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 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!