locker room with the team. They both later expressed regret for making their decisions separately, which suggested a lack of unity. Politics, like football, is a team sport.

Political pressure also falls on the team owners, who were the other group targeted in the Alabama speech, as the president told them how to run their businesses. This is the rich person’s equivalent of the dozens, and no doubt the thought bubbles arising from this group of football billionaires and millionaires said, “This guy was one of us, and not even as rich as me, and he’s getting in our business?”

The New England Patriots owner, Robert Kraft, who befriended Trump and backed his campaign, said he was “deeply disappointed” at Trump’s comments, and clearly by his lack of reciprocity. He wasn’t the only owner who experienced presidential betrayal.

Trump’s attacks were news, and not just because Trump is always news. Most of the time, sports are about the games themselves. Political protest has been a lesser concern, usually a one-off when it touches sports—a boycott, an arm band, or a political punch added to a Hall of Fame speech. When sport has been invoked in politics it’s rarely been about whether athletes are pulling the nation apart, but instead it’s generally been related to the need for national healing. (An exception is the fist-extended protests of John Carlos and Tommie Smith on the medal stand at the 1968 Olympics).

One of the most understudied exchanges between sports and politics took place between then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Commissioner of Baseball Kenesaw Mountain Landis in 1942. In what has come to be known as the “green light” letter, Roosevelt advised Landis that the games should be played during World War II. The president’s logic was that in time of war, the American workers “ought to have a chance for recreation and for taking their minds off their work even more than before.” Landis followed the presidential advice, and Major League Baseball was played throughout the war.

In a similar spirit, the NFL decided to play their Sunday games two days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, although the NFL commissioner, Pete Rozelle, would call it one of his biggest regrets. (In retrospect, he might have listened to one owner, who sought a court order to stop play).

When the Gulf War began, 10 days before the 25th anniversary Super Bowl in Tampa in 1991, it made for a memorable juxtaposition of football and military display. That created a charged atmosphere for Whitney Houston’s famously stirring rendition of the national anthem, which concluded with a flyover by four F-16 fighter jets.

But sometimes sports gives way. After the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, the NFL postponed the games that were scheduled to be played on the following Sunday. For a brief period all planes were still grounded in the United States and the players, like all other Americans, had mixed feelings about travel even when flights resumed.

Even after real tragedies, moments of national unity are short-lived. Today’s Donald Trump-inspired unity won’t last long. The athletes and the owners will soon head back to their respective corners, at least until another unifying “your mama” moment brings them together again.

Maybe it will be Trump, the distractor in chief, who provides that new moment, as he blasts away at others to take our attention away from the racism and political problems that surround him. As LeBron James observed recently, the president doesn’t seem to recognize how he might bring people together, if he so chooses. “He doesn’t understand the power that he has for being the leader of this beautiful country,” tweeted James. “He doesn’t understand how many kids, no matter their race, look up to the President …”

In this upside-down world of politics and sports, maybe Trump will own up to his own productive divisiveness. He could channel the great basketball player Charles Barkley, who famously declared in a TV commercial, “I am not a role model.”

The post To Black Athletes, Donald Trump Is Playing the Dozens appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

No one can know for sure whether any of California’s four National Football League teams—the 49ers, Raiders, Rams, and Chargers—will emerge as big winners in the new season.

But we already know who the losers will be: California cities foolish enough to host NFL teams.

In the rest of America, major cities try to attract the NFL by building costly new stadiums, because they see football franchises as providing a boost to their economies, and especially to their notoriety. But in California, where the economy is nation-sized and our big cities already enjoy global renown, the dynamic is the opposite. Our big cities have been shedding their pro football teams, and thus avoiding the headaches of devoting valuable California land to stadiums within their jurisdictions.

In this contest, the biggest winner has been San Francisco, which, after wasting decades debating a replacement for the 49ers’ former stadium, Candlestick Park, got free of the NFL headache by “losing” the team to the city of Santa Clara. Across the Bay, the newest winner is Oakland, which resisted building a new stadium for the Raiders; its reward will be the team’s departure for Las Vegas in three years.

San Diego also registered a hard-won civic triumph when—after its voters defeated the last of 15 years’ worth of proposals for lavish new Chargers stadiums—the team left town this summer for a temporary home in the small Los Angeles County city of Carson.

In 2020, the Chargers, along with the Rams—who relocated to Southern California in 2016, after more than two decades in St. Louis—will move into a new, shared stadium in the small city of Inglewood.

