Football (Black &) Blues

Travel makes the days go by faster. I can't decide if that is because I'm busy seeing all kinds of neat, interesting things (statues of famous people, old churches, girls in bikinis, puddles of barf outside a Shanghai nightclub), or if it's just because I miss football.

One thing about football is that it helps you mark the time. From kickoff on Sunday afternoon, to the last whistle on Monday night, all you think about is football. You eat it in the form of chilli and cheese. You drink it in the form of Budweiser beer (unless you had a particularly hard Saturday night, in which case you drink football in the form of orange juice and aspirin). You sleep it in the fitful rest of a man who took a lousy quarterback in the fantasy draft.

The remainder of the week is nothing more than waiting for football to come back around again. You check the injury reports, the stats, the blogs. You watch SportsCenter for the 18th time, never realizing that the highlights won't change: the receiver who dropped the touchdown pass and blew the spread along with your fifty bucks will still drop the damn pass, no matter how many times you watch it.

Football is a love/hate affair. Sometimes it is as boring as a young woman, other times as torturous as a Motley Crue reunion tour. But always it is what we want it to be: a game filled with the expectation of victory, and a chance to watch someone get his clock cleaned.

That is, unless you're traveling.

Travel is a hell of a lot of fun, and you can learn a lot about many people and places. One thing you learn very quickly is that nobody watches football beyond the borders of North America. Not only that, but the sad sacks call a completely different game by the same name.

It would seem to make sense. A bunch of wimps running around on a field kicking a beach ball to each other. They use their feet a lot, so hey, the game is called football. Once in a great while, these masters of the Olympic event 'jogging' will even kick the ball towards a barn-sized net. And, once in an even greater while, the ball will go into said net. After that, the fans sing a song and beat the crap out of each other. Where do I sign up?

When there is more violence in the stands than there is on the field, the activity you are playing is a game, not a sport. And when the game you are playing is 90 minutes long but can still end in a 0-0 tie, you are playing an extremely stupid game at that.

I'm a little bit tired of hearing that sooner or later, soccer is going to be a popular sport in the United States and Canada. It isn't. It never will be. Everytime I sit down to watch a football game in a foreign country (relegated to the back of the bar with the small TV, sans volume) some European loudmouth thinks it's time for a soccer discussion. It goes something like this:

"What are you watching, mate?"

"Football," grumbles the irritable Canadian, as he picks up his tuna sandwich because the place doesn't serve wings.

"That ain't football. That's rugby for women."

"Mmm-hmm."

"Football is what you call soccer."

"Yeah."

"Soccer's big in America now. It's going to be bigger than baseball."

"Why's that?" asks the very irritable Canadian, though he already knows the answer because he's heard it five hundred and sixty-two times before.

"All the kids are playing it. When they grow up, they'll play soccer."

563.

I would wager that right now, some poor Canadian is sitting in a Norwegian bar that has satellite reception, and he is listening to the same garbage.

To the Euro-weenies, let's put something on the record: the kids who play soccer are there because their parents won't let them play a violent sport. Football and hockey are out, and fastballs scare the hell out of mothers, so baseball's out, too. Unless you're over six feet tall by the time you hit grade 11, basketball is also a no-go. That leaves soccer. Your passionate game of kick-the-ball-around is there to raise the self-esteem of children that wouldn't have amounted to a damn on the grid iron, and to keep hockey players in shape during the off-season.

People are not going to watch soccer in North America. It's made up of all the people that got cut from the other sports. Sure, there might be a few kids that played soccer as their first choice, but who the hell wants to watch a guy like that play anything? And just because we did something as kids doesn't mean we're going to keep doing it as adults. Using the old 'you show me yours, I'll show you mine' might have worked while hiding in the cushion fort, but it doesn't go over so well on the nightclub circuit.

One thing that does fascinate me about soccer and its fans are the songs they sing. Before the game and after, they trash the USA to no end and make fun of the sports they play. But during the game, virtually all of the songs the Europeans sing (yes, including the O-lay, O-lay, O-lay ditty) were written by American composers. Weird.

Euro-boobs aren't the only ones who don't watch football, yet complain about it constantly. South Africans and Australians are even worse, because they play rugby.

I dig rugby. It's a tough game to play. It was the forerunner of football. Indeed, the Canadian Football League was known as the Canadian Rugby Football Union in 1884, then the Canadian Rugby Union, then the Canadian Football Council, and finally the Canadian Football League in 1958.

The Canadian and American games were both born from rugby, and one of the first recognized football games took place between Harvard and McGill University. There isn't enough time to go into all the ways that the American and Canadian games diverged, but there is enough time to tell the bonehead from Tennessee whom I met that the CFL didn't start in the 1970's, and they didn't change the 4-down rule to 3-downs 'just to be different.' The 4th down appeared in American college ball in 1912. The Canadian game simply kept the 3-down format.

