Is football (the American kind) the greatest thing in the world? Or is it a sign of all that is wrong with society?
Chances are it’s neither, but that’s not always clear from the headlines. Football can be a polarizing subject in the US. Football fans point to the feel good stories: the real tearjerkers—the hometown kid who is awarded a football scholarship, goes to college, never gets in trouble, graduates, and accomplishes great things—yet none of these stories take place on the football field. Fans relish the stories about college football players befriending youngsters with cancer, high schoolers showing an outstanding display of sportsmanship by forfeiting a game after the opposing team’s school was the scene of a deadly shooting, and the Cincinnati Bengals keeping a player on the practice squad so his seriously ill daughter can have access to health insurance.
Detractors focus more on the lawsuits concerning player likenesses and concussions. They look for (and to be truthful have no trouble finding) the stories about domestic violence, drug use, and alleged hazing scandals.
Football can be spun either way, and a great many people have gotten very good at spinning it in one direction or another. Mark Edmundson, however, is not one of those people.
The title of Edmundson’s book Why Football Matters: My Education in the Game might suggest he focuses on the feel good moments, and there definitely are some such moments. What he really does, though, is examine football with thought and care (and perhaps some affection).
The story opens and closes with father/son memories. In the beginning, it is Edmundson and his father eating chocolate bars and watching Jim Brown. At the end, Edmundson shares the game with his son, nicknamed the Pit Bull, who turns out to be a much better football player than Edmundson ever was. In between, Edmundson details his high school football career, what he learned from it, and what he wants the rest of us to think about.
Each chapter opens with football; sometimes watching football, but most often Edmundson’s memories of playing football and being a Medford Mustang. When Edmundson tries out for the team, he describes himself as “a buttery, oversensitive boy, credulous and shy”; he hoped football would turn him into a warrior. It did not. Instead, he describes a try out system where no one was actually cut—boys just quit: “The coaches rarely tried to encourage them to stay. If a kid couldn’t take it, he couldn’t take it. There was no water to be had on the field and there were no compassionate fatherly talks.”
Edmundson could take it though, and he learned how to run while wearing bulky protection and that tackling really didn’t hurt (at least not until later).
He learned about a lot of other things, too; things relating to character, faith, and loss. Considering American society today and its fascination with participation trophies, Edmundson’s section on loss seems particularly appropriate. He talks about losing a football game and losing his younger sister to cancer. He notes how little good writing there is about loss, and he talks about the importance of learning how to lose.
Losing and its implications in life is not a lesson every football player learns he says, but some “guys get their first experience of losing on a football field, and if they have a coach as shrewd as mine was, they get to figure out a lot about themselves and about the world. They get to learn something about how to lose. They figure out how to assess the situation, take stock of their weaknesses, look ahead, and go to work.”
For every positive, though, there is a negative. Edmundson doesn’t glorify football or make it some type of mystical panacea. He notes the problems. Sometimes instead of teaching people how to lose, football makes people “victory junkies”. Often football teaches character, which sounds like a good thing, but Edmundson notes that character can “imprison” and that it can be “the enemy of imagination, empathy, invention, and of plain, pleasant dreaminess.”
Football, of course, is not just about the players and the coaches. There are owners and boosters, general managers and athletic directors and, of course, the fans. Without these people, without the big money, most likely there would be no football, and this is something Edmundson also makes note of. He compares the game of football to the Battle Royal scene in Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, questions whether or not pro football players are exploited, and notes that NFL doesn’t just stand for National Football League: it also stands for Not For Long.
Edmundson asks questions anyone critical of football (or perhaps anyone with common sense) has asked: “When the New York Giants won the 2012 Super Bowl the city of New York turned out and gave them a ticker-tape parade… Everyone in New York loved it—almost. A number of Iraq War veterans stepped forward and asked the obvious question. What about us? When is our parade? When, they asked implicitly, will you celebrate heroes who are truly heroes?”
Edmundson might come off as a little preachy at times, but it’s clear that he’s still invested in the game. He enjoys being the Pit Bull’s father and the popularity it brings him. He acknowledges that most likely his life would have been “poorer” if he had not played football. Perhaps most telling of all, he lost his graduate diploma while moving house, but he never lost the stained football jersey he wore in high school. Possibly he is cautioning himself as much as he is cautioning the football community when he references Plato and calls football a pharmakon; both a poison and an elixir.