The destinations of these teams are telling. The only places in California that seem willing to risk hosting an NFL team are smaller, poorer, obscure cities that sit in the shadow of global municipalities. As such, they are so desperate for any high-profile and distinguishing development that they are willing to devote land and money to wealthy NFL owners, and host teams that won’t even use their new cities in their names. The teams remain the San Francisco 49ers, Los Angeles Rams, and Los Angeles Chargers, not the Santa Clara 49ers or the Inglewood Rams or Carson Chargers.

And that represents the least of the indignities that these smaller towns will suffer from their fateful decision to become NFL cities. Economic studies show that sports teams deliver little in the way of a financial boost to their hometowns—they merely siphon dollars from other entertainment-oriented businesses. That’s especially true of pro football teams, since they play just eight regular-season home games a year, as opposed to 81 for major league baseball teams.

And that doesn’t account for the costs of internecine fighting and civic conflict that greedy NFL teams can engender. Just ask the people of Santa Clara.

Just three years after the 49ers relocated to Santa Clara, the city and the team are engaged in a bitter war of rhetoric, investigations, and lawsuits. The heart of the problem is that, as with so many NFL maneuvers, the deal for the 49ers stadium was a bait-and-switch. Local voters approved the stadium after being told that it would be paid for privately, and the city would bear only a few costs relating to a parking garage and an electric sub-station.

Instead, the stadium required a new hotel tax and the creation of a new public entity that is on the hook for more than $600 million in construction loans. It’s an open question whether stadium revenues will be enough to pay back the loans. Then there’s the opportunity costs. The stadium gobbled up valuable land that might have been better used for businesses that produce more economic activity than a stadium (a Costco, for example), or badly needed housing in a region with a crisis-level shortage.

The stadium is a dud—uninspiringly designed, and situated so that it produces epic traffic jams on game days. And the 49ers have proven to be an awful city partner. The Santa Clara-49ers conflict started with the team’s demand to kick kids off soccer fields next to the stadium so the fields could be used for parking. Court fights have erupted over the 49ers’ financial disclosures, the amount the 49ers pay in rent, and whether the city has made false accusations against the 49ers regarding their level of cooperation with a city audit.

The fight has turned political. A mysterious political action committee sponsored attack ads against city council members who were critical of the 49ers last year (the 49ers haven’t said whether they were behind the PAC). This spring, Santa Clara’s mayor, Lisa Gillmor, told the San Francisco Chronicle: “We learned we cannot trust the 49ers. They are our partners, but they have exploited what we’ve tried to do in the city.”

Things aren’t that bad in Inglewood yet. The opening of that stadium—which is part of a larger development involving entertainment, retail and housing—is still three years away. Construction is already a year behind schedule, and community opposition is growing. There’s also the whiff of bait-and-switch. As in Santa Clara, the stadium was sold as a private project that would cost the city next to nothing. But it turns out that the city could end up giving the project an estimated $100 million in tax breaks, as well as reimbursements for certain security and transportation-shuttle costs at stadium events.

None of this should be surprising. Most NFL teams are wildly profitable, so those teams that have to relocate all carry the stink of failure. All four California teams have relocated, and it’s no coincidence that their owners show up on media lists of the worst owners in all sports.

These include the Rams’ owner, Stan Kroenke, who got rich by marrying a Walmart heiress, and who has produced teams with miserable attendance and losing records for more than a decade. The Spanos family, which owns the Chargers, alienated most of San Diego with poor management, self-dealing, and farcical plans for new stadiums. (The final failed proposal—a combination of stadium, convention center, and “diversity-focused start-up incubator and accelerator”—was ridiculed as the “turducken” of stadiums). In their first two pre-season games in Carson, the Chargers haven’t been able to fill even the small 27,000-seat soccer stadium where they are temporarily playing.

Raiders owner Mark Davis inherited the team from his late father, Al Davis, a scoundrel who moved the team from Oakland to L.A. and back while suing everyone he could along the way. He may be the league’s poorest owner—though that could change when he moves to Las Vegas, which has foolishly devoted $750 million in public dollars to building him a stadium there.

And the 49ers? USA Today this year said owner Jed York had turned the team into “the NFL’s biggest joke.”

No wonder cities have been happy to see these owners leave. And life after NFL football looks pretty good.

