Chapter 1. What's Love Got to Do With It?

by Bob Andelman

"We were in Chicago for a wedding in 1984 and just happened to be booked at the same hotel that the Chicago Bears were staying at. We rode up in the elevator with four or five of the Bears. Walter Payton was particularly outgoing and he talked to my daughter, who was about 2, and asked if he could hold her. He threw her up in the air and caught her and that was a real magic moment for me. While I'm sure Walter Payton wouldn't remember that 10 minutes after it happened, it certainly was a defining moment for me. I'll never forget it. From that moment forward whenever Walter Payton had a great day I was able to feel like he was a good friend of mine."

Dr. Rick Weinberg
Clinical psychologist
University of South Florida, Tampa

Men love a lot of things: Mom. America. Big dogs. Hardware stores.

And football.

Football puts the bite on us for four quarters and tosses us around like a terrier taunting a live catch. We're in its teeth, up in the air, on our backs. We're being shaken, not stirred. It's the ride of our lives and we haven't even left the living room couch.

Somehow, we're both Troy Aikman going back to throw the pigskin and Emmitt Smith leaping high on the 2-yard-line to catch the ball and landing in the end zone. We're doing the dance, slapping high- and low-fives.

Sometimes we're on the sidelines, playing coach, barking plays to the defense. Don't get caught deep! Look for the sneak! Don't let 'em get outside!

If a guy can't be on the field playing or coaching football, the second-best thing is to be in the stands or on the couch, watching. Our egos are so tied to sports that if we can't be playing, we want to watch. (We're like that when it comes to sex, too, if you hadn't noticed.)

Any bored and angry woman who's ever glared in futility at a man glued to a divisional playoff game knows this. Just listen to what we say: "Yes! Yes!! YES!!!" or "Aw, SHIT! GODDAMNMOTHERFRIGGIN-SONUVABITCH!DAMNITALLTOHELLICAN'TBELIEVEIT!" Or watch our body language, the way our hands instinctively reach out to snag a pass or scoop up a fumble, the way we pull at an imaginary helmet to signal a face mask violation.

We don't just watch football. We live it.

We become a part of the action, spending three hours every Sunday afternoon and Monday night on a rocket ride with the stars.

There is some envy at work here, too, because we say to each other or ourselves, "Oh, God, would I love to do that!" Or, "I could play that position as well as that guy!"

In football, we see people beat and tackled. For some of us, aggression is part of it. But it's really a matter of personal glory. We'd desperately like to do the end zone shuffle after a touchdown.

Take Roger Brummett, for example. He's vice president of marketing for a human resources management firm in Carmel, Indiana. He played ball in high school, tried out in college as a walk-on and blew out his knee. A good stake in his devotion to the Indianapolis Colts stems from his dreams of what could have been.

"It's a game that if I could have, I would have played all my life," Brummett says. "I mean, why do even bad golfers play every weekend? There's something that stirs their competitive nature. Watching those games on Sundays is an association of a dream that lets us reach out and touch a venue we would have liked to have participated in."

Psychologists talk about it in terms of transference. Players look in the stands and see fans with fingers up in the air, saying, "We're No. 1! We're No. 1!"

"There is a phrase that sometimes is used -- 'The whistle never blew'," says Dr. Robert L. Arnstein, retired chief psychiatrist of Yale University Health Services. "The implication is that the whistle never blew in a player's final game and he has gone through life playing the game over and over again. Supposedly one of the Yale football coaches once said that, 'You are going out to play Harvard in 10 minutes and never again will you ever do anything so important in your life'."

We see football differently than other sports. Football portrays us the way we are. Aggressive, action-oriented, manipulative. Baseball, on the other hand, portrays the way we think we once were or that we would like to be. Thoughtful, deliberate, patient. Boring.

"The question is not really why people like football," says Dr. Allen L. Sack, a professor of sociology and coordinator of the sports management program at the University of New Haven in Connecticut. "It is, why are men more involved in it? Men and women are involved in a wide variety of other activities but here is one that is primarily male. It is the biggest sport in the U.S. that is for men only -- little boys only. When those little boys grow up they are a built-in market for professional football.

"In terms of participation," he says, "it is little boys that are more likely to be involved or to think about football than little girls. I think that men in their 40s and mid-life can look back and remember what it was like for them to be involved in the game. They can appreciate some of the nuances that other people -- including most women -- may not."

All men come to their football obsession differently. There are at least 20 reasons spelled out in the following pages, connecting our love of the game to everything from the influence of our fathers (Chapter 3: "Cat's in the Cradle") and the need for male bonding (Chapter 9: "Every Picture Tells a Story") to military training (Chapter 8: "Achtung, Baby") and beer commercials (Chapter 20: "Bud Bowling for Dollars").

Some of us prefer the thrill of seeing the game in person (Chapter 17: "Two Tickets to Paradise"), while others content themselves with a TV, a well-stocked refrigerator and the comfort of their own home (Chapter 18: "57 Channels").

Men drive women away from football by our symbiotic link to the sport. We don't want to explain the sport, even to those females who might be actually learn it. It's the last thing on this chauvinistic planet that's still exclusively ours, damn it, ours! Women can't play it and we're not going to encourage you to start. (Chapter 21: "She's No Lady, She's My Wife.")

Not that we don't love the women in our lives. We certainly do. But sometimes a man wants to get his piece of the action in a different way. Football provides a multitude of means: hero worship (Chapter 5: "A Hero Ain't Nothin' But a Sandwich"), violence (Chapter 11: "Hit Me With Your Best Shot"), skill (Chapter 12: "Fly Like An Eagle"), statistics (Chapter 14: "Odds 'n Sods"), gambling (Chapter 15: "You Better, You Bet"), escapism (Chapter 20: "The Man Who Fell to Earth").

But above all else, football is about the dreams and aspirations of boys (Chapter 2: "Boy's Life"), the way our jaws go slack in awe of spectacular feats of physical daring and courage, the way we gape in wide-eyed wonderment at seeing the best athletes strap on the pads and kick some ass.

That's why we love football.

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Chapter 4. Our Town

by Bob Andelman

"I'm a die-hard. I love college football. My two brothers and I were Rutgers undergrads. I donate a pretty good sum of money. I watch the games live and if I can tape it, I'll watch it one more time. During the off-season, I'll watch again. It's a sickness."

Peter Hendricks
Attorney
New Brunswick, N.J.

Sports fans sustain a good-guy view of their hometown team and a bad-guy view of other teams. The hometown team's players are the community's champions, its gladiators, sent into the world to defend the community honor and reinforce community pride.

In Green Bay, the Packers represent far more than just random violence and mayhem committed against out-of-town guests. They are the good guys, superior athletic specimens who triumph due to their virtue and self-discipline, motivation, extraordinary willpower, training and teamwork. At least that's what fathers tell their sons in Green Bay.

In Chicago, where the Packers are mortal enemies of Windy City denizens, fathers regale their sons with tales of Packer misdeeds and ill-gotten gains, of the cheeseheads' cheating and miscreant ways.

When our team goes out and just totally shellacs another team blasting them into the next county, we are a part of it. We revel in the victories. When Cincinnati meets cross-state rival Cleveland, a "W" by any margin gives fans a year of bragging rights. "Your team sucks!" "We're a better city!" The bigger the win, the bigger the boasts. Even though the city had nothing to do with it. It was just a team. It has nothing to do with the city per se but we use it to brag about our community.

Communities assign their values to the athletes who wear their names to the world. New Yorkers expect the Giants to be bold and brassy; Los Angelenos demand the Rams be sleek and stylish. Chicago Bears take no shit from anybody. Denizens of these cities blindly trust their chosen warriors to fight for truth, justice and the NFL way.

The teams themselves nurture their local popularity by dutifully dispatching their young men to feed the poor, help the disabled, entertain the elderly and autograph broken limbs for hospitalized youngsters. (And be photographed doing it.) They invest thousand of hours to be one with their hometown, to veil themselves in an other-worldly mystique in order to mobilize fan support.

Newspaper reporters covering the NFL beat are assiduously courted to provide friendly articles even in a franchise's darkest days.

"I think most teams feel very protective of their good-guy image on their home turf because that is what the fans expect," says Dr. Gregory B. Collins, a psychiatrist and section head of the Alcohol and Drug Recovery Center of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio. He is also a consultant to NFL teams. "They feel that bad publicity hurts the team and hurts the team with the fans. If they just valued mayhem as an athletic skill I don't think they'd mind so much that the players were arrested for violent behavior but, in fact, they don't like that. They really feel it is detrimental to the overall mission of the club and they take offense when that kind of thing happens."

The people in the stands become convinced their own lives rise and fall with the people on the field. Sometimes a whole city can be depressed on Monday. It becomes a real attachment.

* * *

When you watch football you root for a team identified with a city. If your city does well it gives you a stronger sense of identity and a stronger sense of being special, important and central. There is something about rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles if you are from Philadelphia or the Kansas City Chiefs if you are from Kansas or Missouri that hooks you in with that community and puts you on the map if your team does well.

It becomes another way to feel good about yourself. If you identify with Dallas being No. 1 you actually feel you are part of No. 1. The same might apply to individual players or stars that people might follow.

"When I first came to Chicago," former Bears offensive tackle turned sportscaster Dan Jiggetts says, "the Bears had struggled for a decade. In 1976 and '77, we turned around. There was an uplifting of the spirits of people in the city. It's a civic thing. If you're winning, you've got a lot of teammates. In Chicago, they may not like the way the team is going, but they're so supportive."

The Spear brothers, Andrew and Jeff, spent their formative years in Denver developing a love-hate relationship with the Broncos.

"Denver is soooo caught up in Bronco-mania," Andrew says. "You have to get swept away with it. Other markets have other pro teams. Denver fans are more loyal; until the Rockies came along, they didn't have as many choices. Losing all those Super Bowls, the loyalty is still there. I stood by them. And I always will."

"I'm a diehard Denver Broncos fan," Jeff says. "So I know pain. I can't tell you what it's like to root for a winner."

* * *

No. 2 just isn't good enough for frustrated Bronco fans. Buffalo Bills fans know that feeling, but they hesitate to disparage the only game in town.

Football is very important, economically and otherwise, in places like Buffalo, Pittsburgh and Cleveland. While the natives deny the winters in Buffalo are as bad as you've heard, there's no denying that endless weeks and months of snow make for some long days in the dead of winter. The Bills provide relief; a winning season can carry the community into late January and buoy its spirits clear through to spring.

Buffalo is an interesting case, as blue-collar as you can get. The people are hard-working, family-oriented, with strong loyalties. The Bills represent the only game in town to many people. And it's not like New Orleans or Philadelphia, Boston or New York where there are a lot of entertainment options. Buffs hunger for any type of national exposure, anything that says, "Buffalo is a big league city." Cleveland is another city that really wants to be recognized. Tampa is also going through that. Professional athletics have a lot to do with it. In a town like New York, people can afford to be fickle and very demanding of their athletes because there are a lot of choices. In Buffalo, you have a much closer relationship between the team and the community.

