A century of football: The 'ideal' and risk of 'decadence'

The Super Bowl will be played today between the New England Patriots and the Atlanta Falcons. Longtime readers of this column will know that, as a diehard Seattle Seahawks fan, I had hoped for a different outcome even before the game is played.

Nonetheless, later today, I — along with an estimated worldwide audience of well over 100 million people —will be sitting in front of a wide-screen TV, eating chips and salsa, drinking beer (in my case, non-alcoholic) and yelling at the top of my lungs while watching the Big Game.

Yes, it would be more fun if the Seahawks were playing, but the Super Bowl — and by extension, football itself — is obviously a ritual that far exceeds team loyalty.

So what is it that makes this game so riveting and so enduring? It is a question that probably has many answers, but I went back exactly 100 years ago to the thoughts of a later-famous political scientist who addressed the 11th annual convention of the National Collegiate Athletic Association on Dec. 28, 1916, on “The Value of Football.”

Raymond Garfield Gettell (he was born on the day in 1881 when the ill-fated James Garfield was sworn in as president) was then a professor at Amherst College, and not coincidentally also its football coach. A few years later, he would write his most influential book, “The History of Political Thought,” but one suspects that he was also an avid student of the history of the relatively new sport of football.

On Jan. 2, 1917, the Daily Inter Lake picked up an Associated Press story about Gettell’s speech, labeling it “Football Praised by College Prof.” I ran across it while doing research for another story, and was surprised at how the insights from 100 years ago still rang true.

Gettell noted that in all civilizations, the most successful peoples were those that exhibited an intense general interest in games or contests.

“The Olympic games in Greece, the gladiatorial contests in Rome, and the tournaments of the Middle Ages alike were characterized by the enthusiastic zeal of those actively engaged, by the presence of crowds of frenzied spectators, and by the interest and attention centered upon them by the public at large.”

Gettell acknowledged the critics’ complaints that football is too violent, spurs gambling, suffers from those who employ unsportsmanlike methods, can result in “enormous expenditures.” He even noted that the sport can result in “false standards [being] created in the minds of growing school boys,” something which is probably even more true today. But he argued that it would not be such particular criticisms that would lead to the end of a great sport, but rather the common decline, or as he put it “the decadence,” of the people.

Such a decline probably seemed impossible in 1916. America was at the top of her power, and football thrived — especially at that time college football. Rivalries between Ivy League teams, as well as between, for instance, the colleges in Missoula and Bozeman in Montana, were already well-established. Soon professional leagues would be created and the sport would hold even greater sway over the hearts and minds of Americans.

“Each Saturday during the season, thousands assemble to witness the contests, additional thousands, even in the remotest parts of the country, crowd around bulletin boards, which give detailed descriptions of the plays or announce the scores, and still other thousands turn first to the sporting columns of the Sunday morning newspapers. A game that inspires such widespread devotions must rest upon certain vital underlying principles of human nature.”

It is those principles which provide the logical explanation for why football is still popular today — and why tens of millions of fans will watch the Super Bowl even though their own teams, like mine, have long since been vanquished.

Most importantly, “Football is not a contest between individuals. It is a contest between groups or teams. The union of eleven men under their captain typifies the characteristic human factor of organization. In no other game is the individual, as individual, of so little moment, and the unit, or team, so closely integrated.”

Gettell notes that football, by subordinating the individual interest to the welfare of the larger unit, “reproduces on a small scale that process of organized social effort by which man first attained supremacy over the world of nature, and by which the more highly organized and more closely co-operating peoples have conquered and surpassed their less advanced rivals.”

That latter part, of course, is politically incorrect by today’s intellectually timorous standards, but it does accurately depict the ways of the world, however much some people don’t like them. It also explains why “non-competitive, participatory only” versions of football or basketball are so fundamentally unsatisfying.

“Football, while retaining the virtues of physical combat, remedies its worst evils by emphasizing organization, co-operation and obedience. These necessitate self-sacrifice, subordination, mutual aid and fair play. They discipline the individual, teach self-control and inculcate principles of honor and loyalty. Especially do they build up an ideal.”

It is that ideal which has always turned football players and other athletes into idols, especially since the latter part of the 20th century, when there have been few leaders who could inspire the citizenry to be part of something greater than themselves.

“More than any other sport [football] retains the vital elements of physical combat and necessitates an exhibition of all its essential factors — strength, speed, skill and cunning. In addition to this primitive lust for battle, it satisfies the higher and distinctly civilized interest in organization, co-operation and the skilled inter-relation of individual effort directed to a common purpose. It typifies the highest human achievement in its unusual emphasis on discipline and obedience, on the subordination of the individual to authority and law. Finally, in its purpose and in its spirit it represents that highest craving of the human soul, the striving for an ideal.”

It is surely that ideal which also accounts for the popularity of football, but I am not alone in noting that this year’s TV ratings for the NFL have seen a rather precipitous decline. Could that be because of another aspect of football — one that Professor Gettell did not comment upon directly: The curious fact that the tools of organization and cooperation used by each team are wielded unmercifully in warfare against a similarly equipped team. Teamwork is thus used in the furtherance of division and ultimately dominance. Is it possible that when the humiliation of an opponent becomes more important than the principles of teamwork, a tipping point may be reached where the ideal crumbles?

It brings to mind the great national debate we are currently engaged in, where right and left have aligned into political armies whose sole purpose appears to be to vanquish the other. This works well enough in football, I suppose, where one team can prevail and be declared the best, but does it really work in political debate? Can America be long sustained if we divide into enemy camps and work independently to destroy each other?

It would seem not. Among nations, the “higher and distinctly civilized interest in organization, co-operation and the skilled inter-relation of individual effort” must be “directed to a common purpose” or else it is all for naught. While, in football, the American team and the National team can oppose each other without long-term damage, that is not the case in politics. We will either join together and become “one nation … indivisible” or we can expect a steady erosion of liberty and justice and the other ideals for which we have stood.

The result? A “decadence of the people,” as Gettell described it — or as W.B. Yeats prophesied a few years later in 1919, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”

But don’t mind me. Enjoy the game. I will. And remember, Go Hawks!

Frank Miele is managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake.