It’s effective for some, I guess, but there was something about its abrasive, P.T. Barnum-style gaudiness that made me groan out loud and turn off the television. I mean, it was only preseason, and there’s not one piece of those four games that’s worth a single $14 beer at "Insert Corporate Name Here" Stadium.
That was my moment of epiphany, one might say, my "night of fire" where I realized that the National Football League of 2013, that $9 billion-a-year megalomaniacal conglomerate, is just a far different entity, with far different goals, than the thing I grew up with in the 80s and 90s.
It was fairly pure back then. Few stadiums had domes, and snow was a permanent fixture on many a winter field as games went on in temperatures that caused whistles to freeze to referees’ lips. It was about winning, not statistics, and there weren’t a whole lot of rules.
You could hit — God, you could hit — and it was a rough-and-tumble game played by unrefined men.
Now, it’s not just a game. Every Sunday is an event akin to "The Running Man" where society shuts down, the streets are Christmas-morning bare, and every male between the ages of just-born and not-quite-dead refuses to budge from in front of their television.
Then there’s others who don’t really care about the sport, but are involved in fantasy football, and so they watch also, splitting their time between leering at the TV and compulsively checking their phones for scoring updates.
I admit that I’m a part of that particular problem, as I’m in a fantasy league that I do enjoy. But even I think that this Dungeons and Dragons for ex-jocks has created a sort of bizarre subculture filled with "writers" who understand statistics but not sports and commentators who judge a player’s value only on the amount of touchdowns he throws, not the number of games he wins.
And through all of this, there’s the NFL itself, which insists on tweaking and twisting the rules every few years to pull pro football further and further from its violent past. They say the changes are in the name of "player safety," but like any other business, it’s about protecting investments.
Eventually, I assume, it will either abolish defenses altogether (maybe replacing them with cardboard cutouts of Ronnie Lott, who would never survive in the tender NFL of today) or move to a flag-football system that’s played on a field of soft, down-filled pillows built under a rainbow.
But even with the awful mutations of the last 15 years, and the aggravating, all-encompassing fantasy craze, I still love this game. It’s dramatic and (when the league can’t help it) unforgivingly brutal, and it can still create those beautiful moments that only football can.
The older I get, though, the more I’m drawn to sports like boxing and baseball that have maintained their fundamental character a bit better and seem to revel in the fact that, yes, they’re not made for TV, but no, they’re not going to change it, and they’re sorry if you don’t like it but you can always watch something else.
The NFL, like any jilted lover, will move on, whether or not I (or any other disenchanted fans) choose to follow it. After all, when you’re making that much money, you don’t need to listen to anybody, and that league proves over and over that it will do what it wants, regardless of how its faithful feel.
Maybe it’s for the best, though. The memories have been great but the glory days have passed, and nothing upsets me more than watching the slow decline of a once-great thing.
Email: janoski@northjersey.com