William E. "Bill" Price, an associate professor of mathematics at Niagara University, was at the first Bills game ever played back in 1960. He's been a fan ever since, rarely missing a game.

"We have hockey, but football was here first, like a first son," Price says. "Buffalo is a nice city, but it's not glamorous. Other cities have other things to be proud of. We need football. When we're on a roll, you can see half the people in town wearing Bills stuff."

That's why his city can hold its collective head high even when the Bills pile up three successive winning seasons only to fall flat in three straight Super Bowls. It matters, but then again it doesn't. "To make it is a tremendous achievement," Price says. "The long season, all the wins -- I'll take it. Those who don't think so are missing the boat. You had all the enjoyment of those playoff wins. Just being in the Super Bowl is really something. The Bills are our gateway to national recognition. One game is overrated. Second place doesn't get the credit it deserves."

Fellow fan Buff Ralph Weisbeck agrees.

"If we lose a game, I may be down for an hour or two, but I think, 'We'll do better next year'," he says. "Even when we lose the Super Bowl I think, hey, we got there! We had some great games to watch. That team doesn't owe us a bit."

Some years ago, when Price feared Buffalo might lose its team, the college professor did his part to show support. He bought an extra season ticket and ran a newspaper ad offering rides to the games.

* * *

In Green Bay, in the fall of the year, even though a man might go hunting or fishing on game day, he'll always carry a radio with him, tuned to the Packers.

"Financially, nationally, the Packers put little Green Bay on the map," Green Bay banker Jerry Pigeon says. "If we ever lost the team, I think we could survive, but it wouldn't be the same. There's a lot of Packer in me."

As a kid, Pigeon and his buddies used to scale the fence at old City Stadium and sneak into Green Bay games. "They'd walk you out and then you'd jump back over the fence and come back," he says. He used to wait on Packers coach Vince Lombardi when he was a teller at the bank where he's now an officer. And he went to the same high school as Vince Jr.

"It's different being in Green Bay," Pigeon says. "It's the only game in town. That's instilled in us. If I was raised in Chicago or Dallas, I might not have the same interest in the Bears or Cowboys. You'd have to experience it to understand it."

* * *

Larry Mayer says the love of football in Chicago isn't that different than in Green Bay. Chicago is a Bears town, he swears, no matter how many championships Michael Jordan and the Bulls win. People mark the seasons there by Red Grange, George Halas and Mike Ditka. They pass season tickets along in their wills.

"When Mike Ditka got fired," the Chicago Bear Report managing editor says, "you would have thought the president had been killed. The fans were mad at everybody. They said unprintable things about (team owner) Michael McCaskey. A lot of these people, I think, take it too seriously. The 'superfans' are people who live and die with Ditka. He epitomized the city, the work ethic. He was one of us, even though he makes tons of money. It crushed people when he got fired. I know a guy, 6-4, he pulled off the side of the road when he heard Ditka got fired and cried."

* * *

The day H.R. "Dick" Williams relocated his retirement home from ritzy, sleepy Palm Beach, Florida, to Houston, Texas, he says, "I went nuts. In Palm Beach, we had spring training. When I got to Houston, I got season tickets to all three professional sports -- baseball, football and basketball."

A superfan of his own making, Williams created The Derrick Club for Oilers fans. "I won't say I'm the biggest Oiler fan, because some guys paint their faces blue before the games, but I'd say I'm in the top five." It gets him invited by the team to be a guest on road trips and created the enviable opportunity to befriend most of the coaches and players. Getting to know them personally makes all the difference in his enjoyment of the games they play: "It's more than sports; it's your friends out there."

The '60s song lyric that went "You've gotta love the one you're with" couldn't be applied more aptly than to Williams. The former cleaning services contractor lived in Denver and was true to Bronco blue before retiring to Palm Beach. Now that he's in Houston, the Denver loyalties are long forgotten.

"Because I had lived in Denver, my friends there got seats for my wife and I on the 50-yard-line for a Broncos-Oilers game," Williams says. "We (the Oilers) were winning by a tremendous margin. But in the last 16 seconds, John Elway pulled it out for the Broncos and I wound up wearing a Broncos tie to dinner. Very humiliating."

It's easy to switch allegiances when you live in the city where a team plays. "I can't understand people who live in Houston who root for the Cowboys. That's impossible for me to comprehend," Williams says.

* * *

Human resources executive Roger W. Brummett was born to be a Colts fan. As a kid in Indiana, he got a white football helmet and painted a blue stripe in the middle and a horseshoe on each side. When he played football in the yard, house rules were you could only wear the helmet on offense, so you could be Johnny Unitas.

"When people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up," Brummett recalls, "I said I wanted to be quarterback for the Baltimore Colts."

This is all the more significant because Brummett grew up in Indiana, not Baltimore. He chose the Colts as his team long before Bob Irsay ever dreamed of relocating the franchise to Indianapolis.

The year Irsay did shock the football world by moving out of Baltimore in the middle of the night and unloading the trucks at the Hoosierdome, Brummett founded the Thundering Herd fan club. The club hosts tailgate parties, travels to away games, sponsors an annual banquet for players and awards a $1,000 scholarship to a high school football player who is injured and cannot complete a season due to injury.

In 1988, the team recognized Brummett's contributions by presenting him with a jersey that had his name and the number 12, for the "12th man." The jersey was even from a Baltimore Colts uniform, he notes with relish, "so I really got my wish."

The Colts' real impact on Indianapolis is only just being felt in the 1990s as the first generation of area youth grows up with an NFL team. "I think it's taken some time for the community to embrace a professional sports team," Brummett says. Meanwhile, the team has a positive social and economic effect on a blighted area around the Hoosierdome.

"They have contributed to civic pride," the Indianapolis superfan says. "We're one of 28 cities fortunate enough to be part of the NFL. In 10 or 15 years, we can be lucky enough to be like a Green Bay or Buffalo."

* * *

At least one guy relocated to Indianapolis because the Colts moved there.

John Cimasko was raised in Northern New Jersey and, like Brummett, became fascinated with Johnny Unitas and the Baltimore Colts from afar during the '60s. When the team moved to Indiana in '84, Cimasko's interest was oddly rekindled. He and his brother became charter members of the Thundering Herd Fan Club.

On a lark, the brothers Cimasko packed suitcases and went to see the Colts in person at the Dome. It was just short of a religious experience for John. Just before getting on the plane to go home, he picked up a real estate magazine and stuck it in his luggage.

"My wife Maryanne started looking at the homes," he says. "I used to kid about moving to Indianapolis and she called my bluff."

It took some time, but Cimasko caught on with Pepsi-Cola's Indianapolis operation as a route salesman and lived out a fantasy in 1990 by moving his family to the Hoosier State. "This is my place," he says proudly.

That's just the beginning of Cimasko's story, however.

WNDE, the Colts flagship radio station, broadcasts a live, weekly Colts-oriented program from Union Station in Indianapolis. During an open mike segment, audience members can step up and speak their mind. Every week, Cimasko did exactly that. The station quickly recognized this was no ordinary NFL fan from Jersey and soon they looked for him each week. Now Cimasko enjoys his very own segment during the off-season.

"New York is big -- what are your chances of getting a radio thing?" Cimasko says. "That doesn't happen to the common man. And we went to Bob Irsay's mansion! How many people get to talk to the team's general manager about the draft? It's great."

Maryanne Cimasko, the woman who dared her husband to relocate, didn't know what she was setting off.

"She thinks it's a little wacky," Cimasko says.

* * *

There are only 28 NFL franchises, but hundreds of college teams, so far more people have college football loyalties around the country. These folks may live in a college town, but the school's support is spread farthest and widest by students who pass through to pick up a degree on their way to greater glory.

• Attorney Peter Hendricks, on the other hand, is one of those guys who went to Rutgers University and never left New Brunswick, New Jersey.

"I'm in the Scarlet R, the 12th man club," he says. "We have meetings with the coaches to go over prospects. We have a countdown on our calendars to kickoff. Our law firm has had occasion to represent some of the players in a legal capacity. We yell and cheer and scream. It hurts when they lose. I've adopted the same attitude of the coaches and players. You hate to lose but you move on, hoping that the next week is going to bring victory."

• Dr. Robert L. Arnstein, retired chief psychiatrist of Yale University Health Services, is the son of a Yalie who took him to his first game, Yale at Army, in 1927.

"The cadets marched and that was colorful," he recalls. "I saw two or three games that season. I can still remember some of the things that happened. If you asked me what happened yesterday, I'm not so good. I'm not sure what would have happened if I hadn't gone to Yale College. That might have made a difference."

There's no shaking Arnstein's loyalty.

"It has something to do with my feeling that the team embodies a kind of abstract ideal," he says. "I sour on a team if I think that they are not really living up to my idea of what the ideal should be."

* * *

For some men, allegiances can also be made without deference to geography.

These guys typically spend their whole lives in the same city without ever seeing it through the eyes of a visitor, like the New Yorker who's never been to the Statute of Liberty or the top of the Empire State Building. They associate with Dallas or San Francisco or Miami because they're more glamorous, more colorful, or more successful than the locals.

"We used to go to Tampa," former Chicago Bears offensive tackle Dan Jiggetts recalls, "and we'd get cheered more than the Bucs. We thought, what is this, a home game?"

• "I tend not to like the local team," says Larry Selvin, a West Roxbury, Mass., financial accountant. "The local reporting is so biased, I tend to rebel against that. I've always liked Dallas. And I like San Francisco a lot; my brothers are in San Francisco."

• Boston textbook buyer Kenton Blagbrough feels equally strong about four favorite teams. "It's not just the home team I'm rooting for," he says. "Although when the Patriots were on their drive to Super Bowl XX, I was in seventh heaven. That was just awesome."

• Joe DiRaffaele owns a chain of temporary help services, Labor World, based in Coconut Creek, Florida. He got hooked on Notre Dame without ever being a student of the school or traveling to South Bend. Because New York City, DiRaffaele's hometown, doesn't have a high-profile college team, local television stations would broadcast Notre Dame games. It didn't hurt that the Irish played a couple of high-profile games at Yankee Stadium in the '60s.

• Hospitality industry management consultant Mark von Dwingelo also began a love affair with his team by accident. When Yankee Stadium was being refurbished in the mid-70s, the Giants temporarily relocated to von Dwingelo's home state, Connecticut, playing home games in the Yale Bowl. "I was able to go to some games and it was instant attraction," he recalls.