San Francisco, sans the 49ers, is more prosperous than ever, and is using the land at Candlestick Point for new housing and mixed-use developments that will be more valuable than the stadium was. San Diego is still wrestling with the costs—and multimillion-dollar annual operations losses—of the Chargers’ old stadium, Qualcomm. But it is also starting to imagine the happier development possibilities of what could replace it.

And Oakland should find that the eventual departure of the Raiders from O.co Coliseum, as well as the exit of basketball’s Golden State Warriors from the arena next door to the Coliseum, opens up all kinds of transformational opportunities for a piece of land that sits next to a transit center and a short distance from the city’s airport.

But enough about the winners. NFL football in California is for losers. Pity the home teams.

The post In California, Pro Football Is for Losers appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The first time I recall watching the ‘boys play, in the 1970s, I was knee high to him, paying more attention to the gun case where he kept his Purple Heart and the loot he’d collected from dead Nazis. As the men in blue and white jerseys and silver helmets with those big blue lone stars on the side would line up on gameday, they reminded me of the helmeted protagonists from the old war movies I’d watch with my grandfather—Dallas quarterback Roger Staubach ever the hero as he launched missile after missile into the end zone. His famous arm led his team to four Super Bowl appearances (winning two), helping the Cowboys earn the moniker “America’s Team.”

And I was in good company. As the nickname suggests, much of the country began rooting for the Cowboys with me that decade. Spectators across America filled stands and fixated on their TV screens, in awe of Staubach, the team’s clean-cut Navy veteran QB, the always-stoic head coach Tom Landry in his fedora and, of course, the Cowboys cheerleaders.

Dallas managed to exude both class and swagger, not to mention exquisite timing: The Cowboys won their first championship in January of 1972, the same year a Gallup survey first crowned pro football America’s most popular sport. The team’s icons became emblematic of the sensation the game was to become, a sensation filling Texas Stadium with fans in blue and white last Sunday afternoon as the Cowboys faced off against the Green Bay Packers in the NFC division playoffs.

Watching the Cowboys with my family felt like going to church on Sunday morning. Prayer always followed third down, or whenever the ref made a bad call. It was a family tradition to follow the Cowboys religiously. Though our fandom rarely was reflected in our dress, like other Cowboys fans, there was no doubt which team we cheered whenever game day arrived.

The Cowboys cheerleaders fascinated me as a teenager in the ‘80s. They looked like Charlie’s Angels in cowboy hats, always smiling and, to my amazement, doing flips like warriors from the American Ninja movie series I obsessively watched on VHS. They were the brainchildren of Texas Earnest “Tex” Schramm. A former sportswriter for the Austin American-Statesman, he served as general manager of the Cowboys from 1960, when they first became an NFL franchise, until their purchase by owner Jerry Jones in 1989. Schramm pioneered several league innovations over the 29 years he served as general manager: the use of instant replay in the officiating of the game, referees’ microphones, shortening the play clock, and developing the wild-card playoff system. He also helped to coordinate the 1970 merger of the National Football League and the American Football League.

That the Cowboys gained such a loyal following wasn’t just about Lone Star pride, it was about Texas showmanship. Schramm understood that professional football was more than just a sport, and transformed the Cowboys cheerleaders into a squad of professional dancers, with the help of Texie Waterman, one of the top dancers in America at the time.

When the NFL decided to offer a second game on Thanksgiving in the mid-1960s, Schramm jumped at the opportunity to host the holiday games that many NFL teams at the time wanted to avoid. He knew the Cowboys playing on a holiday when many around the country gather to celebrate would increase the team’s national exposure and help cement its All-American image.

Though Schramm’s marketing prowess and Landry’s brilliant coaching drew a national following, it was NFL Films that officially anointed the Cowboys “America’s Team.” During the 1978 season, the television studio’s camera crews noticed that the Cowboys could always count on an unusually large contingent of fans on the road. When Bob Ryan, who produced and edited every Cowboys highlight video for the NFL, wrote the opening to the season recap voiced by legendary baritone voice of John Facenda, he penned what amounts to Cowboys marketing scripture:

“No matter where they play, their fans are there to greet them. Their faces are recognized by fans all across this country. The sum total of their stars are a galaxy. They are the Dallas Cowboys … America’s Team.”

