Brawl in the Afternoon

IT is an existential thing tor a skinny and nearsighted kid to careen around a football field, with only a few woefully insignificant pads for protection and surrounded by friends, reaching for a pass that always just eludes his grasp. It is something that has happened to most of us, alas, this stretching toward the heroic, and it’s this familiarity with struggle that helps make pro football—Partisan Review’s William Phillips called it “the intellectual’s secret vice”—our circus maximus.

Oh, there are other reasons. Our leisure time has increased. So has our need for heroes untainted by all those infernal ambiguities. And the tube, which has brought us war and the Weathermen, also carries the instant replay, allowing us to savor the golden moments with no more effort than sipping a beer. Pro football emerges as splendid theater, the best we’ve got, catharsis for Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew and George Plimpton, as well as Everyman. And unlike the conventional theater, you don’t know how it’s going to come out. The shrewd men who run television know this, and are willing to pay for it.

JS

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John C. Smith

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IT is an existential thing tor a skinny and nearsighted kid to careen around a football field, with only a few woefully insignificant pads for protection and surrounded by friends, reaching for a pass that always just eludes his grasp. It is something that has happened to most of us, alas, this stretching toward the heroic, and it’s this familiarity with struggle that helps make pro football—Partisan Review’s William Phillips called it “the intellectual’s secret vice”—our circus maximus.

Oh, there are other reasons. Our leisure time has increased. So has our need for heroes untainted by all those infernal ambiguities. And the tube, which has brought us war and the Weathermen, also carries the instant replay, allowing us to savor the golden moments with no more effort than sipping a beer. Pro football emerges as splendid theater, the best we’ve got, catharsis for Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew and George Plimpton, as well as Everyman. And unlike the conventional theater, you don’t know how it’s going to come out. The shrewd men who run television know this, and are willing to pay for it.