“Pro football is like nuclear warfare. There are no winners, only survivors.”
– Frank Gifford
Insert groan here. Not only are a few of the same terms used in war and football, but people are obsessed with this. The biggest problem is uppity people like the late Lewis Mumford, who hated sports and wrote crap like this:
“Team sports rank only above war among the least effective reactions against the machine.”
Oh, the machine, and how it crushes us all.
And then John Limon in Writing After War: American War Fiction From Realism to Postmodernism (a book with some good things in it, just not the football stuff) cites Mumford and writes crap like this:
“Football – with its long bombs, blitzes, trenches, etc. – is a verbal compendium of twentieth- century war, so that the football novel ought to be the non-combatant’s Vietnam novel . . . The neat symmetry of the sports metaphor in terms of literary effects is simple to complete. If the baseball novel is meta-literary, the basketball novel anxiously literary, then the football novel is anti-literary.”
That is nonsense. Anti-literary? There’s maybe one good football novel per decade on average, and there’s far too few to find much meaning in which to extrapolate what it IS. Whether Limon has bad taste in writers or football is unclear, but he refers to Norman Mailer’s Why Are We In Vietnam as “the apotheosis of the football novel”. It’s one of the worst football books this writer’s found (out of the current 401 this writer has read), with no real insight into the game. I won’t get into Mailer stabbing his wife, cause it’s hump day and I’m in a good mood.
According to Limon,
Football and war . . . are simultaneously the arenas in which
1) obsolete language is revived and
2) contemporary language is invented.
It’s a stretch. If you come up with a play, you’ve got to call it something. Only a few of the words in football have any military history. Go ahead, look through a playbook, there’s many online. You won’t find many military terms. You’ll find all sorts of weird terms, but most include a letter to give the players a hint of what it means, L or R for left and right, S and W for strong and weak, etc. Many are tagged with blocking calls or rush stunts or coverage wrinkles. Sure, there are blitzes, but there are also dogs, cats, snakes, and all sorts of other terms. An almost endless assortment, as many playbooks are hundreds of pages long.
Note: There’s an essay by Walker Percy, “Naming and Being,” about naming things that’s highly recommended but has no bearing on football. But Walker Percy’s great!
Possibly the greatest living American novelist wrote this:
“I reject the notion of football as warfare. Warfare is warfare. We don’t need a substitute because we’ve got the real thing.
– Zapalac (character) in End Zone by Don DeLillo
Now that’s writing!
Perhaps a man named David Boss put it best:
“Professional football is a game, not a war. It is for a Sunday afternoon, not forever. It is for win or lose, not life or death . . . but for a few hours each Sunday it is the ultimate and only conflict, resolved by the same classic determinants: speed, strength, skill, strategy, tactics, courage, aplomb.”
– David Boss, The Pro Football Experience
There’s another book worth reading! It seems almost unknown, but it’s great. I got mine on Amazon for $0.01 plus shipping. You wanna hate Amazon, but then they sell you a great book for ONE CENT. Them’s the breaks.
This writer believes there are only three classic football novels, and they’re vastly different and highly recommended for people who read AND like football:
End Zone by Don DeLillo
North Dallas Forty by Peter Gent
If I Don’t Six by Elwood Reid
I wish I had some lame military/football jargon to wrap this article up with. Alas, I don’t.
Whiskey Over Milk 