The Cowboys not only became a beloved franchise as the NFL was coming into its own, but also as the city of Dallas was in sore need of a boost. A decade after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the Texas metropolis was still best known to many Americans as the “City of Hate.” Schramm himself was mindful of the need to associate the city with something other than the tragedy, having once told the Chicago Tribune that he was well aware that in the aftermath of ’63, Dallas had become a “bad word” across the nation.

The Cowboys helped rebrand the city in the eyes of the nation, and gave our ever-sprawling metropolis a much-needed sense of being on the same team, a shared story and rooting interest. It would be wrong to dismiss a professional football team as just that—more than 40 years after my grandfather introduced me to the Cowboys, I am struck as a journalist working in Dallas by how much the team, and all its ups and downs, helps bind our community together. A narrative thread linking Roger Staubach and Tony Dorsett to Troy Aikman and Emmitt Smith now reappears in the impressive rookie duet of Dak Prescott and Zeke Elliott.

The past two decades have been disappointing to Cowboys fans, and the division playoff loss to the Packers would seem only more disheartening. But the story of last Sunday’s defeat, with the two leading rookies bringing the ‘boys back from a 15-point deficit to tie the game with only minutes left on the play clock, only then to lose to a last-second field goal, will become part of the lore that gets handed down from one generation to another. And that’s especially true if, as I suspect, this generation’s team is on the verge of becoming another dominant dynasty deserving to be called “America’s Team.”

The post When I Say “Dallas” … You Think “Cowboys!” appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Surprisingly, his answer was all about a Monday Night Football game played less than two weeks after the election. Namely, the first-ever regular season Monday night game played outside the United States, in Mexico City’s iconic Estadio Azteca. The Oakland Raiders beat the Houston Texans before a sellout crowd of nearly 80,000 fans, but what Guajardo found most telling was the moment before the game when the anthems of both countries were played.

Guajardo explained that the NFL hesitated before playing the U.S. anthem in the Azteca for fear of how the crowd might respond, live on ESPN, but at the end of the day the league went ahead. And with the exception of a few scattered boos, the Mexican crowd’s response was gracious and respectful. Guajardo said this was a hopeful moment—that positive attitudes toward people on the other side of the border, often acquired through first-hand experience, can transcend political differences or efforts by demagogues to distort the essential truth of our mutually beneficial North American partnership.

One can only hope. The stark reality is that Donald Trump won the presidency by running against Mexico. For a candidate with a short attention span and malleable policy stances, his views on Mexico throughout the long presidential campaign were remarkably consistent and sustained. Mexican immigrants are rapists who must be deported; the North American Free Trade Agreement is a disaster that must be torn up; U.S. companies opening plants in that country are treasonous; indeed, Mexico is so dodgy, we need to build a massive wall along the 2,000-mile border. And guess who’s going to pay for it?

He’s so glad you asked.

Forgive Mexicans if they end up taking it all a bit personally. Mexico has become a far more accommodating and friendlier neighbor —more of the middle class, democratic, open-to-the-world country Washington always wanted—in the two decades since NAFTA went into effect. But you hardly ever see this acknowledged in the U.S. media, or politics. Instead, in the Trump campaign narrative, Mexico was portrayed as the leading villain standing in the way of making America great again.

One big question is whether Trump really believes his own anti-Mexico vitriol and is determined to act upon it, or whether he simply peddled it as part of a convincing “enraged populist on campaign trail” TV performance. On the other side of the border, a related big question is whether the damage has already been done, whether the mere act of electing such an anti-Mexican president will tarnish the United States in Mexican eyes for a generation to come. Keep in mind there are plenty of populist Mexicans politicians eager to match Trump’s xenophobic nationalism for their own gain, especially as Mexico gears up for its 2018 presidential election.

In the meantime, I take heart at the outbreak of sports diplomacy like the Monday Night Football game.

On the Friday night of election week, the U.S. and Mexican national soccer teams met in Columbus, Ohio for a World Cup qualifying match. This has become one of the most heated regional rivalries in the world’s leading sport, and a World Cup qualifier doesn’t require a seismic political event to ratchet up the level of intensity.

Still, on this occasion it was for the American sportsmen to worry that politics (and Trumpian-style invective about our southern neighbor) might rear their ugly head in a U.S.-Mexico showdown coming three days after the election. Michael Bradley, the U.S. captain, eloquently said before the game: “I would hope our fans do what they always do, which is support our team in the best, most passionate way possible. I would hope they give every person in that stadium the respect they deserve, whether they are American, Mexican, neutral, men, women, children. I hope every person that comes to the stadium comes ready to enjoy what we all want to be a beautiful game between two sporting rivals that have a lot of respect for each other, and hope that it’s a special night in every way.”

