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.

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.

So say some of the most powerful people in the sport. And as a new National Football League season kicks off this weekend, they are busily pursuing thoughtless solutions to the California problem that won’t be good for the state or its biggest regions.

Which makes this the right time for California to go into a hurry-up offense, and come up with our own more creative counterproposals.

First, let’s start by congratulating ourselves. The existence of a football California problem—or a “California dilemma” in the words of former 49ers executive Carmen Policy—is actually a triumph for the Golden State. While cities in the rest of the country have thrown public dollars at the NFL and its billionaire owners for stadiums and infrastructure improvements, California communities—with the prominent exception of Santa Clara, which helped the 49ers build their new Levi’s Stadium—have wisely refused to throw good money after football.

Our fiscal responsibility produced the California problem in the first place: Our biggest city, Los Angeles, has no team, and two of our three teams—the Oakland Raiders and San Diego Chargers—play in two of the league’s oldest and most rundown stadiums. Worse still, from the NFL’s perspective, Oakland shows little interest in building the Raiders a new stadium, and San Diego hasn’t been able to agree on a package generous enough to suit the Chargers.

What to do? At this point, the NFL’s approach to this California dilemma has been to steal from two parts of the state (San Diego and Oakland) to give to another (Los Angeles). The Chargers and Raiders have put together a plan for a stadium they would share in Carson, a small city in south L.A. County. But this has created a “Los Angeles dilemma” as well, since the owner of the St. Louis Rams is well along in plans to move the team back to L.A.

All three teams think their franchises will be worth more in the nation’s second-largest city. But there has been little enthusiasm for pro football’s return in L.A., which has gotten along just fine without NFL in the 20 years since the Raiders and Rams left. The Chargers, mind you, also played in L.A., back in their first season in 1960. These bids from all our pigskin exes make us the Taylor Swift of football cities—our breakups with our teams may be awful, but we’re so attractive the teams can’t stop asking us out.

But no one has figured out how to fit one team or two teams (three teams is too many, everyone agrees) into L.A. And so the competition is on to decide which of these franchises, if any, might be informed by the league, as contestants used to be told on American Idol, “You’re going to Hollywood!” To put a Central Valley cherry on top of this very California football season, the NFL is expected to come up with its solution to the California problem about the time that the 49ers host this season’s Super Bowl in Santa Clara. (By the way, Levi’s Stadium has so many problems with traffic, parking, and the turf on the field itself that the Super Bowl could become another California problem of its own.)

News coverage surrounding the dance between L.A., the NFL, and its three restless franchises suggest this is one of the most complex puzzles of the modern age. It’s not. This big state offers all kinds of places that could host football, and plenty of options for relocating franchises that would serve the state’s interests (for a change), as well as those of the NFL.

Here’s my own plan. The Raiders don’t have to leave Northern California; they would almost certainly be welcomed in Sacramento. Our state capital is deeply insecure about its own status, and it wouldn’t be hard to convince the city fathers—who just devoted more than a quarter billion in tax dollars to an arena for basketball’s Sacramento Kings—to pony up for a stadium. Sacramento’s community of lobbyists and consultants is richer than ever and could easily afford the luxury boxes NFL teams are so eager to sell.

Sacramento County offers plenty of potential stadium sites, if the city itself doesn’t suit; I’d suggest developer-friendly Folsom, with plenty of open land not far from the lake and state prison, as a setting that would fit the Raiders’ outlaw image. If Sacramento balks, Fresno—whose 520,000 residents make it larger than 12 of 31 NFL cities—might love to step up to big-league status. Raiders quarterback Derek Carr was born there, and went to Fresno State.

As for the Chargers, my plan would keep them closer to their current location, moving just a few miles south—and across an international border—to Tijuana. Building a stadium on the Mexico side of the border would be far cheaper than in San Diego, and the Chargers could keep their season ticket holders and local TV audience. The NFL would also accomplish its longstanding goal of establishing a team in Mexico, where it has a huge following, and has already held pre-season games.

The name Chargers would fit Tijuana (a center of electronics manufacturing). And its shared team would give a big boost to the identity and branding of San Diego-Tijuana as a uniquely binational North American metropolis and economic hub. Already, San Diego and Tijuana are building a bridge to connect travelers from San Diego to Tijuana’s A.L. Rodriguez International Airport. If the stadium were built right on the border, the stadium could double, when games aren’t being played, as a new border crossing to reduce the often hours-long waits required of those commuting between San Diego and Tijuana.

