Football, Literature, Culture

By William Burke

On Januray 12, 1975, an estimated 65,000,000 Americans watched Pittsburgh defeat Minnesota in Super Bowl IX. That is more people, surely, than those who have read Moby Dick, The Sound and the Fury, and An American Tragedy, combined. Even several college teachers, it is rumored, closed their books that Sunday afternoon and tripped the TV switch to tune in gusty New Orleans and an interesting game. For football engrosses us. Like all athletics, it is an activity appropriate for the expression of aggressiveness and competition; and we in the United States have ignored the international preference for soccer and have chosen football as our national game. Football represents us; it reveals us; it is a significant objective correlative for our inner communal life. It is as fit an arena for the contemporary novelist who wishes to examine America as were the hotel and restaurant for Dreiser.

In the past several years two fine novels have appeared which treat the cultural importance of football. Both are clearly superior to a semi­serious novel like the best-selling Semi-Tough. The first, A Fan’s Notes by Frederick Exley (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), depicts football as a paradoxical embodiment of the American dream, assuring us that it is both real and illusory. For Exley, football beguiles us because it presents us with a stereotype of the American success story: victory for those willing to work, over circumstances and a determined foe. At the same time, however, it surreptitiously deflates the dream by revealing over several seasons that winners do not last; in time they falter and pass on. In addition, by excluding the weak, slow, aging, and uncoordinated, football tells us that for the overwhelming majority the excitement is purely vicarious, and that access to the fruits of the dream is reserved for a special few. The second novel, End Zone by Don DeLillo (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1972), presents football as an activity significant and appealing because it makes sense in an otherwise senseless world. End Zone shows that the sense of football is bound up in its language, its symbolism, which flexibly and precisely reflects the complex, if minor, activity it is. It is a real if trivial consolation in a world spinning into other, more terrifying, and incomprehensible end zones.

Exley’s book, a confessional novel or a fictionalized autobiography, is the story of a fan who is a loser, a casualty from a too-vigorous pursuit of success. Fred Exley, son of a local semi-pro football hero in Watertown, New York, views football as a glamorous and fitting avenue on which to emulate his father’s fame on a larger scale. But he is, alas, no athlete. Instead he attends USC with aspirations to become a writer, a great one. While there, he appropriates fellow student Frank Gifford as his idol, all unknown to the All-American running back, in a dedication of fanship that becomes increasingly significant in Exley’s life. In the marketplace after his graduation he fantasizes about success while becoming spectacularly unsuccessful. He loses job after job and his one true love; he becomes an alcoholic; still he retains contact with America by following closely the New York Giants and Frank Gifford. Finally he falls out of America and lands in a mental hospital. Recovering, he tests himself again in pursuit of his dreams, twice more returning to a mental hospital. At the end of the novel a chastened Exley is still running (jogging, actually), still obsessed with football, but now chasing only himself.

The energy that has made Exley run is generated by that imprecise but enduring and endearing idea, the American dream, which for Exley becomes visible in the metaphor of football. Like the dream, football promises excitement and emotional fulfillment. Football means mostly victory, but sometimes defeat; usually romance, occasionally tragedy: it is stimulating drama. It whispers of sensual rewards for its participants—luxury, good bourbon, and sex. More importantly, it offers gratification for the spirit: fame for the players, the adulation of the crowd. These images sustain Exley as his life begins its crazy descent. For him, football creates “the feeling of being alive.” Unlike his life, it is an activity with a purpose: “Football was an island of directness in a world of circumspection . . . There was nothing rhetorical or vague about it.”

In spite of his failure to live up to the dream, it is upheld by Frank Gifford, Exley’s “alter ego.” Gifford, says the narrator, “came to represent for me the realization of life’s large promises”; he possesses the “gift of living out his dreams.” Gifford “may be the only fame I’ll ever have,” remarks Exley. Football and Gifford serve to remind the uninformed, younger Exley that it is not the dream that is wrong; the deficiency resides in the failure, Exley himself.

But football, when examined closely, undermines the dream it seemingly supports. When Gifford, now in his thirties, is seriously hurt by the career-shortening and devastating tackle of one Chuck Bednarik, Exley is shocked into an awareness of mortality, the impossibility of ever holding and maintaining for long the public’s acclaim, and the insubstantiality of the dream. Gifford’s fall robs Exley of his “last prop.” Through Gifford’s decline Exley begins to reconcile himself to his true relation to the American drama: he is merely a disillusioned fan.

Here, football would seem an athletic analogue to Simon O. Lesser’s contention that fiction permits us to deal indirectly with real but sometimes repressed desires and frustrations. To the extent that the analogy holds up, however, football resembles popular rather than serious fiction. Like most popular fiction, football presents an image of life that is over­simplified and thus distorted. The distortions in the game parallel distortions in national values.

