A sort of game called 'football'

Many years ago - actually BBT (Before Boob Tubes) - a talented comedian recorded a tongue-in-cheek monologue about the growing popularity of football (baseball was then still the national sport). He explained, in his country-boy way, how he attended a game and was swept along by a rather frightening crowd making their way into a place where a bunch of seats surrounded a cow pasture marked with white lines.

After a wonderfully humorous description of what he then witnessed, the homespun entertainer concluded that it was some sort of game, where the idea was to get a hold of a funny looking ball, then run with it, from one end of the pasture to the other, without getting knocked down by some other fellers who wanted that ball, or else stepping in something.

Our national version of football (there are, of course, several others around the world) hasn't changed much over the years. About the only difference today is in that there's nothing funny about what it has become. Most of our homes' and business' wide-screen televisions are tuned to live broadcasts of football games from Friday to Monday; in between they are playing reruns of prior games, which groups of incoherent experts discuss ad nausea, while using words of no more than one syllable.

Football is a national disgrace and waste. It costs hundreds of dollars to sit in ordinary seats at most games, and food is triple the price you'd pay in a restaurant just outside the stadium. Yet people on welfare manage to take their families to such meaningless events.

Football has become so important to most of us today that it takes precedence over even sex, beer and pickup trucks. Colleges and universities increasingly pay more attention to their football programs than to any other facet of their once-useful institutions. And finally, football has no redeeming social or economic value whatsoever. Indeed, it can be argued that it weakens our nation in many significant ways.

All contact sports appeal to man's basest, uncivilized, primitive instincts; that has been so since earliest recorded history. The Mongols who first set foot on the Americas brought with them "games" of extreme violence, in which surviving losers were often put to death in brutal ways. Archaeological evidence of such games is available in many of the nations south of us.

Native Americans also apparently enjoyed violent games of physical combat, such as one that became today's lacrosse.

We humans have strange fascination with violence. Think, if you will, about how much of our movie and television entertainment is based on violence; about how we slow our cars to a crawl while passing emergency vehicles at an accident scene on the highway; and then there are those screaming mobs of blood thirsty fans at sweaty boxing and wrestling matches. Curious, isn't it: When someone uses dogs to fight dogs, the public roundly condemns them, but human against human - that's just fine.

As mankind advances through the ages, many have worked to subdue those primitive instincts. They continue trying to elevate man above other animal forms, such as the hyena, but they seem to be shoveling against the tide.

The most advanced civilization of its time, the Greeks, enjoyed watching naked wrestlers sadistically dominate one another, along with pugilists beating each other senseless. When the Roman emperors had troubles controlling their ignorant populations, they gave them savage games, in which animals ripped humans apart and men fought each other to the death.

Our form of football is little different from those spectacles; in some interesting ways it even bears an uncomfortable relationship with warfare between nations. Up until well after our Revolutionary War, armies faced each other in parallel lines before combat, much as do football teams when arranged at the scrimmage line.

One newspaper article recently, and appropriately, headlined an upcoming football game between two of our military academies as "When Army Battles Navy." Early armies sometimes put up their champion against that of the enemy, in one-on-one combat, to decide the outcome of which nation or tribe was the winner. Haven't our football games become that? Don't we, strangely and inappropriately derive some sort of underserved personal pride and pleasure from becoming "number one," because our mercenaries beat their mercenaries in a violent, physical contest?

Football has no redeeming value: not sociologically nor economically; yet we worship at that pagan altar, even sometimes referring to winning coaches as "saints," and making idolized heroes of muscular athletes that are paid obscenely well to fight symbolic battles for our vain and meaningless glory.

Football creates nothing that neither improves nor supports this nation. It adds nothing to the Gross National Product. Indeed, it wastes resources, human and other, that could be productive.

It is sad enough that football is as important as it has become in the general population, but its infection has spread to once-isolated college campuses, where it eats at the learning which is supposed to take place there. When football first began on college fields, it was only an intramural sport (although admittedly a rough one). Those who played college football then were every bit as much real students as were non-players. That is clearly not the situation today, wherein a majority of college teams are, literally, professional athletes. They are paid in many devious ways, and seldom break a book while studying farcical courses such as "Artificial Turf Management 101."

If you think I am being unfairly critical of college football, think, if you will, of such headlines as "Alabama is Number One!" Now Alabama, of course, is a state in our Union. Is it the state to which that large print was referring? No, it's a state university, which is first in what? It is not for academics; instead it's football - because they had the better team of mercenaries, who don't really give a hoot about the state, the school or its newly anointed, "number one" students.

Colleges and universities are created (supposedly) to advance the educations of persons needing continued formal training in subjects such as engineering, science, mathematics, history, agriculture, etc. Professional football has no place on any college campus.

I have heard some argue that college football gives students a needed sense of belonging. What blathering nonsense! Inner city gangs and organized crime syndicates offer a sense of belonging, but do we need them?

A healthy student body can be justifiably proud of the scholastic reputation of its school; no one needs sports to create genuine pride in association with a university. Do Oxford, Yale, Columbia, Princeton or MIT need winning football teams? Obviously not!

Isn't it time that we all took a deep breath, sat back with the TV off and the beer unopened and considered what our consuming fascination with football is doing to us, rather than for us? The first step to kicking the habit that preys on everyone is to let universities know that professional football is not allowed on campus. All college players must be full-time students, earning decent grades, by themselves, in real courses, and they must not, in any way, be "paid" for playing.

Makes sense, doesn't it? Oh well, I tried.