As for the Rams, I’d be happy to see them stay in St. Louis, where there are plans for a taxpayer-funded new stadium. Studies show that a new pro sports team adds little in the way of economic activity when it moves into a town like Los Angeles; it mostly just takes away from other sports and entertainment businesses.

But if L.A. must have a team, it should be the Rams—for financial reasons. The Rams’ stadium in Inglewood would be part of a multifaceted redevelopment of a property that once housed the Hollywood Park racetrack; it would therefore be more expensive—and inject more money into our economy—than the proposed Chargers-Raiders stadium in Carson. And the Rams wouldn’t be abandoning another California region to come here.

Maybe state leaders have a better game plan. Or maybe you do? If so, we need to see it now. The season is underway, California. It’s time to strap on our helmets.

The post Professional Football Has a California Problem appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Colorado and Washington each legalized marijuana for recreational use more than a year ago, and this year, they will become the nation’s first states to sell over-the-counter weed to anyone 21 or over. I’m a diehard NFL fan, the editor-in-keif of Weedmaps.com (an online guide to marijuana dispensaries), and a relatively new resident of Denver (who still roots for the football Giants, who are hosting this Super Bowl in their stadium in my native New Jersey), and so you can imagine that I’m pretty stoked about what this contest might mean. Regardless of whether legalization is a cause or a meaningless correlation to these two teams’ success, this head-to-head matchup begs the question: Which state is doing a better job of legalizing marijuana?

First things first: It’s a bit early to know which state will win this game. Washington state’s new legal weed laws aren’t supposed to go into effect until June. In the meantime, Colorado has taken an early lead. The state began selling legal, over-the-counter pot on January 1 of this year, and fans from around the world have taken advantage, flocking to what’s being called “The New Amsterdam.”

People from all 50 states and every continent excluding Antarctica have traveled to the Weedmaps.com office here in Denver and to the Clinic on Colorado, which is also a medical dispensary, to purchase recreational cannabis. I’ve personally bumped into people from Sweden, South Africa, Mexico, and even Libya. On the first day of the new year, I interviewed a grandmother who had come with her family simply to experience history. And I’ve spoken with a number of veterans from the Iraq war who suffer from PTSD, and are thrilled about what legalization means for people like them. The vibe has been not only historic and emotional, but also futuristic, as though Coloradans are glimpsing a time when every state will have legalized marijuana, and every Super Bowl thus will be a legal Smoke-A-Bowl. (Los Angeles, perhaps there’s a lesson here for you. Could legal pot in California help you bring back the NFL—and maybe even get a decent team?)

Washington state is playing catch-up. For the next six months, the Evergreen State will continue hashing out its policies and vetting prospective marijuana business owners. The state has been flooded with over 2,000 applicants, some of them purportedly not real businesses. Washington’s State Liquor Board Control handles the implementation of I-502, the initiative that makes marijuana legal there. But while the board has made recommendations, laws have not been finalized and remain in a state of limbo. Lawmakers in Washington anticipate recreational sales beginning in June, but that date is subject to change. Although the Liquor Control Board has attributed the delay to a desire to be careful, Washington’s implementation is mired in debates among growers, dispensary owners, counties, and municipalities.

This doesn’t bode well, given the state’s history. Medical marijuana was legalized in Washington back in 1998—but it wasn’t until 2010 that the state allowed fully operating dispensaries to serve patients. Colorado’s efforts, like the Broncos’ offense, was more hurry-up; Colorado voted to make medical marijuana legal in 2010 and almost immediately made it a reality.

Today, medical patients in both states can grow cannabis plants legally. However, in Colorado, growing is much easier, as “caregivers” (any person with a grow license—not just dispensaries) have more flexibility to grow more plants—upwards of 200 plants, which yield 300 to 400 ounces of marijuana. Like the Seahawks’ offense, Washington’s approach is more conservative and plodding: Medical marijuana patients can grow up to six plants in their homes, and the state’s proposed rules for recreational marijuana require you to have a medical card to grow. Under Colorado’s recreational rules, anyone can grow up to six plants in his or her home.