• Banker Shawn Cahill went to Florida State University from 1977-80. He was in school when coach Bobby Bowden took the Seminoles to their first major bowl game; "It was my classmates playing," Cahill says. "You're rooting for guys you know and it continues after you leave school. When these guys go to the professional ranks, you follow them. I still root for guys like Deion Sanders, who was good at Florida State."

* * *

Keith Farber, a Buena Park, California, courier and native of the city, loves any team if its name starts with the words "Los Angeles." He views the games as a social outlet, making friends through the Rambassadors fan club and relying on the Raiders, Rams, Lakers, Kings and Dodgers for contributions to his own self-esteem.

"I was a short, pudgy kid," he says. "I wasn't an athlete when I was young because I didn't grow out of it until I was 14."

There are some things some guys never grow out of, though. The shoelaces on his tennis shoes are blue-gold. He wears a Rams watch and Rams pendant every day. He dons team sweats to the games. And he has, on several occasions, painted his face in Rams colors.

"When my team wins, I win," Farber says.

* * *

One of the most revealing studies of sports and community identity was overseen by Dr. Robert B. Cialdini, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University. He confirmed through research that, as a general tendency, fans prefer to associate themselves publicly with winners and to distance themselves in the eyes of any audience from losers.

Cialdini even coined the phrase that describes this phenomena: "basking in reflected glory" to describe the phenomena.

Winning and losing teams influence the morale of a region, a city or a college campus. The community may actually have clinical features of depression when its team loses. People become blue for several days, disoriented and non-productive, whereas if they win, they are pumped up and active.

For example, after the home team wins a football game on Saturday, scores of university students at seven major NCAA schools systematically chose to wear apparel to class on Monday that announced their school affiliation. They wore sweatshirts, T-shirts and team jackets with insignias and emblems that designated them as part of the university after the team won in far greater numbers than after it lost. The larger the victory margin, the stronger the tendency to show off.

"There is a great tendency on the part of the fans to literally dress themselves in the success of their team," Cialdini says. "The other thing that we have found is that this doesn't just apply to such things as the way people dress themselves. It also has to do with the way that they associate themselves and the pronouns that they use to describe a victory or defeat of the home team. We find, for example, that college students here at Arizona State University were significantly more likely to use the term 'we' to describe the outcome of a game that the football team had won but to use the term 'they' to describe the outcome of a game that the team had lost. Again there is a tendency to incorporate victors within the concept of the self and a tendency to distance losers from that concept."

The tendency to use "we" to describe victories and "they" to describe defeats was by far more powerful among those people who had recently experienced a personal failure.

"People who have experienced some sort of recent setback were people who have a sense of low self-worth because they carry around this sense of themselves as losers," Cialdini says. "Especially likely to fall into this category are people who choose to bask in reflective glory but avoid the shadow of another's defeat. Those are the fair weather fans. We're not saying that people who support their teams and get behind their teams and like to associate themselves with their team are people with low self-concept. We are saying that fair weather fans are people with low self-concept. They are the ones who jump on the opportunity to connect themselves to a victor but then bury their connections with a loser."

There is another feature to Cialdini's study worth noting. Apparently the reason people bask in reflective glory and distance themselves from the shadow of failure is to boost their image in the eyes of others. They believe other people will see them as more positive if they are associated with positive things, even though they didn't cause the positive things.

In the apparel study, Cialdini's researchers found that the effect was just as strong for away games as it was for home games, even when the fan played no conceivable role in the success of the team. They weren't in the stands cheering the team on, but they still wore more home team apparel when the team won.

"We think it is a desire to connect themselves with victorious others so the audience will see the fans more positively," Cialdini says.

When there is a victory, fans feel as though they shared in the glory of the team. That has to do with the sedentary quality of modern life. American men rarely battle or do combat. (Urban guerilla warfare and 26-mile marathons not withstanding.) We use physical sports as proxies for the lost challenge of the physical environment, indeed, against one another. We get a vicarious, second-hand charge from watching people engaged in physical contests where they can identify with one side or another. It's primitive but we can do it without getting hurt or messing up our designer jeans. We can turn on the tube and watch our favorite gladiators fight on our behalf and if we feel as though our honor is somehow at stake, victory will be all the more rewarding.

Fans want to associate themselves with victorious teams in order to enhance their self-esteem and personal prestige.

Studies have shown that they do that if they have recently had some kind of damage done to their own esteem. If students perform poorly in their exams, when they are given an opportunity to bask in reflective glory they are more likely to do it when they have had recent damage to their esteem than when it has not happened.

Dr. Edward R. Hirt, an Indiana University social psychologist, conducted his own study of the basking in reflected glory phenomena. He used college basketball fans to determine how the outcomes of a game featuring their team affected them personally.

People flock when their team is doing really well. But when the team hits on a big losing streak or a bad couple of years, attendance and general interest falls off. Nobody cares about them. Hirt's study concerned itself with the people who stick with their team through thick and thin, enduring the losses to one day, again, relish victory. The hardcore fans don't disassociate themselves from their team when the waters turn choppy. They believe they have to suffer through those tough times because they are true fans of the team.

In brief, Hirt's methodology was to organize loyal fans into groups of six to eight and have them watch away games of their favorite college basketball team. They were asked to rate the performance of players and the teams. They also had to assess their mood and their feelings of self-esteem.

"Our assumption," Hirt says, "was that people's moods were going to be very much affected by the team's outcome, but also that it might carry over and affect their self-esteem as well."

Subjects were also put through what they were told was an unrelated study. They did tasks ostensibly designed to estimate various abilities from a motor-skills test (mini-basketball free throws) and solving anagrams to a simulated dating scenario where they were shown slides of the opposite sex, pre-rated for attractiveness, and asked how likely it was the person in the slide would go out with them.

"Under winning conditions, we found you did get some elevations and people's estimates on all these tasks," Hirt says. "But in the loss condition, we saw lowering on their motor skills, social skills and their mental abilities to solve problems. Then we had them actually do the task and we didn't find any differences. So this is all a perception of your own ability rather than actually influencing your ability to do things.

"The bottom line," he says, "was that there does seem to be this connection of the fan with the team so that the team's outcome does have effects on the fan's perception of themselves. But they didn't seem to carry over to affect performance per se, just their outlook and sense of self."

The one puzzler in the results was that the effects of the loss seem to be stronger than the win.

"I have two explanations for that and I don't know which one is right," Hirt says. "The first one -- the more boring one -- is that college students are already so optimistic about their own abilities that there is not a lot of room on the scale to go up. There is a lot more room to go down. They already believe that they are well above average. It may just be a scaling effect there that wins really do affect people in the same way losses do but we couldn't see it based on the kinds of scales we were using and the kinds of tasks we had.

"The second thing," he says, "could be -- and I think this may hold some water -- that for many fans, and especially here at Indiana, any win is expected and any loss is devastating. In that situation a win is good and what you expect but you don't get as up for it. In fact, people can be pretty critical even of wins. 'You should have won by more' or 'We didn't really play that well but we won the game.' The losses are uniformly all bad regardless of how badly you lose."

The most avid followers of a team really startled Hirt. They watched every game to the point where it was a major part of their lives. It was an obsession to the point where they would arrange their schedule around a game.

"I have no reason to believe that the results that we found with basketball are any different than football," Hirt says."I am not sure that this helps necessarily explain why people watch the stuff. Why would they want to put themselves through that?"

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Chapter 6. Play the Game

by Bob Andelman

"I played one year of football in junior college. I played for the same coach that I had in high school. When he went to the single wing, I was a 'blocking back.' When he went to a split-T there was nothing for me except the line. I went through one spring practice on the line and figured that was enough of this football stuff for me. Then I was a sportswriter for 41 years."

Volney Meece
Executive Director
Football Writers Association of America

There are a number of things in life that every man is expected to do:

Drink beer.

Talk about sex.

Dream about sports cars.

Play football.

The great thing about the last expectation on the list is that we can play the game at any level and easily relate to guys who play it at higher levels. It's a joyous -- and jarring -- shared experience that men come back to our entire lives.

"Football is the single most attractive sport we have," Dr. Thomas A. Tutko says. "Baseball is too slow. Basketball is too fast. Hockey and soccer are too confusing. But football stops just enough so we can analyze it and think about it."

Football also exploits many American values. Hard work, competition, territoriality. It represents, in a symbolic way, all of the tough things in America that we look upon as high values.

"At some point in their lives, guys either play football or know guys who do. It's the All-American experience," former Chicago Bears offensive tackle Dan Jiggetts says. "That shared experience is something that draws people back."

"It's a sport I grew up playing and still play every Sunday morning." Larry Mayer says. "We play two-hand touch, but it gets pretty rough. These are guys I've played with since the seventh grade."

Even Bill Evans, a marketing manager for Compuserve in Columbus, Ohio, returned to the sport, despite rocky beginnings as a participant. "I played two weeks of Pee Wee football and gave it up," he says. "The coaches were blue-collar, ex-high school linemen who took out their anger on kids. It was terrible what they put us through. Just a bunch of washed-up people reliving their youth."

No matter what the quality of their individual experience, men who have played the game enjoy a bond, even if they never played in the same game or at the same level. A stockbroker who played flag football in phys ed class knows the joy of catching a game-winning touchdown or third-down conversion pass as well as his auto mechanic who played ball at a Division III college.

A lot of men watch football because they played it. They've been involved in it as a sport themselves on a sandlot or on an organized level. They reach a point where it is hard to participate anymore so they become fans. They develop a fascination for it as an athletic event or as a form of entertainment.

Men gravitate back to the sports and activities they enjoyed as youths. Football provides a bonus: There is little or no possibility of women being involved with football because it is the last truly male bastion of strength, violence and speed. That's important because much as men love women, they love their time away from them, too.

Many men are former school and college athletes who seek to recapture the echoes of their youth by watching the sports they used to play. They connect to yesterday -- no responsibilities, no debt, no obligations, no shaving -- by watching others play sports they still love. It's kind of a Walter Mitty thing of seeing themselves out there, dashing across the chalk lines, being heroic, athletic, drawing a crowd, being admired.

Of course, along with all that is our eternal fascination with standing in awe of the skills of the best. On TV we see those who have the tools we lack. There is an envy, a fascination with the Heisman Trophy winner, just like there is when an average musician stands in awe of the best musicians.

And between those who never played the game and those who did, there will always be an invisible wall.

"If you are in a group of men where one or two have played the game and the others have not," Dr. Michael Messner says, "the ones who have played the game will have a sense of having knowledge that the others don't. Depending on how secure or insecure they are, they use that or not. There is always that thing that until you have been out there and felt the blows and had the blood on you and sweated and cried with your teammates, you can't understand the game. People say that about war, about football, about whatever."

The game appeals to us because it's so neat and tidy, leaving few loose ends.

