Why Football Matters: My Education in the Game
Mark Edmundson
Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto
Steve Almond
As the titles of their books suggest, Steve Almond and Mark Edmundson come down on opposite ends of the football debate.
Almond’s book, Against Football, is an extended essay on why his fandom has evolved into loathing. Edmundson’s Why Football Matters is an elegiac account of his youthful rescue and redemption on the high school gridirons.
Football is a peculiar kind of American religion. No other game seems to so deeply embody the more complicated aspects of our national character.
America’s national sport is replete with military metaphors, as both authors point out. Football is an incredibly bureaucratic game too — it has more coaches per capita than any other sport, and the rule book is so complicated, the referees should have law degrees. But what really makes football red, white and blue are the waterfalls of profit it generates.
Almond is a fiction writer and former sports reporter, and his is the much more lively of the two books; it’s an unapologetic, frontal assault. One of his biggest beefs is the corporate greed of the NFL, whose owners often seek out obscenely large public subsidies.
He is a lifelong Oakland Raiders fan, but what eventually causes his love for the sport to wane is the physical toll. Drawing on the latest research, he concludes that football fans are deriving pleasure from watching men and boys inflict permanent brain damage upon one another.
And yet for Edmundson, a University of Virginia professor of English and author of Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education, it’s the physical challenge, together with the sense of teamwork and brotherhood, that is football’s gift to American culture.
“When a boy is trying to grow up, football can be a form of education that works when no others can,” he writes.
Why Football Matters is a moving account of his painful youth. He grew up with a father who could be distant — except on days when he and his son watched football together. Football helped Edmundson navigate through the untimely death of his sister, and gave him an understanding of faith: before every game, “we prayed for a fair contest; we prayed we would escape serious injury and that the other team would, too.”
Edmundson says he’s grateful to football for the moral strength it gave him. “I’ve needed it to progress in my profession, to publish my books and take care of my family,” he writes. But he confesses that his “football-based character” probably came at a cost.
Almond is similarly conflicted. “Maybe the way to think of football is as a kind of refuge,” he writes: The football field is where America allows its “lust for violence” and “patriarchal domination” to roam free.