There is one area in which Seattle has the clear advantage over Denver: delivery, at least for medical patients. Unless patients are wheelchair-bound and have a written exemption, delivery services for cannabis are completely illegal in Colorado. That means you have to leave your couch to buy weed in Denver. In Seattle—like in California—it’s only a phone call away. You call up the delivery service, place an order for the weed, hash, or edibles you want, and they arrive at your doorstep faster than a pizza. (After all, you don’t have to cook the weed.) Show your medical marijuana card to the delivery person (like in a dispensary), and you’re good to go. Most of these transactions are of the cash variety, as many dispensaries and delivery services don’t accept credit cards.

While we’ve covered growing and buying, a key question remains: Which state’s got a better stash? It’s a matter of personal preference, and probably impossible to say for sure. Thanks to the high altitude, Colorado’s weed has a reputation for being more dry, which means it burns and dries out more quickly. For the most part, the strains grown there originated in Amsterdam. Colorado’s hash has a better reputation than its standard pot. Washington’s strains come from Northern California and British Columbia for the most part, and the pot from there has a more tropical vibe. In the end, it’s a toss-up, and you can get great weed in both states.

But think twice before you buy a plane ticket to Denver to cheer on the Broncos while getting high with local fans at the bar. Just because weed is legal doesn’t mean lighting up in public is legal. In both states, it can get you fined up to $300. While you’re allowed to smoke on your front porch in Denver, you’re technically not allowed to smoke in bars, restaurants, or clubs, pursuant to the state’s Clean Indoor Act. That said, from what I’ve heard and seen, very few fines are being levied by policemen for smoking in public. If you smoke discreetly in either state at the right venue, you should be good to go.

Who wins the Doobie Bowl? One team’s fans will smoke up in celebration come Sunday night. The other’s will just have to console themselves—legally, of course.

The post Who Wins the Doobie Bowl? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My kids and I mostly had fun with those insults—although we were taken aback by a few misogynistic, homophobic comments, like the question above. But now even the president is taking me on. Not me, personally, of course, but in The New Yorker last week, he said that the long-term risks of serious brain injury taken by NFL players—the reason for my boycott—haven’t affected his interest in the game. “There’s a little bit of caveat emptor,” he argued. “These guys, they know what they’re doing. They know what they’re buying into. It is no longer a secret.”

But although many folks are expressing serious concern about football’s impact on the brain, opting out of the country’s largest fan base isn’t easy. For me, who watched some part of about five games—and up to six hours—a week of pro football in years past, it was like quitting an addiction. You find yourself having relapses, hanging out with other addicts who are still using, making all kinds of rules to excuse a few hits.

So, how did it go? In a sign of how badly I did, I’ll use the trusty Monday morning sports columnist scorecard:

Offense: B-
On your average Sunday this past fall, I watched zero hours of professional football. Sounds like cold turkey, but read on. I have no NFL fans in my house, so the peer pressure was low. I did seek out the NFL once—for the conference championship games that decided which team would advance to the Super Bowl. While I watched neither game live, I recorded them and watched parts of both the next day while working out. I can report that the high just wasn’t as intense—but man, the stuff was potent: the historic Broncos offense, the Manning-Brady rivalry, Silicon Valley against Seattle. But even all that didn’t produce the unique neural combination of relaxation and excitement that it once did. Then again, part of the reason I stopped watching in the first place was to reduce demand for a damaging product. In that, I failed. I stayed up to get the scores online and, hoping for a contact high, listened every week to The B.S. Report, a podcast during which Bill Simmons, the ESPN columnist and Grantland editor, discusses the week’s action. It’s a funny podcast, but all those clicks to download were telling the NFL, “Keep it going, Fuzz is still a fan.”

Defense: C
Most addicts have an out—a back door that lets them get what they crave without blaming themselves. My out was something I called the “hospitality rule”: I’d watch football if it would be rude not to. I had 36 family members coming to my house for Thanksgiving this year. I couldn’t deny them their tradition, right? As a result of my “hospitality,” I caught a good bit of the Cowboys game and some of the other two games. Of course, plenty of those 36 Hogans never saw a play, because they didn’t go into the TV room. At another family gathering, this clause let me see one of the Coolest Plays of the Year, when an Indianapolis Colts running back in the playoff game against the Kansas City Chiefs fumbled on the one-yard line, and the ball bounced off a teammate’s helmet into the hands of his quarterback, whose name is actually Luck. Luck then leapt into the end zone, helping sustain one of the most remarkable comebacks of the year. Not only did I get that same old high: This play brought me back into the community of fans who retell the same amazing play for the rest of the week, brag to those who missed it, and get to feel like they were part of a special moment.