Men play football in high school in deference to their aggressive drive, the ability to express that in a sublimated, safe way. "Nothing happens at the end of a game," Dr. Mark Unterberg says. "Only one team wins and the other loses and everybody goes off to take a shower and goes home. It becomes a safe way for one group of men to kill another group and become victorious. Sometimes the image of the old Roman Coliseum or Roman Empire analogy and the gladiators may not be too far off."

What about able-bodied young men who didn't play the game? Dr. Allen L. Sack is dubious that there are any.

"It is pretty hard to avoid," the sociologist says. "They probably tried out for a team or were involved very closely with males who were involved in it. Somewhere along the line, even if you hated it, you were probably pressured into playing it. I don't know if that is true of all social classes but it is certainly true of the working class. It's tough. If you go to school in a place like Odessa, Texas (made famous by H.G. Bissinger's 1990 book Friday Night Lights {Addison-Wesley}) it's very difficult to envision a young man, even those who despise and loathe the very nature of the game, not in some way or other feeling pressure to be involved. Even if that was coming out for practice and trying out for the team and not liking it, walking off and having a negative attitude toward it. In the years that follow, when those really rotten memories start to go away, you start romanticizing what it was like. You still have some experience with the game."

Part of the mystery of football is the great divergence between those who play and those who watch. Baseball fans commonly participate in adult softball leagues and bar leagues. But there aren't many amateur adult football leagues.

The downside of becoming a fan without having experienced football, or only being exposed to it on television, is that you don't appreciate the athleticism. TV better captures a basketball court or boxing ring, but a football field is 100 yards long. The close-up is adequate, but it doesn't put the game in perspective.

"That is why it's difficult for women to learn football from watching it on TV," says Dr. Daniel Begel, a Milwaukee psychiatrist and founder of the International Society for Sport Psychiatry. "And that's one of the reasons women can't get into it. They can't learn it from watching on TV. You have to have played it."

The difference could be in who you know. Certainly there are disabled men who become great and learned fans of the game without ever taking to the field. There are scores of people who did not necessarily participate but maybe had a parent or an uncle who participated so they had some vicarious exposure to it early on and developed an attraction to and interest in the sport.

* * *

Men associate with the aggressiveness of football and the violence. Yet we see a lot of people at games in wheelchairs. Some may have played the game before being disabled; some may have been disabled by football. Many of these men will never have that experience on a football field and yet they still associate with the game.

"It gets back to identifications," Dr. Stanley H. Teitelbaum says. "There is a pull, identifying with those who can run when you yourself can't. I have a friend who was paralyzed in childhood from polio. His greatest love became watching the ballet. It's the same phenomenon of being able to watch others who can glide gracefully or who can run and do the things you can't do. For some people that is very painful, but for others it becomes a way of identifying with the players and seeing yourself in them."

* * *

David Johnson is a special case. The Chula Vista, California, fan of the San Diego Chargers is about the same size as your average defensive tackle. In high school, the football coaches couldn't wait to get him on the playing field. And he wanted to play. But in the 10th grade, Johnson developed spinal meningitis. Since then, he's spent a lifetime wondering "What if?"

"The main reason I love pro football is I never had the opportunity to play it," he says. "I'm one of the biggest fans you'll ever find. I absolutely love football. I marvel at these people, how the quarterback can complete a 60-yard bomb to a receiver running down the field, hoping to hit him with pinpoint accuracy!"

(Silva empathizes with Johnson's plight. "When the ability to participate is taken away," he says, "particularly if it is not taken in a traumatic fashion, a lot of people will yearn for those things that they can't have.")

Johnson, an unemployed truck driver, relocated to Southern California from Indiana after a Navy stint in San Diego. He came to the Chargers' attention several years ago because everywhere they went, so did he. This superfan leaves the mobile home he shares with his parents 10 miles from the Mexican border and drives his '69 Chevy to daily training camp workouts, mini-camps and regular season practices. He's always positive and encouraging to his team.

"I give the guys a hand, a good round of applause. I appreciate the athletic ability of these people. They can do things I could never do in high school," he says.

One of the Chargers coaches took note of Johnson and "adopted" him, making sure a ticket is always available for him at Chargers home games.

Among Johnson's heroes of the game are the grand old man, George Blanda, and Dick Butkus. "Butkus exemplified the ferocity and violence that is football," Johnson says. "Seeing somebody tackle like him is a way to let out your frustrations from the week. When you've been unemployed as long as I have, you need something."

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Chapter 14. Odds 'n' Sods

by Bob Andelman

"I pride myself on being a trivia expert. I challenge my friends. If they can beat me, I'll take them to lunch. I know basically every number for every Bears player. The most obscure the player, the more I remember. I guess it helped me get my job and I guess it helps me do my job better. It's weird because I don't otherwise have a good memory. My sister remembers things from childhood. I don't."

Larry Mayer
Managing editor
Chicago Bear Report

If there's one thing sure to drive a non-football fan batty it's the ever increasing treasure trove of statistics. Thanks to computers and new information gathering techniques, fans of numbers can track virtually any aspect of the game.

Under the category of passing alone, we follow attempts, completions, completion percentage, yards, touchdowns, touchdown percentage, longest touchdown pass, interceptions, interception percentage, average gain and overall rating.

What about kicking? For punting alone there's number of kicks, total yards, longest kick, gross average, touchbacks, kicks inside the 20-yard-line, blocked kicks, number of kicks returned by opposing teams and the total and average returns. Field-goal accuracy typically breaks down into distance: 1-19 yards, 20-29 yards, 30-39 yards, 40-49 yards and the very thinly populated 50 yards or more.

Let's assume the point is made and skip defensive examples.

"I love sports because of the numbers and the statistics," financial accountant Larry Selvin says. "As I grew up, I won arithmetic contests. I have like a photographic memory for numbers and dates. I can tell you every Super Bowl off the top of my head -- who was in it, what was the score, who won the MVP, where they played the game."



Stats are a way of dealing with one's mastery of the game and not just as a passive participant. Keeping statistics -- on paper, in our heads -- is a form of activity.

 
It's a form of competitiveness -- knowing more stats than the next person. Sometimes obsessive behavior becomes a way to deal with affective emotions. Sometimes it's a way for an underachiever to finally become an overachiever. Maybe part of the person fears that if they don't do statistics they might get too excited over the game. They understand what is going on. It's their way of being active and showing that they are really part of the game.

Dr. Bruce C. Ogilvie calls it exhibitionism, legitimized by what comes into our living rooms via the TV.

"I think that would be a terribly neurotic thing to do," he says, "to quest for some exaggerated attention. 'Hey, look at me, dad!' It's an incredible need to become involved in something that has some meaning for them, that has some influence in the way they feel about themselves and sometimes the way they feel about the world. These are spectators to life. All they get is whatever they can abstract from what is going on out there. That becomes living for them. That goes to such extremes when you talk about the couch potato. What a termination of life."

"Pathetic, isn't it?" Dr. Daniel Begel scoffs. "Hanging out through the TV with football or anything else."





Sometimes people do things unconsciously. Deep down they may believe the more they memorize Thurman Thomas's stats, the more they know him. The more some guys know about Thomas, the more they can identify with him or enjoy what he does on the field.

There are so many facets of football. A guy can be master in one segment but not the other. Some people, their whole life is tailgate parties. They drink champagne, they crank up the car tunes. Some of them don't even go in until the game has started and even then they follow the action on portable TVs.

Trivia buffs create games within games. They envision themselves as part of the game because they are game historians. They remember the details.

"Some people like that. Kind of an obsessive-compulsive behavior," Dr. Thomas A. Tutko says. "There is a place for those individuals as well. The memories that come up provide an emotional charge in some way. Good play. The great hit. All of it gets relived because it fulfills a need inside them."

Bill Price teaches statistics at Niagara University but he, for one, has had enough of the growing statistical obsession among fans, sportscasters and the NFL itself.

"I think they're overdone," Price says. "I've seen players get good numbers but they play lousy."

William J. Winslow, president of the Institute of Athletic Motivation, blames stat-mania on ego-involvement. "I've often said to myself that if these people could put the same attention to their careers as they do to memorizing football numbers, they'd be more successful. They spend evenings gathering stats and reading newspapers instead of reading journals.

"Take kids," he says. "They remember batting averages but can't put 2 + 2 together in school. You get minority athletes who can't get passing grades in school but memorize whole playbooks. If you're memorizing something you like, it's no longer a chore, it's something you like."

That's it, exactly.



Players stats are something that a guy can easily consume with a modicum of interest because in a man's life, he knows sports trivia or trivia dressed up as information will always pass for conversation with other men. It's something we can relate to others and groups who share our same interest. That serves our self-esteem.

The more knowledgeable we supposedly are about this game -- it doesn't matter whatever else we do. The knowledge is ego-boosting and self-esteem boosting. Men know what their guys did and how they played. It's another twist on basking in reflected glory phenomena. We can boost our ego and self-esteem not by performance itself but by being knowledgeable about it.

* * *

Aaron Vaughn, a copy editor at the Valley Daily News in Kent, Washington, didn't pay much attention to football until his late teens. Then he couldn't get enough: he needed NFL, college, even high school games to slake his thirst.

As the years went by and he neared his 30th birthday, Vaughn's interest deepened. He stopped going to pro games in person because he didn't care for the Seattle Seahawks and all he ever got were lousy seats. But at work, he started hanging around sportswriters and editors who honed his technical understanding of football.

Now he's more interested in the annual college draft than the game itself.

"Every year, I buy three draft guides," he says. "I study players and who the teams need. It's something I find fascinating, how they make their decisions. I really am a behind-the-scenes guy."



The first player Vaughn followed was University of Oregon quarterback Chris Miller, researching his background and plotting his prospects. He became an Atlanta Falcons fan when they drafted his man. After that, Vaughn was hooked. He conducts his own mock drafts. He videotapes the draft on ESPN, watching it over and over again, comparing and critiquing his selections for the NFL teams with their actual choices.

"I try not to hold it against teams that don't pick a guy," Vaughn says. "It's technical and boring to a lot of my friends. But it's a lot of fun."