It ended up being a more special night for Mexico, which won 2-1. Politics was a subtext of the match (I know of Mexican-Americans who usually root for the U.S. who couldn’t help but root for Mexico in post-electoral solidarity), but there were no chants about building a wall or mass deportations.

In January, the Phoenix Suns are playing regular-season NBA games against the Dallas Mavericks and San Antonio Spurs in Mexico City. Much like the NFL, with its estimated 20 million avid fans in Mexico and talk of a possible franchise there, the NBA doesn’t see America’s neighbor to the south as the poor, conniving disaster of a country depicted in the recent election. Instead, American pro basketball is treating Mexico as a venue for future growth: a dynamic market with an expanding middle class and an appetite for American goods, culture, and entertainment. As do the U.S. cities these NBA teams represent, all of whom are organizing events alongside the games to try to attract more Mexican investment, trade, and tourism.

Mexico is the second largest buyer of U.S. goods in the world, a market whose importance to most Fortune 500 companies cannot be overstated. These companies increasingly see North America as one integrated manufacturing platform too, a manufacturer that is more competitive with other parts of the world as a cohesive unit. Politicians bash companies like Ford for opening plants in Mexico, but 40 percent of the components of the goods imported from these plants are produced in the U.S., demonstrating how porous the border has become as an economic matter, and just how seamless the back-and-forth is within North American supply chains.

One underappreciated danger for both American and Mexican workers is that companies will be spooked by populist protectionism and take more of their global manufacturing out of North America altogether.

Back in the realm of sports diplomacy, one way for North Americans to transcend the ugliness of politics and assert a shared identity would be by hosting a World Cup together. The 2026 World Cup is the next one to be awarded, and the North American region is a strong contender, given the tournament’s traditional rotation among continents. Both Mexico and the U.S. are expected to submit compelling bids.

There has also been talk throughout the year of a potential joint U.S.-Mexico bid; World Cups are typically played in eight host cities, and there’s the precedent of Japan and South Korea sharing the 2002 Cup. But that talk was followed by speculation that Trump’s election makes a joint bid less likely.

It would be a shame to abandon the idea on account of politics. Quite the contrary: A shared North American World Cup (can we include Toronto too?) is needed, now more than ever.

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Saturday, August 31, 1991. It was Labor Day weekend, the very definition of a sleepy, late-summer day in that simple, pre-digital world. H.W. Bush was president, the Gulf War was five months gone. The biggest news was that Kyrgyzstan had declared its independence from the Soviet Union. Precisely nothing was happening.

Well, not quite nothing.

In the gently swelling cornfields of southeastern Iowa bordering the Norman Rockwell-brushed town of Mount Pleasant, Iowa Wesleyan College, a 500-student school that had been a showcase of football incompetence for most of the preceding 100 years, was opening its season at home. Its opponent was Northeast Missouri State University, a NCAA Division II gridiron dynamo with 9,000 students, nationally ranked and favored by 25 points. Many people expected a blowout. From all appearances, IWC was going to get the snot beaten out of it.

What the fans saw, instead, was something unprecedented in the sport’s 122-year history. What they saw was tiny Iowa Wesleyan playing a stripped-down, wide-open, high-speed, pass-crazy version of the old game that amounted to a wholesale reinvention of American offensive football. Iowa Wesleyan won, 34-31, but the game was not that close. The IWC Tigers piled up 537 yards of total offense to NEM’s 322. They completed 41 of 54 passes for 454 yards and five touchdowns. They were unstoppable.

No one—no reporter, fan, or coach—understood this at the time, but August 31, 1991 was the day football changed forever. The sweeping and dramatic transformation of offensive football it inspired would not take place immediately. In the world of American sports culture, Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, was a few compass points off the middle of nowhere. It would take the better part of two decades for the changes to work themselves from the upper Midwest’s picture-perfect, brick-and-ivy campuses and into football’s sinew and guts, to revolutionize it, to transform it into the wide-open, high-speed, pass-crazy game we watch on our televisions today.

The father of this innovation—the substance of which we’ll get to in a moment—was a coach named Hal Mumme, who came from Texas to this small Midwestern town in 1989 and spun up a full-scale fantasy of a winning football team.