Special Teams: F
I watched a ton of college football. So not only am I supporting kids putting their brains on the line, but also, much like a cocaine addict in America helping ruin a town somewhere in a foreign land, my participation in today’s football economy means some college athlete is putting himself at risk and not being properly compensated. (Some of my fellow Northwestern Wildcats are now asking to join a union, which could change that.)

Sadly, I can’t report that I did anything particularly special with my newfound free time. I now cook dinner on Sunday nights, have been able to help more around the house, and caught all the Oscar contenders on the big screen. But it’s not like I trained for a marathon or re-landscaped the backyard. My tools are still disorganized, and my pile of unread books is just as high.

My scorecard shows obvious room for improvement, but the big questions are: Did my abstention make any sort of difference? And, will I relapse?

If you’re old enough, you remember when boxing matches were on regular TV and dominated both the sports and news pages. At some point, watching retired champs slur their words and lose their memories caught up with the sport, and the cultural spotlight and the fans turned away, reducing boxing to a small but dedicated group of spectators who pay big bucks per fight. If enough people choose, as I did, not to watch football, is that where the NFL is headed? Doubtful.

The difference is that boxing requires so little upfront investment: All a match takes are two boxers, their small team, and some gear at a gym or small arena. Football, however, requires dozens of men to be flown all over the country weekly, equipped from head to toe, and prepared by a huge coaching and training staff that works nearly 24/7.

So, if enough of us stop watching, or if enough moms don’t let their sons play, could the NFL just die? Don’t count on that, either. As a young columnist on my high school paper, I predicted soccer would overtake football (even though I was a bigger fan of football) in the U.S. by the year 2000. That was 32 years ago, and that prediction seems even sillier now than it did then. You could just as soon wish away cocaine.

The NFL has promised to take care of its retired players, and the president is right that the league’s players are grown men who, now at least, know the risks. But, do I have to watch and enjoy them taking those risks? Like any addict, I’ll take it one season—maybe even one week—at a time. As for this Sunday, some friends invited us over, and I don’t think it was just to watch the commercials.

The post Can a Football Addict Quit the NFL? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In this salary-cap era, NFL teams are the result of a transactional opportunism that brings together talented free agents for a few seasons, as if for a gig. The Denver star quarterback, Peyton Manning, and go-to receiver, Wes Welker, are still identified by fans mostly as having played with the Colts and Patriots. Seattle’s star running back, Marshawn Lynch, came in a 2010 trade, and before this season the Seahawks traded for wide receiver Percy Harvin and signed veteran pass rushers Cliff Avril and Michael Bennett as free agents. NFL general managers work their rosters these days like Rubik’s Cubes.

We are unlikely to witness another enduring NFL empire like those 1970s Steelers, who won four Super Bowls in six seasons, launching nine players into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. They were a team in a way that today is no longer possible in the NFL.

Consider this: eight of those Steeler greats—defensive linemen Mean Joe Greene and L.C. Greenwood, quarterback Terry Bradshaw, safety Donnie Shell, receivers Lynn Swann and John Stallworth, and linebackers Jack Lambert and Jack Ham—played a combined 100 seasons in the NFL, and every single one of those seasons was played in a Steeler uniform. In Super Bowl XIV against the Rams in January 1980, not one player on the Steelers’ roster had ever played a down for another NFL team.

The 1970s Steelers knew each other intimately, the women they loved, the cigarettes they smoked, their favorite brands of beer (Lambert: Michelob, always in bottles, never cans).

That closeness created synergy on the field. The Steeler players also shared a love for team owner Art Rooney Sr., aka the Chief. As founder of the Steelers, Rooney had been a lovable loser in the NFL for 40 years. As a horseplayer, though, he rated among the nation’s best, a shrewd gambler with a sixth sense. Rooney was an American archetype, Irish-Catholic and local, up from the streets of Pittsburgh’s north side, his leather-bound prayer book in one hand and the Daily Racing Form in the other.

The players wanted to win one for the old man. The defining hour came in January 1975 in the locker room at Tulane Stadium in New Orleans after the Steelers had defeated Minnesota 16-6 to win Super Bowl IX. Linebacker Andy Russell, a defensive captain, called for Rooney, then 73 years old. With his teammates crowded around, Russell presented him with the game ball. “This one’s for the Chief,” Russell said. “It’s a long time coming.”

