Yesterday the 49ers won in amazing fashion against the New Orleans Saints, scoring the winning touchdown with 9 seconds to go. The two teams scored 28 points combined in the last four minutes, as the lead kept changing hands. In the end the Niners prevailed, sending the fans in Candlestick Park--that football palace positioned at the edge of San Francisco--into a frenzy.
Over in Oakland I was quite excited myself. Just like when the Giants won the World Series in 2010, I am shamelessly hopping onto the fairweather fan's bandwagon. I hope the Niners go to the Super Bowl and prevail, but whatever happens I'll totally lose interest once the off-season starts.
The National Football League has two conferences, the American Football Conference (AFC) and the National Football Conference (NFC). When I was a kid my dad cheered for the Browns, then and now part of the AFC. Since the Browns never went to the Super Bowl, our duty was always to cheer for the AFC team in the Super Bowl. The Niners were in the NFC (still are), which meant we couldn't cheer for them in the big game. In 1985 the Niners played the Miami Dolphins in the Super Bowl. The Dolphins represented the AFC. So Dad and I cheered uproariously as the Dolphins players were introduced. Dad's best friend Danny was not as strict in his AFC loyalties, and cheered for the Niners instead. Danny was smarter than us; the Niners won, 38-16. (That game was played at Stanford Stadium, so one could argue that the Niners had essentially a home field advantage.) Those were the glory years for the Niners, and now the city can taste them again.
All that said, it's a guilt-inducing time to be a football fan. Aging veterans are dealing with the fallout of a lifetime of sustaining concussions. And as Jonah Lehrer reports, we know much more than we used to about how hard football is on teenage players. It seems likely that, over time, fewer parents will allow their boys to play what is without doubt a brutal game. Maybe this is all part of a very gradual fade-out from the gladiator days, when it was socially acceptable to watch people fight to the death.
And yet...even while knowing its ugliness there is an appeal to watching a football game. I get very excited when my Northwestern Wildcats make it to a postseason bowl, only to become very disappointed when they lose. I vicariously place my hopes in them, enduring an emotional rollercoastser for no rational reason whatsoever.
Yeah, it's dumb; but so are all allegiances, once you really stop to examine them. Yes, there are far better uses for the amount of money that flows into college and professional sports. Yes, televised football games are vehicles for the relentless marketing of crappy consumer goods that we either do not need or will be bad for our health. True, true and true.
And yet we watch--millions of people do, mostly men but many women as well. There's a primal connection between an athletic spectacle and a community's conception of itself. Those who would challenge the primacy of football and other sports are on solid moral ground; but if they scold and screech they will not prevail. As always, it's not what you say but how you say it.
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