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Appendix: Can't Tell the Players Without a Scorecard

by Bob Andelman

Here's a roster of men and women interviewed during research for Why Men Love Football: A Report From the Couch:

Dr. Robert L. Arnstein, retired chief psychiatrist of Yale University Health Services, lives in Hamden, Connecticut

Dr. William J. Beausay, a psychologist in Columbus, Ohio, is founder of the Academy of Sport Psychology International and a consultant to athletes in pro sports such as baseball, football, basketball, hockey and motor racing

Dr. Daniel Begel, a psychiatrist in Milwaukee, is a founder of the International Society for Sport Psychiatry

Eric L. Berger, a personal injury defense attorney for insurance companies in Sunrise, Florida

Ed Berry, a former Marine and retired gardener for the City of San Diego, lives in El Cajon, California

Kenton Blagbrough, a textbook buyer at Boston University

Barry Bradley, senior editor of the Maddux Report, a business magazine in St. Petersburg, Florida

Roger W. Brummett, a vice president of marketing for a human resources management firm in Carmel, Indiana, is founder and president of the Baltimore Colts' Thundering Herd Fan Club

Frank Bryant, a former Army helicopter pilot, is a property developer in Long Beach, California

Dr. Robert B. Cialdini, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University in Tempe

John Cimasko, a route salesman for Pepsi-Cola in Carmel, Indiana, and charter member of the Baltimore Colts' Thundering Herd Fan Club

Dr. Jay Coakley, a professor of sociology and director of the Center for the Study of Sport and Leisure at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, is the author of Sports in Society: Issues and Controversies (Moseby-Yearbook)

Dr. Gregory B. Collins, a psychiatrist, is section head of the Alcohol and Drug Recovery Center of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio and is a consultant to NFL teams

Jerry DeForest Jr., owns The Tailgate Sports Bar in Staten Island, New York

Joe DiRaffaele, owns Labor World, a chain of temporary help services based in Coconut Creek, Florida

Joe Diroff, a retired Navy man and former mathematics teacher, lives in Detroit

Barry Dreayer, a salesman/consultant for computer software and voice mail systems, taught a course for sports novices called "TeachMeSports" in Atlanta

Dr. D. Stanley Eitzen, a professor of sociology at Colorado State University at Fort Collins is a past-president of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport and co-author (with Dr. George H. Sage) of Sociology of North American Sport (William C. Brown)

Bill Evans, a marketing manager with Compuserve in Columbus, Ohio

Keith Farber, a courier in Buena Park, California

Richard M. "Rick" Georges, an attorney in St. Petersburg, Florida

Dr. Daniel M. Glick, a psychiatrist in Scottsdale, Arizona

Pat Harmon, an historian for the College Football Hall of Fame in Kings Island, Ohio

Peter Hendricks, an attorney in New Brunswick, N.J.

Dr. Edward R. Hirt, professor of psychology at Indiana University in Bloomington

Harold Hyman, a property manager in Tamarac, Florida

Dr. Seppo E. Iso-Ahola, a sport psychologist at the University of Maryland at College Park, is the co-author (with Brad Hatfield) of Psychology of Sports: A Social Psychological Approach (Wm. C. Brown)

Dan Jiggetts, a former offensive tackle with the Chicago Bears, is a sportscaster with WSCR Radio and WBBM-TV in Chicago (partner of Mike North at WSCR)

David Johnson, a truck driver, lives in Chula Vista, California

Bruce Kessler, a warehouseman in North Brunswick, New Jersey, taught the author of Why Men Love Football how to play football

Jim Luttrell, a copy chief with the Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky

Palmiro "Paul" Mazzoleni, a retired service station owner and founder of Martha's Coffee Club in Green Bay, Wisconsin

Larry Mayer, managing editor of the Chicago Bear Report, lives in Palatine, Illinois

Volney Meece, a retired sportswriter of 41 years experience, is executive director of the Football Writers Association of America in Edmond, Oklahoma

Jim Melvin, a health and fitness writer and copy editor at the St. Petersburg Times in Florida

Dr. Michael A. Messner, a sociologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, is the author Power at Play: Sports and the Problem of Masculinity (Beacon Press) and co-editor (with Dr. Don Sabo) of Sport, Men and the Gender Order: Critical Feminist Perspectives (Human Kinetics Publishers)

Mike North, a sports radio personality at WSCR-Radio in Chicago (partner of Dan Jiggetts)

Dr. Bruce C. Ogilvie, a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at San Jose State University, is a director of the Institute of Athletic Motivation

Jerry Pigeon, a banker in Green Bay, Wisconsin

William E. "Bill" Price, an associate professor of mathematics at Niagara University in New York

Jim Runels, a retired Nabisco Brands sales management executive, lives in Yorba Linda, California

Dr. Don Sabo, a sociologist at D'Youville University in Amherst, N.Y., is author of Jock: Sports and Male Identity (Prentice Hall), co-editor (with Dr. Michael Messner) of Sport, Men and the Gender Order: Critical Feminist Perspectives (Human Kinetics Publishers) and one-time football captain at the State University of New York at Buffalo

Dr. Allen L. Sack, a professor of sociology and coordinator of the sports management program at the University of New Haven, Connecticut, played defensive end for the University of Notre Dame's 1966 championship football team

Dr. George H. Sage, a retired professor of kinesiology and sociology at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, is the author of Power and Ideology in American Sport (Human Kinetics) and co-author (with Dr. D. Stanley Eitzen) of Sociology of North American Sport (Wm. C. Brown)

Dave Schwarzmueller, a banker in West Seneca, New York

Larry Selvin, a financial accountant in West Roxbury, Mass.

Dr. John M. Silva, a professor of sport psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is a co-editor of Psychological Foundations of Sport (Human Kinetics)

Andrew L. Spear, a music sales representative in San Francisco (and Jeff's brother)

Jeff Spear, a comedy writer for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in Los Angeles (and Andrew's brother)

Joe Surdi, a barber in St. Petersburg, Florida

Michele Szynal, a communications manager for the North Atlantic Group of The Gillette Company in Boston

Dr. Stanley H. Teitelbaum, a clinical psychologist in New York City

Dr. Thomas A. Tutko, a clinical psychologist at San Jose State University and a director of the Institute of Athletic Motivation.

Dr. Mark Unterberg, a psychiatrist and executive medical director of Green Oaks Medical City in Dallas, is a consultant to NFL and NBA teams

Aaron Vaughn, a copy editor at the Valley Daily News in Kent, Washington

Mark H. von Dwingelo, a hospitality industry management consultant in Atlanta

Dr. Rick Weinberg, a clinical psychologist at the University of South Florida's Florida Mental Health Institute in Tampa

Neil Wiesenfeld, owner of a promotional advertising company in Atlanta

Ralph Weisbeck, a retired executive of a tool manufacturing company, lives in Williamsville, New York

H. R. "Dick" Williams, a retired cleaning services contractor and founder of the Houston Oilers fan organization, The Derrick Club, in Sugar Land, Texas

Ann Winkler, advertising manager for Apple Computer

William J. Winslow, president of the Institute of Athletic Motivation in Redwood City, California

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Chapter 13. I Yam What I Yam

by Bob Andelman

"The traditional campfire for men of the 1970s and '80s is the football game. Football is your little domain, where you can go back and be a man again. That's where we get a release. You put on your team colors, go out and get crazy with your buddies. Want to talk about male bonding? Football is the male experience."

Dan Jiggetts
Former Chicago Bears offensive tackle
Chicago

Football -- like funny car racing and hardware stores -- is one of those things men can only truly enjoy with other men. Women don't get it and men honestly don't care if they ever do.

"I'm sure it's healthy to have enjoyment away from your wife, have a few beers with your friends," Shawn Cahill says. "On Sundays, in the fall, football is that outlet."

Part of the reason is traditional socialization; sports are for boys, playing house is for girls. That ancient view, of course, predates women athletes such as Manon Rheaume stopping goals for the Tampa Bay Lightning's farm team and Lynette Woodward slamming backboards to the tune of "Sweet Georgia Brown" for the Harlem Globetrotters. And certainly the ranks of women who enjoy watching sports is growing enormously. But it's just these breakthroughs that cause many men to rebel and try to re-fortify the remaining male-only domains against further female incursions.

For their book, Sport, Men and the Gender Order: Critical Feminist Perspectives (Human Kinetics Publishers), sociologists Dr. Don Sabo of D'Youville College and Dr. Michael Messner of the University of Southern California interviewed many former athletes about their subsequent careers in the white collar world. One man wasn't adapting well to his new boss -- a woman. He had never been supervised by a woman in the workplace before and he wasn't handling it well.

"Let me put it this way," the man told Messner. "A woman can do a job as good as I can and maybe even be my boss but I'll be damned if she could go out on the football field and take a hit from Ronnie Lott."

When all else fails, men will still reduce the battle of the sexes to a question of brute force.

"I think that is partly what football does for men today," Messner says. "It provides them with a place even if they can't play football. If you had seen this guy you would have realized he couldn't have taken a hit from Ronnie Lott, either. Nor could most of us. I couldn't and wouldn't want to. A very small proportion of men could actually do that. Symbolically, what that provides to a lot of men in this day and age is a certain kind of symbolic proof that there is this place where men are clearly superior and different from women. Whereas in all other aspects of our lives there are women moving into positions of power and authority."

Jeff Spear, a Los Angeles-based comedy writer for The Tonight Show, admits to letting go a little aggression by watching his Denver Broncos have at it.

"I see Steve Atwater taking some guy out and I react to that," he says. "If it's a really good clean hit you tend to have some feeling for the guy that he just laid out. You have to be very impressed and amazed at the prowess of this huge guy. I'm not delusional that I want to wear a Bronco helmet and bounce off the walls. I'm just more impressed that basically someone can get away with doing that without being arrested."

Men watching games with other men -- and without women -- create a masculine space, not unlike an adolescent's treehouse or fort.





One of the observations that Messner and Sabo make in their book is that during the 1960s and '70s, a lot of men viewed and participated in football as a masculinity ritual. As a cultural spectacle, football somehow reverberated with more traditional notions of what it means to be a man in American society. 

Football players were caricatures of comic book masculinity. They were the guys who succeeded and who got the girls, the guys who literally and symbolically embodied masculine adequacy, bravery, courage, aggression and strength.

Football acted as a passion play for men, but the passions that were being enacted had a lot to do with patriarchal cultural traditions and notions about what makes men and why men are superior to and different from women.

"The socio-cultural backdrop for this was that it was the '60s, where changes in the marketplace in the division of labor between men and women really became noticed," Sabo says. Sabo's specialty is gender relations in sport. "Women participated in the work place; men's roles in families changed. Gender changes had been unfolding since before the turn of the century. But it was in the '60s that we really began to notice the in-your-face changes in men's and women's lives. You had the emergence of the modern women's movement. Women were actively questioning the traditional scripts that patriarchal custom had laid out for them. The cheerleader roles, the wife/mother role, the political subordinate/housemate role. I think men were shaken to a certain extent by the women's movement and intimidated by it. They had no real discussion that enabled them to analyze the changes in their lives that feminism provided for women.

"There was no men's study in the '60s and '70s," Sabo says. "What happened in the '80s however was a shift in the cultural core of meanings inside ritualized football. The shift was from gender images to what I call meritocratic images. In the '60s and '70s, football players carried their image in their bravado and biceps. By the end of the '80s the football image was being carried in $370 Italian leather attache cases that contained the fat contracts that players had gleaned from the business of professional football."