***

The Steelers’ brotherhood flourished during the ’70s inside their post-game hide-away: the locker room sauna at Three Rivers Stadium, a stadium that exists now only in memory. It was players only. No coaches, no press. Only about seven or eight big men could fit in the sauna comfortably, though sometimes a few more squeezed in. The equipment man turned off the steam and filled a trash can with ice and beer. Players talked about the game just played, needled each other, laughed, and reveled in their moment.

As Bradshaw told me, “The sauna was our escape, and nobody could get to us. That was the most fun we ever had.”

Pro football has its gifts, and costs. The costs often come later, like a bill past-due. A man sees himself much differently in his 20s than in his 50s or 60s. In his 20s, he is invincible. He looks at 50, his father’s world, like a faraway planet. But once a man reaches his 50s, he sees himself with a wisdom and context that the passing decades have provided. He understands that life is short, and values his special friendships more.

In the quiet of night now, the game calls out for payment, and the 1970s Steelers, grandfathers now in their 60s, feel it in their muscles and bones. They all live with some pain, differing by degrees.

Bradshaw suffered at least seven concussions as a Steelers player. In 2011, he struggled to remember names and statistics on the studio set of FOX NFL Sunday. He went to a Southern California clinic to undergo brain scans and diagnostic testing. He said he began taking multiple pills, including power boost and mood boost pills. He also downloaded brain puzzles from the Internet and to help his hand-eye coordination he bought two Ping-Pong tables.

Running back Franco Harris takes blueberries and fish oil each morning to slow brain damage that he believes he and every other NFL player suffered. Reggie Harrison, the Steelers’ special teams kamikaze now known as Kamaal Ali-Salaam-El, says he takes Oxycontin and other medications for head, back, and leg pain, and whisks though his northern Virginia home on a motorized scooter. Running back John (Frenchy) Fuqua needs latches on the doors at home in Detroit because his surgically repaired wrists can’t turn a knob. Greenwood underwent so many back surgeries he lost count, maybe 14 or 15.

“I feel like I’ve been rode hard and put away wet,” Greenwood told me by phone last fall, several days before his final back surgery. He groaned in pain, put the phone down, shifted in his chair, and upon his return apologized. Two weeks later Greenwood died, at 67, due to complications from that surgery.

Twelve Steelers from the days of empire died before 60. The causes of those deaths varied widely, including cancer, heart attacks, and accidents involving a car and a falling tree. Quarterback Joe Gilliam died at 49 from cocaine overdose.

For a time, Mike Webster lived out of his truck, virtually homeless. A Hall of Fame center, Webster played 17 NFL seasons. He retired at nearly 40 and died at 50, and in between lost his money, his marriage and, ultimately, his mind. In 2002 he became the first NFL player diagnosed posthumously with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a neurodegenerative brain disease.

“What has the game given me?” said John Banaszak, a defensive lineman for the ’70s Steelers. “It’s given me my teammates … You want to talk about what the game takes away from you? It takes away your teammates.”

***

The enduring Steeler brotherhood reveals itself in different ways. When they are together, often at Pittsburgh-area charity events such as the annual Mel Blount Youth Home celebrity roast fundraiser, you can sense their closeness in the way they embrace, in the stories they tell.

Decades later, Donnie Shell’s children still call Stallworth “Uncle John,” and Stallworth’s children call Shell “Uncle Donnie.”

Two old veterans from the Super Bowl IX team, Russell and center Ray Mansfield, kept a deep friendship until Mansfield’s heart attack in 1996. After their days as teammates, they hiked mountains together in the West, and traveled across the world together. Today, Fuqua and Salaam-El have each other on speed dial. They talk multiple times each week. “Our friendship,” Salaam-El told me, “will see us into the grave.”

Franco Harris has become the social glue of the team, and is so deeply involved in charitable causes that Greene calls him Mister Pittsburgh. When his son, Dok, ran for mayor of Pittsburgh in 2009, some of the 1970s Steelers campaigned for him. He has hosted private dinners on the 25th, 30th, and 40th anniversaries of the Immaculate Reception, Harris’ famous catch to win a 1972 playoff game against the Raiders. He invited Steeler teammates and their wives, and footed the entire bill himself.

