On Football

The scene of father and son passing the old pigskin back and forth is a quintessential image of the American family. Indeed, the paternal engendering of football and sports appreciation has become so Americanly archaic that the story line is now conveniently captured in AT&T high speed wireless commercials. The story’s montage is cinematically choreographed to appropriately dramatic music: fathers pass the ball to their sons, take them to football games, and encourage and inspire them to go out for high school teams, perhaps college teams. Fathers in the stands cheer their sons on into a manhood that seems to comprise all the sportsman-like values of America: fierce competition, fair play, hard work, and determination. Through football we see a geneses of American manhood and a whole future of beers and good old father-son, male-male bonding time in the stands or around a big screen TV.

Yet this is not football’s only American story. I, for one, drink too many things with maraschino cherries, little umbrellas, and fancy garnish for male-male bonding time over beer and a big screen TV. At 21 my voice has yet to drop low enough to even make the shouts, grunts, and yells that pass for communication on a football team. Though I am familiar enough with brightly colored spandex pants and net jersey shirts, I would never dream of paring those with cleats, helmets, and pads. And yes, I think that a football game would be infinitely more entertaining if both the cheerleaders and the players got to use pom-poms.    

Football’s integration into America is so complete that not even a nerdy, skinny, white gay guy can escape it. Indeed, football and I have a long and tawdry history. Our sorted affair stretches back to the depths of my bookish, asthmatic, illiterate 8-year-old childhood. My ex high school football star father decided that I needed to be familiar with sports for the “breadth of my education as a person”. Though most kids would have relished the opportunity to spend some quality athletic time with their dad, at the time I felt differently.

Back in the day, my father and I had nothing but quality time. My sister lived with my mother. I went to all my father’s piano tuning appointments after school. Because dad did not allow cable and I was dyslexic, my father would read to me for hours on end instead. Time playing sports meant that dad was going to take longer to get through the anthology of Sherlock Holmes we had just gotten into. So, I threw a knockout drag-out fit complete with tears and flailing limbs that no line backer could have blocked. Yet dad’s unilateral parental order stood firm and by the end of our “ball time” he usually got me to enjoy myself. 

I moved in with my mother in 5^th grade. In middle and high school, football and I renewed our old enmity. I found out just how awful teenage football players can be. For the adolescent boy, athletics is the gateway to a masculine brotherhood and future homo-sociality that tends to ward off bulling and teasing. At the time I was more concerned with my magic card collection and beating my friends at Super Smash Brothers than playing a sport. Mother decided that it could not hurt to ask her best friend’s husband to “pass the pigskin” with me. Though I did not know it at the time, looking back it was probably the first time that I ever had a crush on another man.

Though I couldn’t yet articulate these feelings to others, or myself, I grew to more than adore Jake over the time I spent passing the ball with him, trying to pay attention to foot ball games, listening in rapt attention to his explanations of the rules of the game. Eventually my mother had a falling out with her friend and I stopped hanging out with Jake.

After I graduated high school I went to work for as a legal assistant part time while going to community college. Our common love of fine food and fine cooking made my boss and I fast friends. Hating to get left out of a good meal, I would often come over to my boss’s (who having gone to university of Texas is a die-hard Long Horns fan) for dinner and football. I found that I was perfectly capable of limiting polite dinner conversations to commercials when there was plenty of “classic football food” around: duck and sour cherry sauce on my plate and pinot noir in my glass. After much pate and sherry, wine and food, liquor and dessert I came to understand that even a nerdy gay man can learn to appreciate beefy men in metallic spandex pants clobbering each other on a football field.

This year my friend Tim, who I met rock climbing in Bishop invited me to the super bowl party he and his roommate, Leo, were throwing. Despite my tawdry history with the sport, I had a blast. From what I could gather, the crowd at the party consisted approximately of two major groups. Tim is deaf and many of his friends are deaf, gay, rock climbers (or some other combination there of). Leo is also a rock climber; he is a lawyer as well. There was a fair amount of his friends too: gay, rock-climbing, lawyers (or some combination there of).

It was the most fun I have ever had watching a game simply because of the diversity of the people there. Whenever a successful play was made, the TV room would be filled with a mixture of lawyerly cheers, a flurry of joyous signing, and the happy ululations of people who clearly have no idea what their voices sound like. The happiness and excitement of the game was literally heard, seen, and signed through the air.

Conversations, spoken, scribbled on scraps of paper, typed out on iPhones, and signed centered on topics as technical as coaching decisions or topics as frivolous as the virtues of football player’s spandex adorned asses. I managed to have a conversation in my pathetic attempt at broken spanglish regarding work, college, and cute guys. There was some serious critique of the Black Eyed Peas half time show debauchery. In the kitchen among the baking spinach puffs and pizza, beer bottles, wine, and liquor a group of muscle-bound, rock-climbing lawyers used a storm of legal jargon to discuss prospects in the federal gay marriage case.

It is my impression that when people think of football often they often think only of the stories told in the commercials. You know the one about the production macho white men with beef for brains. I am just as guilty as anyone else: since the days of “ball time” with dad I had always thought myself (at least in the back of my mind) too nerdy, too gay, too sophisticated, and just not bro enough to enjoy football. But regardless, it is foolish to let self-conscious insecurities prevent you from having a good time.

As I flitted from conversation to conversation at Tim’s party I realized that there were no macho men with beef for brains there. In fact not one of the people I talked to lived a life depicted in commercials, and really no one does. Though this is a rather simple observation to make, its profound nature (in my opinion) lies in the fact that it is often neglected. The existence of Tim’s party in and of itself is a repudiation of the American commercial stories.

Though undoubtedly there are quite a few homes in American that follow the commercial bro and beer paradigm, there are parties out there having duck and sour cherry sauce and spinach puffs instead of hot wings with the game. There are parties where people sign their cheers, instead of shouting them. There are parties were the men have the pom-poms and the women have the beer.

I think that the story that was told, at this super bowl party, and parties across the nation, was merely one of people coming together to have a good time. And really isn’t that the more American story? E pluribus unum, out of many one. Despite all the divergent and different stories of people across the nation, on super bowl Sunday those stories converge around something as inane as beefy men in metallic spandex. Whether this convergence happens around a football game, the election of a president, the fighting of a war, or the shooting of a congresswoman, it is quintessentialy a human story and it is the American story. The only question that remains then is how do we want to tell it?