Foreword
The Supreme Spectator Sport
American football is a phenomenon of the American century. Nothing in 1899 was like
1999 football. In the last hundred years, as the United States has moved from second-rate
power to world dominance, U.S. college and pro football leaders have built on a distant
soccer-rugby foundation to invent the nation’s favorite sport.
Reflecting precise attention to American tastes, style and preferences, the inventors,
most of them gifted football players or coaches, have carefully created the game of the
century.
This book, without being a history, is the story of how and why that happened, and who
did it.
From the first, the game’s builders have acted boldly. They have turned over
hundreds of rules and customs. But at any one time, as the sports public in any era has
known, they have acted with deliberation, proceeding so gradually that many football fans
are unaware that the game has been invented incrementally – during the evolutionary
moves of a full century.
My run as a football writer has taken me to the big games of most of that century.
Representing Los Angeles newspapers, I have covered each of the thirty-three Super Bowls.
More than sixty years ago, as a college student doubling as a South Dakota newspaper
reporter, I covered the old Chicago All-Star Game for the first of many times. That was in
1936.
It seemed to me then, as it has ever since, that the sport I watched that first night
– football as created and constantly recreated by and for Americans – is the
world’s supreme spectator sport.
In its first century, football has evolved into America’s most widely accepted
major league pastime: first in the polls, first in the ratings. To viewers and
participants alike, it is the most intriguing of the team games.
For this, there are contradictory reasons. Football is, to begin with, a celebration of
big-hit violence, of daunting physical collisions. Yet at the same time, it is the most
intellectual of the team games, the most intricate, comprehensive and demanding, the most
absorbing to play or see and contemplate. No other game so profoundly challenges body and
intellect alike.
It is football’s combination of physical and mental competition that gets the
attention of so many millions of Americans. And although the violence ensures that only
the strong and courageous may participate, it is the game’s computer complexity that
redeems it for a civilized nation.
This is a sport for those who love a spectacle of courage and drama that you have to
think about to fully enjoy. Football was made for the thinking person.
And it was made.
During the final years of the nineteenth century, the indispensable first moves were
made by groups of Ivy League soccer and rugby players who, searching for something more
cerebral and also rougher, ultimately abandoned both Old-World pastimes.
During the twentieth century, the new game was shaped into what it is today by groups
of inventive football players and coaches: by Yale’s Walter Camp, author of
football’s first rulebook, and by many others, from Knute Rockne of Notre Dame, to
Clark Shaughnessy of Stanford, to Bill Walsh of San Francisco. Just in the last quarter
century, football people have been learning that, as Walsh first demonstrated, the game
can be played more successfully with fast-tempo passing than with ball-control runs –
a sacrilegious finding to those who favor brawn over brains but a culmination of the long
evolution of football both as a game to play and a spectacle to watch.
Elsewhere, in overwhelming numbers, the world is still playing soccer, the game that
was ours once upon a time. Until well after the U.S. Civil War (1861-65), every American
who in the fall months played any game played soccer. We gave it up voluntarily. And,
consciously, we have chosen another course. As anthropologist William Arens noted:
"In contrast to our language and many of our values, football was not forced upon us.
We chose it."
Soccer has been called the best of the kids’ games, but among U.S. adults the
demand has been constant throughout the century for something more imaginative, more
stimulating; and football’s innovators, aware of the demand, have kept supplying it.
Plainly, most of us appreciate having something to look forward to on a crisp fall
weekend. This is a book for the many who choose football.
I can identify with them all. Scrolling back through the years of an active newspaper
career, I note that I have spent more time on football than all other sports combined.
This has been consistently true in Los Angeles, where, after starting on the old Examiner
and then the Herald-Examiner, I had the luck to join the Times in time to participate in
the most remarkable newspaper adventure of the century, the Otis Chandler renaissance.
During Chandler’s twenty years as publisher (1960-80), the Times rose from
mediocrity to become one of the world’s two or three best and most profitable
newspapers. In part this happened, analysts have said, because Chandler and his editor,
Bill Thomas, stressed in-depth articles at luxurious length with datelines from everywhere
– an agenda that brought me assignments of unprecedented scope for a sports reporter.
After a summer assignment in Europe one year, I went from beat writer covering the local
pro football club to a position that then existed on no other paper: national pro and
college football writer. And in these pages you will meet some of the coaches and players
I have known, many of them artists or artisans whose vision and actions changed and
enriched football in its big century.
From the beginning, I have held to a single course: I track winners. Over all the
years, I have never voluntarily entered a losers’ locker room. Even though some of
the nation’s best writers insist that losers are the best story, an inference that
leads them to specialize in heartbreak, turmoil, gossip or scandal – the fruit of
human frailty – my interest is in the game itself and in whatever brings game-time
success. The will to achieve doesn’t, I’m sure, lead automatically to
achievement. Winning doesn’t just happen, and for me the most compelling question is
always the same: "What did you do to win?"
Not that I’m touting my way to anyone else, and not that I have anything against
losers. Some of my best friends are losers. But I have spent most of the American century
as a witness to the sport that was built in America to challenge the human body and mind.
And every year without exception, the most appealing contestants have been, to me, the
individuals who could meet the challenge.
Bob Oates
Marina del Rey, Calif.
October 1, 1999
Excerpts from Chapter 5:
Champions: All Pros of All Kinds ...
Football in America: Game of the Century retails for $19.95 and is available in
bookstores everywhere. It can be seen and purchased through Amazon.com, QualitySportsBooks.com,
or by calling the publisher direct at 1-800-464-1116 |