Fundamentally, Exley’s failure in his stumbling dash after the great dream is a subconscious rejection of the direction of his life. His father’s example provides Exley with an inescapable roadmap, and for this legacy the son both loves and hates the father, both idolizes and reviles him. Committed consciously to the values of his true American father and subconsciously repelled by them, Exley is divided, and his self-destructiveness reflects the depth of his division. His identity as a fan affirms the goal, his drunkenness denies it. His ambivalence is best illustrated in the one great romance of his life. In Chicago he meets and falls in love with one Bunny Sue; it becomes a “time when more than any other I felt at one with my country, and with that American girl, Bunny Sue.” Bunny is wealthy, beautiful, and oozing sexuality; as her name suggests, she is a kind of centerfold, the ideal cheerleader, a Saturday night reward for the Saturday afternoon hero. “Miss America,” Exley calls her. But he becomes impotent with her; for the first time in his life he cannot complete the sex act. His temporary impotence is partially due to Bunny’s intellectual and moral vacuousness, her mild and thoughtless promiscuity. At bottom, however, his failure to copulate stems from his deep subconscious rejection of her and the American dream she too perfectly represents: “I . . . sensed that I had never loved Bunny Sue . . . and that my inability to couple had not been with her but with some aspect of America with which I could not have lived successfully.”

This aspect of America is apparently the commitment to appearances by those who make love to success. For these, surface style and the seeming power to control their lives are of supreme importance. This attitude reflects a dwarfed vision of the possibilities of life, and it is reinforced by football. On the field there are no real losers; the participants are big, quick, strong, tough—succeeders and winners all. The losers—the slow and the frightened, the weak and the timid—do not put on uniforms and get paid for performing in public. Similarly, the American marketplace is designed to benefit those who possess the qualities of winners. The play for the American dream is more cruel and callous than the battering on the gridiron. Exley in his laughable run at it has learned to display the characteristics of the winner and discovers he is less of a human because of it. He lies, he picks fights. When he meets a true and humane man in his stepfather, Exley can only scorn him. This same insensitivity to substance is apparent across the wide land. As Exley stumbles back and forth across the country he realizes how many secretly lonely and frightened people there are, how many cannot deal successfully with a life of appearances. One woman develops deafness as a protection against people on the way up. Another woman allows her husband to destroy her family tie with her brother because the latter is a drunk and occasional resident of the state mental home. In fact, it is at the mental hospital in the figures of those who constitute its dependable population that the image of the American loser is most vivid to Exley and, appropriately, best hidden from the public.

These repeaters were the ugly, the broken, the carrion. They had crossed eyes and bug eyes and cavernous eyes. They had club feet or twisted limbs or—sometimes—no limbs. These people were grotesque. On noticing this, I thought I understood: there was in mid-century America no place for them.

The American dream and football—a compatible partnership.

Football is just as important for Gary Harkness, the protagonist and narrator of End Zone, as it is for Fred Exley: as Gary says, “life meant nothing without football.” Like Exley, Gary is a sensitive and intelligent young man; and like Exley, Gary’s commitment to football is consuming. Unlike Exley, however, Gary is a player, the second-best running back on the Logos College (West Texas) football team. The novel treats the events of one football season. The season is successful, Logos managing a 9–1 record. The only game discussed at any length in the novel is the single loss of the year, a trouncing at the hands of West Centrex Biotechnical in the season’s big game. For the most part the novel examines the locale, the players, their activities and interests on and off the field, all in relation to the importance of language and football in their lives and the relation of language to football.

In a remarkable fusion of style and theme, DeLillo keeps the importance of language before our minds. First there are the names: Logos, West Centrex Biotechnical, Norgene Azamanian, Zap Zapalac, among others. Then there are the linguistic exercises: Gary opens the dictionary every day to learn a new word. Fellow player Anatole Bloomberg is attempting to refashion his English, purge it of its New Jersey and Jewish twists and turns, make it more Texan, more American. One player is memorizing long passages in German, a language he does not understand; it is all part of a course titled “The Untellable.” Mr. Tom, mute inspiration behind the college, is notable for his inability to make words; he can only slobber and dribble. In addition the novel bristles with jargon, the clichés of business, of science, of warfare, of electronics. While football seems the subject of the novel, DeLillo clearly establishes language as his central concern. It is the instrument by which human experience becomes meaningful, and meaning means comfort.