The imagery surrounding male athletes shifted from comic book heroes to million-dollar, muscle-bound dynamos. In the same way that football ritual masked and belied the realities of men's lives in the '60s and '70s, football players got harder while regular guys -- emotionally and interpersonally -- got softer. Football players got richer while many other American men got poorer.

Football as the American Dream Machine for gender or economic images remains constant. But illusions fostered by the game shifted.

That's one of the things we get from entertainment: illusion.

* * * 

Research by University of Northern Colorado students under the tutelage of Dr. George H. Sage confirmed what men already knew: We watch televised sports to hang out with our current friends (and talk about old friends). 

"That is one of the explanations for the success of sports bars," Sage says. "Guys can go with their friends, have a few beers in the presence of a bunch of other guys doing the same thing and watch the games. Or they can have a couple of their friends over to watch."

"I'm sure there is a certain amount of truth in that," Jeff Spear says. "There tends to be a certain . . . I don't want to use the word 'bonding' because it's a dumb '90s term but there's a certain clique you fall into when you are watching football with your friends and it's very easy and it's relaxing."

Bars have carried sporting contests via radio and television since Marconi's day. But sports bars put the two concepts together with Madison Avenue marketing glitz and gee-whiz satellite technology to create multimedia sports menageries. Imagine a place with dueling twin 60-inch projection TVs, dining booths with their own 60-channel sets and more TVs everywhere you look. A red L.E.D. SportsTicker display with the latest news and scores. Attractive women in day-glo, silky short-shorts and suggestive, bodice-gripping T-shirts serving hot and greasy snacks and cold beer. Plus electronic darts, pool, video games and 3-on-3 mini basketball courts.

They're great for making new pals for a few hours.

• "We scream and yell for the same things," Barry Dreayer says. "I start conversations in sports bars. We find unbelievable bonds -- a passion for the Raiders or Gators. When that happens, I feel like I'm at a stadium." 

• "We sort of regress a little bit," attorney Eric Berger says, sheepishly.





• "I'm more myself, more vocal with the guys," Atlanta entrepreneur Neil Wiesenfeld says. "We do things, say things guys do. We'll scrutinize every play. Criticize. 'Oh! Why didn't they get open?' We try to be critical; we want our team to do well. 'Third down and short yardage -- wouldn't a screen be great?' We may do that with the women, but we watch our language. You can be a jerk with your friends. When you're with strangers, you're more reserved. When you get with your friends, you're more excited. Most people, by themselves, don't high-five themselves."

Yesterday's ultimate guy-getaway was Hef's castle. But Hef is ready for Social Security. The place to go in the '90s is a sports bar.

"I have noticed that if you are watching football in a group there is a whole lot more talk and noise than if you watch it by yourself," Messner says. "There is obviously drinking with some men -- that might raise the excitement level or just bring down some of their inhibitions -- but my sense is that a lot of men just prefer to watch football games with other men."

Dr. Stanley H. Teitelbaum agrees. "I think a lot of men feel that only another man could really understand the game in depth the way they do," he says. "They might enjoy having the company of their spouses watching the game or going to the game but it is a different thing. It is not the same thing as sharing it with other guys."

Sports and the way men view and talk about sports serves to separate men from women. It functions to exclude women from certain institutions like workplace culture and so forth. Away from stadiums and home perches in front of the TV, males use sports in the office culture as a sort of a bond; sports talk is the glue that holds men together. It's a way that men massage their relationships with each other in workplaces; "lubricate" their relationships might be a better way to put it. Lots of women have experienced this as a way that men exclude them. Whether or not men intend to use that to exclude women, it is experienced by women that way.

Even men who are not hardcore football fans may use pigskin chatter to escape female counterparts in the work place.

Women don't care as much about it as men. Men would be just as willing to watch the game with a woman who was as knowledgeable and involved as they are but that doesn't tend to happen.

Football is a place where men know that they are physically superior to women. But it's also a place where men of all sizes, shapes and physical abilities are basically equal when it comes to sitting and watching a game side-by-side. I'm not going to take a hit from Ronnie Lott but I can be equal to the guy sitting next to me who maybe played a couple of years in college and understand the game as well as he does.

"All men can identify with the men on the field as men," Messner says. "Being knowledgeable about the game as a spectator is a way to get respect among your peers not necessarily having played."

* * * 

Why do men love football over other games?

Strength. Muscle. Brute force. Raw power.

Even if little boys and little girls were socialized in the same way, football is intrinsically a different kind of game in that it takes brute force. It is one of the last areas of American life -- and probably one of the last occupations -- to preclude equal participation by men and women because of how we are socialized as youngsters. The game depends on strength and speed and hormonal advantages that men have and women do not. 

"You have to be 280 to 300 pounds to play offensive line and I don't see 280-pound women to do that," says Dr. Allen L. Sack, a University of New Haven sociology professor and former Notre Dame defensive end. "If they should come along they deserve the right to play but I just don't see it happening. Unless by some miracle of evolutionary mutation women are able to build muscle mass in the same way men can, or if the game is radically altered to permit women to play so that it might become less incredibly wild and winning has to be left dependent upon physical skill, not skill of muscle mass. Football is a throwback. It fits best in a pre-industrial model where physical strength and prowess were that important. As society has changed over hundreds of years there are fewer and fewer areas of our lives that are still dependent on physical force and physical prowess. In most areas men and women can probably compete fairly, equally -- except in the realm of military front lines or in a football game. It will probably one of the last bastions of male dominance." 

The professionals believe football mirrors much of modern American society -- the good, the bad and the ugly. Particularly the ugly. 

Men still dominate most institutions in American society but women have made inroads and many men now work in places where women are peers and even bosses. Some men are threatened by that.



Football provides a sense of clarity about gender. There are fully armored men on a battlefield, fighting over territory like in the good old Dark Ages, using their bodies as weapons to blast other men back. On the sidelines are scantily clad cheerleaders exposed with no armor. On television, the camera cuts back and forth between the battles of the men on the gridiron and the tender, sexual objects on the sideline. 

"It provides a real sense of clarity between what men are and what women are," Messner says. "Women are there for support and sexual distraction and what the men are doing on the field is really the center stage and what really matters and why we are all there." 

TV commercials during football games represent the same imagery, further reinforcing the differences between the brutal and fairer sexes. 

Sack supports Messner's theory. 

"If you brought someone from Europe for a day and you wanted them to get an idea of what American life was all about, the values and the culture, you might just take them to the Super Bowl," Sack suggests. "What would they see there? They would definitely see the role women play. While the main action is taking place on the field with the heroic men, the women are scantily clad, positioned in the background as supporters of the men. And if you look very close and you are very astute you would see that there are very few black coaches, that the entire team is represented by blacks except that the quarterbacks are white and his guards are white. As you move off into the periphery, more and more of the athletes are black and, just like blacks play a peripheral role in industry, law and politics, you are going to see all that reflected in the game."
A foreign visitor would also see the aggressiveness of American society and the fans getting turned on by the violence. Sack says that can be traced to the American frontier.

"Rugged individualism, violence and competitiveness has made us a great nation," he says. "But I think some of that has spilled over into negative qualities, like young men who are taught to never accept no for an answer, and young men who are taught to be incredibly aggressive in football. This is pounded into your head. Never give up. To be a winner, you have to give 110 percent. Never accept the possibility of defeat. Physically push until you dominate the other side. I'd be surprised if this didn't in some cases spill over into male/female relationships."

Young men who are taught to be so aggressive and never take "no" for an answer may not understand the need for sensitivity towards another person, male or female. Sack says that someone trained to never accept "no" for an answer could apply that to social situations. If a woman says "no" to a man conditioned to never accept that word, they could both be in trouble.

"I don't want to lay this mainly on young athletes," Sack says. "Date rape is more universal in its scope. But it is a possibility that the socialization we give to young males through sports like football may lead to a tendency toward what might be perceived as rape. Certainly going a little further than they should go and not listening to someone when they say, 'No, no no! I don't want to do this!'

"If you went into a locker room," he says, "written all over the walls you'd see little things about what it takes to be a real man, disparaging women. When I was playing, if you were not doing well they called you 'pussy' for not hitting hard enough. If you got hit a little late and were not willing to go back and smash somebody in return you were called a 'sissy' a 'woman' or a 'girl.' That has been part of the game."

These are our culture's great motivational tools. And the reason they work is because we still hold up the idea of being violent and aggressive and dominant as the primary values for young males. We hold that to be passive and sensitive, intellectual and introspective is sissy and girlish. So if you take a young man who has been in that kind of environment and attack and accuse him of being less than aggressive, then he is less than a man, less than a human being. It will goad him.

"There was a coach who was sanctioned or reprimanded recently because before a football game in Texas he brought a cow or bull in and castrated it in front of the team," Sack says. "There's all kinds of symbolism there."

It's not like we Americans invented all this. The game seen as the most male-dominated in British society is rugby. The degradation of women is part and parcel of that. "To this day," Sack says, "if you go to a party after a rugby match, there are these lewd post-game singing and male-bonding rituals that they have that are sexually explicit and violent, humiliating and denigrating for women. I never felt football was quite that bad but football does have those kinds of tendencies I think. It is all male."





That's the bad news. The good news is that most of us respond to football because it reinforces our masculinity in healthy ways. It gives us a chance to revert to simpler times when the most important things in life were getting picked first to play football and being home in time for dinner. 

"It's rather interesting," Sabo says. "There is this idea that masculinity has become an imitation without an original. In other words, it's an illusion that doesn't have any base in reality any more, so for many men pursuing or worshipping the cultural icons of masculinity is akin to walking -- with great deliberation -- toward a mirage."

Dubious? According to Sabo, a sporting goods manufacturers association surveyed 20,000 American households in 1991 and found that women had become the leaders in the most popular fitness activities, including aerobic exercise, bicycling, calisthenics, exercise with equipment, walking, running and swimming.

Whereas men are much more publicly and culturally identified with sports and fitness, the reality is that they are less actively involved with fitness activities. And whereas women are more culturally associated and defined as physically passive and less athletically inclined, they are, in fact, more apt to participate in these activities than their male counterpart.

* * *

Men, like women, need connections with other people. We often search for connections that are consistent with our cultural identities. 

Sports tend to celebrate the kinds of ideologies that men grow up with and associate with masculinity. Football emphasizes and celebrates dominant forms of masculinity. It provides men with an activity around which we can relate to other men and in the process celebrate our own commitment to a dominant forms of masculinity.

Sports emerge in ways that reinforce the distribution of power and privilege in a society. Sports take resources in order to be organized and staged. The people who are most likely to have those resources are obviously privileged people within a culture. On a very general level, sports have emerged in ways that reflect the values and experiences of men because men have traditionally controlled resources. Sports, then, reflect the interest of particular groups of men: those with a disproportionate share of economic power.