Stallworth, the Hall of Fame receiver, earned his master’s degree in business while still playing for the Steelers, then returned home to Huntsville to build an information technology firm in the aerospace industry that he later sold for a reported $69 million. Today, when Stallworth reminisces about the 1970s Steelers, he doesn’t think of big plays or his four Super Bowl rings. He thinks of his teammates and the brotherhood they share. In his fondest dreams, Stallworth would like to bring back all of them—even those who have died—for one more conversation, and he’d like to have that conversation in the sauna at the vanquished Three Rivers Stadium.

Stallworth imagines that they’ll all be there: Mad Dog and Fats, Bradshaw and Webby, Mean Joe, L.C., Rocky, Lambert, and Franco. They’d ask each other questions that men in their 20s and 30s—today’s Broncos and Seahawks, for instance—typically don’t think to ask. What’s going on in your life? What makes you happy these days? What really endures?

The post The Enduring Steelers Empire appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“I was into the art of running,” says Harris, “not running into.”

Maybe that’s why Harris, 62, is lucid today while so many others of his NFL generation suffer the aftereffects of countless collisions: not just busted joints and limbs but confusion, depression, aggression, maybe Parkinson’s and ALS, premature senility, death. They played at a time when nobody got “concussed.” You got your bell rung. You got dinged, gonged, smoked, nuked, blown up. You got your head handed to you. And if you were a real man you didn’t whine about it. (Any Steeler who whined got the team’s Bleeding Pussy award, a tampon.) You kept your mouth shut, got back on the field, and hunted somebody else’s head.

I’m younger than Harris but old enough to remember a proudly violent NFL. The Raider defensive backs George Atkinson, Jack Tatum, and Skip Thomas were nicknamed the Hit Man, the Assassin, and Dr. Death. I remember when Monday Night Football’s halftime highlights celebrated the week’s killer hits with wham-bam music, and when the cheap helmets of the ’70s cracked in combat, long before pregame animation showed two colliding helmets shattering to smithereens. Of course we’ve all evolved since then. Helmet-to-helmet hits are illegal today. Most of them, anyway. Today’s team doctors usually check concussed players before they go back in. And the NFL kicked off the current season with a $30 million donation to brain-injury science—enough to pay for a full four minutes of Super Bowl commercial time. We’re smarter about NFL violence these days, or at least more concussively correct.

Sometimes. During last week’s AFC Championship, a helmet-to-helmet hit shellacked New England’s Stevan Ridley, who fell flat as a Pacquiao and dropped the ball on what turned out to be the decisive game of the game—while announcers Jim Nantz and Phil Simms burbled on.

“He’s out.”

Out cold? Out of the game? Out of time to find out; they cut to commercial.

“We’ll be right back!”

Ridley came around, but it was one of those plays that make you think that watching pro football is like eating veal. If you thought too much about what it takes to provide the product, you’d run the other way.

Dozens of NFL plays every week leave you marveling at the resilience of the human head and neck. Of course it may be a decade or two before Ridley pays the toll for that play—or thousands of other hits he’s taken in two pro seasons, three years at LSU, plus years of playing on both sides of the ball in high school and before. Still it’s remarkable that there aren’t more Darryl Stingleys littering NFL turf. Stingley was the Patriots receiver Tatum leveled in 1978, leaving him paralyzed for life. But while Stingley remains the league’s only line-of-duty quadriplegic, there are hundreds if not thousands of John Mackeys.

Mackey was a Colts Hall of Famer, the first modern tight end and first president of the players’ union. Jack Kemp, the Bills quarterback and future congressman, once called him “the smartest man in the room.” But Mackey decayed as he aged. Seeing Colts receiver Marvin Harrison wearing his number 88 on TV, he yelled, “That’s not me!” He was 53. When his money ran out, his wife, Sylvia, sold their house and went back to work as a flight attendant. Shortly before he died in 2011, she shamed the NFL and NFLPA into funding the 88 Plan, named for Mackey’s old number. The fund pays up to $88,000 a year for nursing-home care for retired players with dementia or Alzheimer’s. As part of the deal, the league stipulated that there was no proof any ex-players’ dementia had anything to do with their football careers.

But NFL fans don’t have to worry about issues like that. The league does.

A certain stripe of talk-radio knucklehead likes to say it’s not flag football. Or touch football. Or ballet. “They signed up for a rough game.” True, if we’re talking broken bones, arthritic hands, crutches, wheelchairs, hip and knee replacements—even a leg replacement in the case of Oakland’s Hall of Fame center Jim Otto, who had his right leg amputated and replaced with a prosthetic stamped with the Raiders logo. But while players consciously risked life and limb, they never agreed to risk their identities. Their selves. Which is what Mackey risked and lost—Mackey and hundreds if not thousands more.