Before that game, Mumme, a laid-back, irreverent Jimmy Buffett fan with a fondness for Civil War history, had little to recommend him. In 13 years as an assistant or head coach at various high schools and colleges, he had managed only two winning seasons. He had been fired twice. He had had his home egged and his car repossessed. But he had spent much of that time experimenting with the forward pass, making pilgrimages to visit great passing gurus like LaVell Edwards at Brigham Young University, Bill Walsh of the San Francisco 49ers, and Mouse Davis, the pioneer of the offensive system known as the Run and Shoot. By the time he got to Iowa Wesleyan he had—unbeknownst to everyone—invented a new way to play football.

To everyone’s astonishment except his own, Mumme fulfilled all of his promises. When he arrived, the team’s record was 0-10. By the time he left, three years later, Iowa Wesleyan led the nation in most passing categories. That year, Mumme’s quarterback Dustin Dewald became one of the leading passers in the history of the game. In one game alone, he attempted 86 passes and completed 61 of them, both national records.

The unprecedented quantity of passes was the product of much deeper changes. At Iowa Wesleyan Mumme redefined the fundamental principles of the game, its goals and objectives, even the way teams measured success. His offense was so far outside the normal rules and conventions that his players were actually playing an entirely different game than their opponents.

For example: His opponents played a game in which the offensive team ran 60-65 plays per game. That was what everybody did. Except Mumme. In the Northeast Missouri State game, his team became the first in the modern era to run a two-minute, no huddle drill for the entire game. He ran 82 plays. In a subsequent game that season he would run 100—as many as another team would run in a 5- or 6-quarter game. This relativistic scale applied to the concept of downs, too. The opposition believed it had three downs to get a first down, or be forced to punt. Hal’s team, which seldom punted, played a 4-down game, giving them an extra chance. And Hal’s team usually converted the extra chance—his quarterbacks completed 70 percent of their passes, something that had not been done before—the product of his ultra-simple system of field-decoding.

Mumme altered concepts of space as well as time. While the opposition preferred to play a game where the players were jammed together in a tight scrum at the middle of the field, Hal and his assistant coach Mike Leach—who would go on to fame in his own right as the coach of Texas Tech and Washington State—created wildly porous formations, putting 4 to 6 feet between his offensive linemen. He often emptied his backfield, sending five receivers streaking to all corners of the field. His teams forced their opponents to defend a much larger area than they ever had before.

Mumme turned other football traditions on their heads, too. Conventional wisdom dictated that the single most important statistic other than the score itself was the time of possession, which signified ball control. Hal thought the statistic was utterly meaningless. He was happy to hold the ball for merely 20 percent of a game and win by 50 points. In a world where the size and complexity of a coach’s playbook was considered to be a measure of talent and ability, Mumme’s offense was ultra-simple. He had no playbook at all and just a handful of plays. But he had designed his few plays to look complex, meaning that his players played a dead simple game while the overly complex defense believed it was seeing dozens of angry hornets buzzing at them.

All of these heresies exploded on the football world in 1997, when Mumme became head coach of University of Kentucky and took his explosive offense to the supposedly pass-proof, lockdown defenses of the SEC. When he beat Alabama and Louisiana State University, the entire football world was suddenly paying attention. After Kentucky’s game with Alabama, a steady stream of coaches and players showed up in Lexington, wanting to learn the magic. The coaches included rising stars like Urban Meyer, then an assistant coach at Notre Dame (and later a national championship-winning coach at University of Florida and Ohio State), and Sean Payton, then an assistant with the Philadelphia Eagles (and later the Super Bowl-winning head coach of the New Orleans Saints). The following summer, 6,000 high school players and many of their coaches attended three continuous weeks of Air Raid camps at the University of Kentucky. Requests poured in from all over the NFL and college football for Kentucky game films.

Since then, football at all levels in America has been transformed into something that looks a lot like the Iowa Wesleyan-Northeast Missouri game: an up-tempo, spread-the-field, pass-all-the time sport. The shift has been massive. In 1991, when that game was played, only five NCAA Division I quarterbacks had thrown for more than 10,000 yards in their careers. By 2016, 90 more had done it. Of the 92 college NCAA D1 quarterbacks who have thrown for more than 4,000 yards in a season, 78 have done it since the year 2000.

Mumme was not the only one to unleash this change, but you could argue that, in the second decade of the 21st century, it has been his radical, innovative ideas that have changed the game more than anyone else.

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