"The whole notion of sports celebrating kind of a meritocracy as well as masculinity is something that is very important here," Coakley says. "People with power and privilege in this society are very interested in promoting the idea that we live in a meritocracy and that people who are successful got there because they deserve it."

Problems arise because men grow up surrounded and confronted by all these forms of competitive sports but don't raise any kinds of critical questions about them. We just accept them as part of our culture and nature. They're fun, they're entertaining. They're a turn-on. We like them best because we don't have to think much about them.

Football and hockey are seen as men's sports where you take a hit. Soaking up the physical agony of contact sports represents the ultimate in manliness. Playing with pain is encouraged, not chastened. In fact, fans get really obnoxious about players who won't take a hit.

"I remember when I was in college," Dr. Edward R. Hirt says, "Tony Dorsett was in his heyday and a lot of people ragged on him big time, saying he was such a pussy because he ran out of bounds and he would never take a hard hit. In reality, any of us would do the exact same thing. We don't want a 275-pound lineman crashing on us. And we certainly wouldn't want six of them to do it. You'd run out of bounds too, if you weren't going to gain any more than half a yard."

But for some reason football fans all get like that. We really admire the guys who go in a game, hit hard and swallow a hit. If our guys are victims of illegal or late hits, we bully them into fighting. Our guys, if they're real men, won't take any shit off your guys.

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Chapter 21. She's No Woman, She's My Wife

by Bob Andelman

"Why do you bug me during football? Did I bother you during childbirth?"

Tim Taylor
TV Host, "Tool Time"
Detroit

Mothers. Daughters. Wives. Sisters. Women in-laws.

Perhaps the greatest unspoken reason that men love football is because it gives many of us a few precious, uninterrupted hours away from those wonderful women in our lives.

Football presents one of the last great places where men can hide out. It's a game that women are not going to start playing any time soon and that few women care to attend in person, so men can still be men and watch the games, hootin' and hollerin' and behaving like jerks. Like Three Stooges movies, women just don't get it.

"Has football gotten in the way of relationships? I'm sure it has," Barry Dreayer says. "Past relationships didn't have a clue what was going on, didn't want to to have a clue."

Love 'em, hate 'em, can or can't live without 'em, men feel that women often complicate their lives at all the wrong times. Twelve-forty-five on Sunday afternoon is not the time to ask the man in your life to get up and do anything. It is not the time to engage him in deep conversation about Junior's grades or suspicions that Muffy is a lesbian. And it is definitely not the time to complain that he hasn't been showing you enough attention lately. Because for the next 6 hours, it isn't going to get any better.

Some women threaten their husbands with divorce because they can't bear the thought of losing them to football one more week. Some women do more than threaten.

Retired Nabisco Brands sales management executive and Los Angeles Rams superfan Jim Runels decided two could play that game. He divorced his football-hating wife and married a woman who not only tolerates the game but loves it.

"My first wife? I had to sneak off by telling her I was going to play golf," Runels says. "Then I'd go see a football game. I'd come back late and she'd bitch and complain. She'd get mad at me. I'd never hear the end of it. I could never get her to go to a football game."

Runels' home office in Yorba Linda, California, is packed with all manner of Rams paraphernalia -- hats, phones, umbrellas, helmet telephones, directors chairs, pins, cards. "Plus I have jerseys -- Bob Waterfield's No. 7 with my name on the back!" he says. "My first wife, I could never get through the front door with this stuff. When I met my second wife, Marge, I made it clear I was a Rams fan. I sent her a Rams card and she sent me back a Rams magnet and a note that said, 'See? I'm a Rams fan, too!' We clicked."

The new Mr. & Mrs. Runels -- members of the Rambassadors fan club -- make annual sojourns to Hawaii for the Pro Bowl and have even been to the Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.

The day before he got married, Joe DiRaffaele, owner of Labor World, a Coconut Creek, Florida, chain of temporary help services, told his bride there were a few things about him that she needed to know.

"One day, I'm moving back to New York," he said. "And Saturdays, I watch football. And Sundays, I watch football. I don't go out."

She knew what she was getting into, DiRaffaele felt. "You know how things change when you got married and have kids? She had to understand."

Then, an amazing thing happened. One day, Kim turned to her husband and said, "You have to teach me about football." And she got into it. One Monday night, the Dolphins were playing the Jets and Joe set the VCR to tape the game while he was out. "But my wife watched it," he says. "When I got home she said, 'The Jets really got hosed.' " Joe decided right then and there that he was a lucky man, married to a rare woman.

Time passed and the DiRaffaeles' daughter was born, on a Saturday. Joe, of course, was watching college football at the time.



"Every time football is on, my daughter watches," DiRaffaele says. "She's 20 months old. I call 'Touchdown' and she does the referee's touchdown signal. She does clipping -- she bends and puts her hand behind her knee. When commercials come on, she walks away. I guess she likes the action of it. My wife has a black shirt with Joe Montana on it going back to pass. My daughter points to it and says, 'Football!' We're a football family."

Ralph Weisbeck's wife likes football, too, but she doesn't watch many games.

"She gets too excited," Weisbeck says, laughing. "She only comes in if we're three touchdowns ahead. She won't watch the game from the beginning; she's afraid they're going to lose. She can't stand losing."

Modern women discover a number of ways to cope with their men on NFL Sundays. They:

• Leave for a few hours.

• Stay, bitch and moan.

• Learn the game.

The rest of Why Men Love Football might be subtitled And The Women Who Want to Kill Them as we suggest possible responses for women struggling with man who plan to watch football come what may.

In the Berger household, Eric's love of football led to separate TVs and separate activities on Sunday. "My wife doesn't get into sports," he says, "but she tolerates it because she knows it's important to me. She knew how it was when we got married and it's not going to change."

Women often feel that football transforms their men into spectators in their own lives. They're probably right. But as one wife put it, "Football keeps him home. It's a hobby. My women friends say, 'Thank God he has something to keep him busy.' "

The same woman almost divorced her husband when he lost his job and filled his days as commissioner of a fantasy football league. They worked that out, but she became a staunch advocate of being anywhere but the living room when her husband pitches camp to watch football. She has no interest in the game. Rather than pouting and tapping her foot, waiting an eternity for the game to end, she'll go out with other disaffected women. Or she'll tackle paperwork brought home from the office.

Image via Wikipedia

Dr. Seppo E. Iso-Ahola says women should accept football as part of their man's behavior. "If you start arguing with that, especially if it's with somebody highly, psychologically invested in football, that is only going to lead to problems," he says. "It is much easier to accept that and say, 'Okay, my husband or boyfriend likes that and chose that and I accept that.' That doesn't cause problems."

"I think each person should have a parallel life," Dr. John M. Silva says. "If I'm going to sit at home all afternoon and watch TV, I shouldn't hold my wife prisoner and make her watch TV. If she wants to go out and tend the garden or go shopping, I think it's important for two things to go on. One, that the woman develops some appreciation for the interests of her spouse, and two, that they also have enough independence in their relationship that they can pursue some separate interests."

There's another good reason for women to flee on NFL Sundays. If they stay, men may expect to be waited on.

A lot of husbands want their wives nearby, even if they are not watching the game. They want them in the house to serve them, answer the phone, keep the kids quiet, get the beer and run to 7-Eleven for more when it runs out.

Hey, doll! We're out of pretzels! Are those nachos ready yet? How 'bout some beer!

"I can see the argument or displeasure with each other," Dr. Bruce C. Ogilvie says. "What can you tell women? Have a women's Sunday, doing things that please them. Leave the home scene because you are not going to change these apes. Do something that brings you pleasure. Be selfish. Go out and do something very, very selfish so you come home and feel totally good about what you have done."

Dr. Stanley H. Teitelbaum recommends that women construct more of a life of their own and develop independent interests so that while their man watches the game, they can do something besides family chores.

"There are couples who can do that," he says, "but there is also a risk, too, because the more people do that then the more they go their separate ways. After a while comes into play new questions: 'How much do they really need each other? How much do they really have with each other? Would they rather go separate ways and get involved in their separate activities and interests or do they really have shared interests and things in common? Do they really want to be together?' Going their own way is okay on Sunday if it's really important to him or on Saturday to watch the game. She can make that accommodation and do other things provided that there are enough other times in the course of their week that they have more mutuality, togetherness and harmony. In that scenario, the relationship probably can work."

Women can find themselves in a no-win predicament if their husbands and boyfriends don't take pains to understand the potential for conflict on Sundays. It doesn't speak well for the survival of these relationships if, to survive, a power game develops in which the husband/boyfriend is in control of the relationship and dictates, "This is what I want to do and this is what I like. Either fit in, go along with it or don't."

Every woman has her own way of dealing with separation anxiety on game day.

Chicago Bear Report managing editor Larry Mayer's second date with the woman he eventually married was at the Bears' 1987 season opener, a Monday night game versus the New York Giants. The Bears won the two previous Super Bowls and Mayer couldn't think of a more exciting place to be. His future bride didn't let on at the time than any place else would have been more exciting to her.

"My wife hates sports," Mayer says. "She was just being polite. She can't stand sports. She only travels on the road with me because the Bears play in good cities. In Tampa, she goes to the mall across the street from the stadium. In New Orleans, she brings a paperback to read in the stadium."




* * *
Railing about a toilet seat perpetually left up would probably prove less aggravating and more constructive than trying to talk a man out of watching football on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon.

"If a woman asks her husband to do things other than watch football, he won't find that acceptable. That can very easily lead to arguments," Iso-Ahola says. "In that context, I can see why violence would happen. These males are very highly invested, psychologically, in this game. Their tolerance level for other things is low. There is psychological data that has shown that when we watch or observe somebody else perform aggressively then our own behavior tends to become aggressive as well.

Therefore when these men are watching football -- an aggressive and violent sport -- their feeling of hostility in general tends to significantly increase. If you have an opportunity or situation at home that lends itself to arguments, then it is easier for the man who is already aggressively aroused, or in a hostile mood, to act."

The expression "football widow" refers to spouses of football fans who become invisible to their families from October to January. If yours is a busy family, working all week or busy with the kids, there is the expectation -- not unfairly -- that on Sunday you'll have some time together. But if the guy is more excited and interested in watching the game on TV than in having an outing with his family, he better expect trouble.

In that kind of stereotypical situation, a wife may feel aggrieved and neglected, that "This is our one day to really be together and go out, but you'd rather sit by the tube and watch football! You'd rather be married to football than me!" The husband retaliates: "Hey, I've worked hard and busted my butt all week. Finally, I have a chance to relax, drink a few beers and enjoy the game. But you won't give me space and the room to relax." He feels nagged and a mutual resentment builds.