The NFL might be the most successful entertainment conglomerate in America today. No other sport, TV programming, or pop culture phenomenon comes close. Medical science is the only threat to the league’s success and business model, and as we learn exponentially more about what football does to players’ brains, the question looms: At what point does the human toll get too high? How much entertainment are the players’ futures worth?

We’ve reached a point at which even healthy Hall of Famers like Franco Harris get scared if they forget a phone number or lose their car keys. They can’t help thinking, Is this how it starts? Today Jim McMahon, the punky quarterback who led the Bears to victory in Super Bowl XX, gets lost in hotel hallways. He’s 53. We’ve reached a point at which the only heroic act left to some of our football heroes is to shoot themselves in the heart—as McMahon’s teammate Dave Duerson and Chargers linebacker Junior Seau did—so that neurologists can analyze their damaged brains. Is that your idea of a national pastime?

Last week, Seau’s family sued the league, adding another plaintiff to an ongoing legal attack on the NFL. Litigation and PR pressure may force the league to alter the rules to mitigate risks—eliminating kickoffs is one possibility. The game faces a threat any business has to take seriously—scarily unquantifiable liability exposure.

Meanwhile football forces families into quandaries like the one an ex-Raider and his wife faced two years ago: their son, a high-school star, lived and breathed football. His one dream was to land a college scholarship and follow his father into the NFL. Then he got his bell rung. Seventeen years old, a head-hammering hit, his brain goes blink and reboots. He felt fine except for a lingering headache. He said, “Dad, what should I do?”

They knew he’d never get a Division-I scholarship sitting on the sideline, waiting for a doctor to send him back in.

“Keep your mouth shut,” his dad said. “Don’t tell anyone.”

Today that kid is playing college football.

Who’d support a game like that?

The answer, of course, is just about all of us. Me too, and here’s my mea culpernick: NFL football may be damned in the long term, but it’s still the most telegenic, accessibly complex, dramatic, and melodramatic spectacle of the TV age—our true national pastime.

This year, as usual, I considered making a statement, taking a stand—making the NFL and CBS settle for 164,999,999 viewers. But no, I’ve got some friends coming over to watch what promises to be a great show. Ray Lewis’s last game! Two brother coaches facing off in a Super Bowl for the first time! I want to see Colin Kaepernick run a 60-yard bootleg around Lewis. I want to see Jim Harbaugh turn purple and throttle a ref. I want to see the year’s most expensive commercials and the halftime show, America’s greatest multimedia train wreck. As pop philosopher Norman Vincent Peale liked to say, “If Jesus Christ were here today, he’d be at the Super Bowl.”

So praise the Lord and pass the rationalizations.

Niners by nine.

The post A Super Bowl of Guilt appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As for me, I haven’t had a thrilling football weekend this millennium. See, I’m a Buffalo Bills fan, so the excitement is all vicarious. The Bills haven’t made the playoffs since 1999, the longest drought of any team in the National Football League. I might as well be living in L.A., without a team. It would be the same, minus the heartbreak. OK, minus the heartbreak and with better weather.

Some experts predicted the Bills’ spell of futility would end this year, after Buffalo courted and signed the star defensive end Mario Williams in the offseason to bolster their porous defense. Like many Bills fans, I believed them, poring over Buffalo’s 2012 schedule and mapping out rosy scenarios: a division title, a first-round bye, a trip to the AFC championship game. It all seemed possible, as it usually does back in August. Not so by Thanksgiving, at which time the Bills were 4-6. They finished the season 6-10, forcing their long-suffering fans to spend yet another January watching other teams compete for the Vince Lombardi trophy.

There’s a silver lining to all this failure for us Bills fans, which is that we’re spared the agony of near-success. Every Buffalo resident and every Bills fan in the diaspora spread across the country still suffers from a collective post-traumatic syndrome resulting from Buffalo’s unique accomplishment in sports history: losing four consecutive Super Bowls in the early 1990s.