Football came from rugby, but it was a much tougher game than rugby from the start. On-field deaths were not unknown, and a closed fist punch to the face was a legitimate way to bring a man down.

Aussie Rules football might look tough, until you notice that the highlights you see are the only hits that took place in the entire game. Rugby itself is missing two critical elements: the football rule that allows you to hit a man as hard as you can, anywhere on his body, without needing to use your arms, and the ability to blindside the man even if he doesn't have the ball.

Rugby tackles hurt. Football tackles are devastating. But it is the rugby player and rugby fan who freaks out whenever the subject of which sport is 'tougher' comes up. Football fans and players pay this argument no mind for two reasons: we know football is tougher, and we don't watch rugby, anyway.

The pads argument is usually the first to come out. Rugby fans complain that football players wear pads and helmets. This argument stuns me with its idiocy. Do the rugby fans mean to tell me that a game that requires armour in order to avoid serious injury or death is less tough than the one that does not? And do they believe that football started with all of this armour in the first place? Fat chance.

The history of football is actually a history of governing councils trying to keep young men from killing each other. Americans and Canadians took rugby and turned it into the most cruel, barbaric sport imaginable. Since then, it has been a struggle to keep it as sane and safe as possible while still allowing men to beat each other's brains in.

As far as I know, rugby has not changed any of its major rules in decades. The absence of helmets and flak jackets on their players is proof positive that the game is not, on the whole, life threatening (rugby does not allow a tackle above the shoulders, nor does it allow 'hitting,' that is, tackling without using the arms to wrap up).

A quick look at football's history tells you why the game was almost banned on more than one occasion. In 1892, Harvard used a new formation against Yale called the 'flying wedge.' It was developed, oddly enough, by a chess master.

The front line of the offense would interlock their arms and plow forward, the ball carrier behind them. Defenders would have to rip this wall apart to get to the man. It must have been Dislocated Shoulder City. Any defender who fell down was trampled beneath the wedge. Add the face punch into the mix, and these college students would have been a bloody mess.

Which they were. Seven players were carted off the field in what one paper called "a dying condition." There were so many injuries to Yale that they took it personally. The two schools broke off all official contact for the next two years.

The brutality got worse. Wedge formations and the act of dragging your ball carrier forward (in effect standing him up for an especially painful hit) made the game lethal. By 1900, serious injuries and on-field deaths were a regularity.

There's no way that football could be started from scratch today. It's incredible that it lasted at all. Remember that these were college students. Pro football was still small time, and the NFL didn't yet exist. Mothers were shipping their boys off to Yale, Harvard, and Rutgers to get an education, and then watching them come home in a pine box.

1905 was a bad year. 18 college students died playing football, and the game was banned in a number of schools. President Roosevelt finally stepped in and told colleges to clean up the game, or he'd campaign to have football banned outright.

Taking heed, nineteen colleges got together and drummed up some new rules. If you've ever wondered how the NCAA got it's start, now you know (it was originally called the Intercollegiate Athletics Association of the United States; its specific purpose was to find a way to keep football, and its players, alive). The 1906 meeting invented the neutral zone, wrote up some new laws about tackling, and also codified the laws for the forward pass. With the formal entry of the forward pass, football kissed rugby good-bye.

The new rules were a good idea, but they didn't help much. In 1908, 33 more college players would die playing with the pigskin. Someone has pointed out that with a limited number of schools playing ball at the turn of the century, you had close to a 50/50 shot of buying the farm stepping on the football field. Tough odds.

If the internet, television, and SportsCenter had existed back then, football would have been as dead as the players it killed. No one would have stood for endless highlights of college kids being carried off the field, dead and broken. If it happened just once today it would be dreadful, and the second guessing of the game would be extreme. But thirty-three times in one season?

What's incredible is that our forebears stood for it, and that college students still wanted to play the game. Helmets, pads, and various rule changes throughout the years have made the game safer, but only safer in the quotation mark sense. Today, about 8 players a year get killed playing football. That's from all levels combined, making it small potatoes compared to the old days, though a staggering number of injuries flood the locker rooms each weekend.

Concussions, for one. 40 000 of them are reported annually among high school players alone, and those are only the kids that get treated. Concussions are such a certainty that NFL teams have a chart for each player. If a player gets nailed in the head, they know what questions to ask that particular man in order to find out if he's still got all his marbles. And even if he does, that's not to say that he'll have them later on. Former players report nausea and forgetfulness well after they retire, a chronic symptom of having your head kicked in. It will be with them for the rest of their lives.

But, hey, who needs helmets?

It's insane for us to love this game. Absolutely crazy. But love it we do. Perhaps it is only a coincidence that football is by far the sport with the most injuries, and also the sport with the highest television ratings and fan attendance. Perhaps.

Traveling puts me through intense football withdrawal. I love the game, brag about it, want to jam it down a Euro-weenie's throat every time they crack wise. It says something about me and my culture that I long to see a man carry a ball over a white line, even if he has to destroy himself to do it.

But then, what does it say about the player?