One of the things that tends to help women a lot is trying to understand not only their own point of view but to get in the other person's shoes. One of the ways couples can do this is to switch roles. Stand back from being so hot under the collar and role-play with each other, assuming the other person's lines. Have a dialogue with the man expressing the views that he thinks the woman has and the woman expressing the views that she thinks the man has. If they can do that, they are in a position to better understand how the other one feels. Once there is greater appreciation for that, there is more of a foundation for negotiation.

Smart, experienced couples don't wait for NFL Sunday to arrive. They anticipate it before it happens, negotiate their needs ahead of time and trade off. "This Sunday, I'm going to watch the 49ers game and next Sunday we are going to do something else together." Or they'll structure Sunday so that at 4 p.m. she knows he is going to be watching the game. "I'm going to be watching the game but let's do something together in the morning and the afternoon before 4."

Dr. Michael Messner says discussion in social science circles about the viewing of violent sports revolves around whether it is something that helps men blow off steam or something that makes men more aggressive and prone to violence. Most of the evidence compiled by psychologists suggests the latter.

"Viewing aggressive and violent sports like boxing or football is more likely to de-sensitize men to violence and victims of violence," Messner says. "In terms of domestic violence, one of the things that is important to recognize is that when fans identify with teams, half of the fans are losing all the time. So if a man watches an aggressive, violent sport coupled with drinking some alcohol with his friends and his team loses, his aggression and frustration level both simultaneously go up. The tendency, once the game is over, to turn that aggression and frustration on someone close is what explains the fact that women's shelters always report much more activity and business on Super Bowl Sunday. In other parts of the world, during World Cup soccer, the same thing happens."

During the media hype leading up to Super Bowl XXVII in Pasadena, California in 1993, much was made of a report that Super Bowl Sunday is the busiest day of the year for women's shelters. An author of the report, Garland F. White, a sociologist at Old Dominion University, immediately claimed the report's findings were taken out of context. But many social scientists and psychologists nonetheless believe Super Bowl Sunday is a very dangerous day for women.

Some women want to learn about sports and get involved as much as possible themselves so as not to leave this as some sort of exclusive male territory. Other women do the exact opposite and on football Sundays they take shopping days with their women friends and get out.

"Rather than seeing this as something that women need to respond to," Messner says, "I think it's something that men need to think about and talk to each other about. Not necessarily that we should quit liking or watching sports together but I think we should try to understand the way it is connected to other parts of our lives. What it means to us in terms of our relationships to women. Does watching sports and the way we watch sports contribute to more supportive and intimate and peaceful relations with women? Or does it separate us more and make us more likely to be antagonistic and even violent towards women?

"Those are questions that men need to ask themselves," Messner says. "Until we do, women are going to be left trying to find ways to keep themselves safe rather than participating with us as equals."

A completely different school of thought suggests that women can never fully appreciate the game, no matter how hard they try. It's just not in their makeup.

Dr. William Beausay says that the large majority of women found at football games go there not to watch the game, but to accompany their companion. "I used to know the exact percentage of women who go because they love football -- it was about 8.6 percent," he says. Even that small number was made up of women who liked the sport for its pageantry, the atmosphere, the colors, the music and the spirit, Beausay says.

"They would never say the powerful team or an effective team, a great athletic prowess or winning. Those weren't the reasons. There were usually aesthetic reasons for women," he says.




So, according to his research, most women at football games are there because of their men. If the men didn't go, they wouldn't be found dead there.

"I don't think women are socialized in the same way as men," Dr. D. Stanley Eitzen says. "They are raised in the same type of society but they are raised to be feminine. To be feminine is to not be aggressive and not be dominant and they also don't play football. They haven't had that experience for the most part and, in fact, when it comes to football, they are on the sidelines being the supporters, cheering and all of that kind of thing while men are the doers. I think this represents a very sexist kind of society, but that is, in fact, what we are.

"Many women get into football and enjoy it, too" he says. "I don't think they have the same depth of feeling that men do because we have played it. We understand the intricacies of football and the precision that it takes to really have a play work well as well as the level of aggression. I don't know that women understand that because none of their sports in our society really are that way. They can be a little bit aggressive in field hockey and things like that but it is not the same."

Silva says he's intrigued by the way football coaches encourage their young men to develop aggression to be hitters, blockers and tacklers, giving rewards for the "best hit of the week." Best hits are bone-crushers, where the opponent who was tackled does not get up for a while. Players gets decal on their helmets for causing that.

"An ex-Denver Bronco told me that every Monday, some people had envelopes in their lockers with money in them," Silva says. "It was for extra hard hits. That's against league rules but it's just part of this macho thing. I said, don't you realize that if every team does that it increases the level of people getting hurt? He said, 'You don't think of it that way. You think of it on an individual basis and you are being rewarded.' Men have been socialized to understand this mentality; I'm not sure very many women do. In many ways women have been robbed because our work world is an aggressive, tough, rock 'em-sock 'em kind of place where men have the advantage of this kind of experience that women don't."

Men get really upset when their mates cannot identify with something that is as crucial to them as football.




"It is important if you can develop some appreciation and some knowledge for the sport," Silva says. "I don't care which way it goes, male/female, female/male. If the wife is interested in some sport, it behooves the husband to develop some interest and vice versa. Some games, I really do enjoy having my wife watch with me.

"I'll say, 'Do you know what happened right there? Do you know what that call was? Why did the team that recovered get to keep the ball?' " he explains. "Sometimes men watch and we know what is going on but our spouses don't. I find that the more I ask questions, the more knowledgeable my wife gets about the sport and the more knowledgeable she gets the more interested she is. One of the reasons a lot of women are not interested is they don't have a full understanding and appreciation. And when they ask a 'stupid' question, especially in front of your friends, they get ridiculed. What is that going to do?"

Some women gravitate to the game and meet with resistance if they get to liking it too much. They start watching it with their boyfriends, husbands or friends but find that men have a really hard time talking to them about it and taking it seriously.

"My sister told me that it took her husband's friends 10 years to accept the fact that she knew as much as they did about the Raiders," Messner says. "They did eventually learn to respect that she knows the game and she is very happy now that occasionally they will even ask for her opinion on something.

They didn't even know how to talk to a woman about those things. There is an assumption among men that women will not be interested, aren't interested and aren't knowledgeable."

That's been Larry Selvin's experience. Sort of. "Either women don't understand the rules or they don't know the players. If they know the rules and a few of the players, they're tolerable," he says.

"Actually, that goes for men or women."

Dan Jiggetts, the former Chicago Bears player turned sportscaster, enjoys talking football with women. "Most guys will seek out a woman that wants to watch a football game with them," he says. "They're very understanding. When you want to sit down and talk strategy, the women listen. They lock in. The guys say they understand, but the strategy goes over their heads. They're watching who gets knocked on their tail."

"My wife is a Cleveland Browns fan," Atlanta management consultant Mark von Dwingelo says. "When we watch games, she occasionally asks, 'Why'd that happen?' Or, 'Why'd they call that penalty?' I appreciate it. It's only annoying if the Browns are playing the Giants. If the Giants are on, she knows the game will only last three hours -- she can hold her questions. She'll say something to me and I'll say, 'Gretch, what am I doing?' And she'll say, 'Okay, I'll ask you later.'"

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Chapter 22. The Post-Game Report

by Bob Andelman

"I'm always interested in the sportscaster who says, 'This is going to be a screen-pass to the right' before it happens. I'm still trying to figure out how they know that."

Bill Evans
Marketing manager
Columbus, Ohio

If this book were a TV show, this would be the place we'd recap the action. Feel free to play along at home.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

So, why do men love football?

• Action. Crunching bones, banging heads and huge men flying through the air with the greatest of ease. That's what we want to see. Over and over and over again. It's not just a job, it's an adventure.

• Violence. The natural hangover from too much action. "Kill him! KILL him!" We don't want anybody to actually die on the field, but would it be so wrong to temporarily disable a few of the other team's guys? At the height of passion, a strong hit in the backfield sends us over the edge.

• Skill envy. What's the big deal? Anybody could do that! Yeah, right. In our dreams, maybe we can dodge and weave like Emmitt Smith, sideswipe a quarterback the way Santana Dotson does or throw a Hail, Mary bomb like Warren Moon, but in our waking hours we pray long and hard to be granted such skills. Being a star in business or politics doesn't end our yearning to be football heroes.

• Military correlates. In an era of American men with less battlefield experience than any previous generation, football brings us as close to being warriors as we care to be. And for our fathers and grandfathers, it takes them back to what they remember as glorious battles of right over might.

• Early socialization. Some of us are so swamped by football images when we're young boys and teens that we couldn't dislike football even if we wanted to. Not that we do.

• Community support. Our football team -- high school, college or pro -- represents who we are. The North Brunswick Township (N.J.) High School Raiders carry the pride of that community's residents on their shoulders when they clash with the much hated South Brunswick High School Vikings every Thanksgiving. It's an event that draws disparate elements of the community together for a single reason. Once a year, side-by-side, they raise a paper cup and cheer their sons as one.

• Escapism. Every weekend, Saturday and Sunday, we put aside the mundaneness of daily life and commune with men who are bigger than us, stronger and wealthier than us. We forget our problems, our families, our overdue bills, and enter an astral field where nothing matters but winning and cold beer.

• Statistics. By carefully tracking the Chicago Bears' winning percentage in games when they're down by a touchdown going into the two-minute warning, we become better people. No, really.

• Hero worship. Beyond the art of skill envy lies hero worship, the process through which we identify football players with whom we can identify. We then deify these men beyond all rational thought, putting them upon pillars of righteousness that we then chip away at until their careers go up in smoke. Gotta have heroes.

• Male bonding. Five days and six nights out of the week we'd rather be around women. But on Saturday and Sunday afternoons and Monday nights, we'll be hangin' with the fellas, eating fried foods, drinking by the pitcher, screaming language unrepeatable elsewhere and acting like idiots. That's what friendships are made of.

• It goes well with beer. And pretzels. Gotta have pretzels.

For women struggling to understand men who sacrifice their lives to football, the best advice is this: hunker down on the couch with your own bowl of pretzels, pop the top on a cold one and get educated.

Ask questions; demand answers. What exactly is the quarterback reaching for when he puts his hands under the center's rear end? Who decides who gets to catch the ball? And what the hell is the referee talking about, anyway?

Get mad when your guys screws up; celebrate when they score. (Think of each touchdown as an orgasm; your enthusiasm, however contrived, will sound more convincing.) Take cheap shots at the announcers, the coaches and the players -- it's expected. Look for some element of the game with which you can connect, even if it's just that beefy running back who looks great in tight pants. Know that it's not just whether you win or lose; it's how you watch the game.

And don't ask for the remote control until the post-game show credits are rolling.

The End.  

Copyright 1993 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!