Bills fans can all recount in chapter and verse the team’s four consecutive AFC championship game wins. We share, too, an utter disbelief that the football gods would be so cruel as to invite the same team back again, onto the same stage, merely to subject its players and fans to more anguish and heartbreak. Again and again. The most humiliating of the Super Bowl losses was 1993’s 52-17 thrashing by the Dallas Cowboys, a game in which the Bills committed a record nine turnovers. The most excruciating was to the New York Giants—the first in the string of defeats, in 1991—when kicker Scott Norwood’s potential game-winning field goal in the final seconds sailed wide right, a phrase that has haunted western New York ever since.

The glory years were thrilling, if painful. Sports fandom is like that, a form of opt-in social cohesion and identity that almost invariably leads to disappointment. The NFL has 32 teams, and even fans of the Super Bowl losers—the league’s runners-up—end up crushed. That’s a lot of seemingly optional pain. But I can’t overstate the socially binding nature of this camaraderie-in-angst, and how large it can loom in defining shared identities—my Bills passion is one of the longest-running narrative threads in my life. Russians of a certain age may have lived through the Great Patriotic War together, but we Buffalo folk made it through four straight Super Bowl losses together. Yet we somehow survived this, only to endure the Music City Miracle in 2000’s wild card game, when the Tennessee Titans defeated the Bills on a freak kickoff-return-lateral-trick play as time expired. That was the last playoff game Buffalo played.

Don’t get me wrong. Having spent the past 14 years watching the Bills field a succession of embarrassments—teams whose inept quarterbacks and clueless coaches would test even the most loyal fan’s capacity for suffering—I would be lying if I claimed I didn’t miss those glory years of Jim Kelly, Bruce Smith, and Thurman Thomas. But I don’t miss the way they ended—the feeling of crushing loss and dazed stupidity (had I really thought it would end differently?) that came from seeing confetti rain down on someone else’s team once again, while Buffalo’s players scurried off into the losing locker room. The sole consolation after the gut-wrenching loss to the Giants in 1991 was that the Bills were a young, supremely talented team that would surely make its way back to the Super Bowl and emerge victorious. Make their way back they did, only to wilt and implode in ways that deepened the fatalism of their angst-ridden supporters, who eventually came to realize the football gods were, in fact, this cruel—at least to fans from Buffalo.

For years after those losses, I approached Super Bowl Sunday in a state of mild dread, knowing the moment would come when the game would end and another champion would be crowned, teams I firmly believed were less talented—but also, alas, less cursed—than the Marv Levy-coached Bills. My ideal Super Bowl would have been for both teams to lose, denying fans on both sides the feeling of rapturous triumph that we in Buffalo could only dream about.

Dull though it has been, the Bills’ prolonged absence from the playoffs has done much to leaven this ungenerous impulse. It has reminded me what the Super Bowl can be for less haunted spectators: an entertaining, high-stakes sporting event, to be enjoyed rather than suffered through. It has also enabled me to root for other teams on the basis of more enlightened, less narrowly self-serving reasons. For myself and, I suspect, many Bills fans, this means pulling for other mishap-prone underdogs. It means cheering for teams from smaller, cold-weather markets—ideally, from the Rustbelt—whose fans do not all look like tanned corporate executives.

And, of course, it means rooting against teams that have made a regular habit of pummeling the Bills. No team has done this more in the past decade than our division rivals, the New England Patriots, which is why it was thrilling and cathartic to watch Super Bowl XLII, in 2008, when the heavily favored, previously unbeaten Patriots were stunned, 17-14, after Eli Manning engineered a miraculous, last-minute touchdown drive. The game didn’t quite exorcise the ghost of Scott Norwood—the first team that defeated the Patriots in the Super Bowl was, after all, the Giants—but it proved that the football gods are sometimes merciless and unsparing even to those they seem to have blessed. Even to Tom Brady, the Patriots’ cool, unflappable quarterback married to the Brazilian supermodel who is reviled by many Bills fans mainly for his unfailing ability to torment us. Last year, he led his team to the Super Bowl again, where they once again lost in heartbreaking fashion to the Giants.

I’m aware the Bills’ absence from the playoffs will not last forever. One day, Tom Brady will retire. The Bills will draft a quarterback who is actually qualified to play the position at the NFL level. Sooner or later, that wild card berth or division title will materialize. When this happens, I’ll begin bracing for the pain. Meanwhile, this weekend, I’ll be enjoying the games unburdened by anguish—and rooting against the Patriots.

The post The Agony and the Lack of Ecstasy of Rooting for the Bills appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.