Football makes life bearable for Harkness, the novel implies, because it is a language system that is intelligible and provides some security in an otherwise frightening and unintelligible world. Today there are historical and metaphysical considerations horrible beyond the reach of language. The jacket for the novel pictures a football player standing under the crossbar, a mushroom cloud in the background: history has veered into a nuclear end zone. History may be out of control because the universe is uncontrolled and God-abandoned, God’s absence suggested by his silence. Football, however, conveys a satisfying experience through its precise and flexible symbolism. When the quarterback speaks, eleven men act in a predictable manner. When violence begins to get out of control, arbiters have at hand a bag of symbols—flags, motions, words—to restore peace and order. Even the grunts of hitting and being hit are meaningful, an expression of “ancient warriorship.” The world may be heading toward nuclear holocaust; God, if there is one, may have ceased speaking to men—these are formidable psychological and spiritual burdens—but football is consoling, still a small defense against the most frightening suspicion of all: that human life has no center, that it is out of control and there is no way to get it back.

The end zone of nuclear nightmare toward which history seems to be advancing is contrasted with football in that the language of war does not convey sense. At one point Gary remarks: “I became fascinated by words and phrases like thermal hurricane, overkill, circular error probability, post-attack environment, stark deterrence, dose-rate contours, kill-ratio spasm war.” Words like these, however, do not communicate the reality to which they refer. In a discussion with ROTC Major Staley, Gary raises the problem:

“Major, there’s no way to express thirty million dead. No words. So men are recruited to reinvent the language.”

“I don’t make up the words, Gary.”

“They don’t explain, they don’t clarify, they don’t express. They’re pain . . .”

The language of warfare has failed. Ironically, the only way in which modern war can begin to be understood is as a game. Like the inventor of Monopoly, Major Staley has created a board game of modern warfare for two to explain how it works, and the horror of war and the absurd impotence of its language are convincingly suggested.

Besides warfare and the course of history, there is the silence itself, a stark contrast to the commotion of football. The Texas desert is an apt place to engage the silence, a basic and fundamental dimension, the non-human element in which we move. “The sun. The desert. The flat stones. The insects, the wind and the clouds. The moon. The stars. The west and east.” The desert through its primeval and alien character thus brings into consciousness the silence of the universe. No god speaks. Instead, the music of the spheres is silence, the silence defined as a “big metallic noise.” Silence, like lost divinity, is both threat and fascination. As threat it is the non-explanation for seemingly pointless deaths that occur too frequently for comfort throughout the novel. While Gary is a freshman at Michigan State he and another player tackle an Indiana punt receiver, who dies. Bloomberg’s mother is murdered back in New Jersey. Norgene Azamanian is killed in a car wreck. Mrs. Tom, the college president, dies after a plane crash. Most ominous of all, assistant coach Tom Cook Clark, a gentle and scholarly type (he smokes a pipe, doesn’t swear; no one really knows him) commits suicide in the middle of Logos’s winning season. How can we understand these traumatic happenings? There is a horror out there, expressive in its silence. At the same time silence fascinates, as if the key to the universal secret resides there; it is one of the great attractions of Logos College and the Texas desert. When Taft Robinson, the single black student in the college, casts off football after the season and retreats to his room and his studies in monklike seclusion and quietness, he begins to discern in the silence a “hum,” a “low roar,” a “brute chant.”

With mysticism the only hope for coming to terms with silence and with language ineffective in describing the landscapes of contemporary history, football becomes a religion radiant with significance. Those who are sensitive to the destructiveness of history and metaphysics become disoriented, and football provides a focus, a center, if a false one. One distinction of the Logos football team is its preponderance of exiles who amass in the desert as if on a religious retreat, “separated from whatever is left of the center of one’s own history,” the central ritual being their sport. Gary has played freshman football for Syracuse (he is a native of New York state), Miami, Penn State, and Michigan State. Taft Robinson is a transfer from Columbia University, lured to Texas by Coach Creed, who would “whisper” in his ear, saying “we would deny ourselves. We would get right down to the bottom of it . . . We would learn the secrets.” Anatole Bloomberg is in retreat from his Jewishness. Coach Creed is also an exile, born “in either a log cabin or a manger.” A successful big-time coach, he is sentenced to obscurity at Logos for slapping (à la General Patton) a football player who didn’t hustle. There are others, but these are the major actors, the primary exiles.

Those in exile, those in ascetic exploration, those on the run from history—they all find in football a light in the darkness. The language of football is a beacon; it harbors. Note the things it can do. It can produce esoteric sounds that result in precise and predetermined behavior on the part of eleven men:

Blue turk right, double-slot, zero snag delay.

Quick picket left, hook right.

Twin option off modified crossbow.

Re-T, chuck-and-go.

It permits one adult to insult another without anyone’s feelings being hurt: “‘Typical,’ [Coach] Veech said. ‘That’s typical of the whole attitude around here. You people are a bunch of feeble-minded shit farmers. You’re lazy, you’re self-satisfied, you’re stupid.’” It consists of chants, grunts, meaningful in their emotional stimulation to the players in the exchange; Gary and a teammate psych themselves up before a game:

“Right,” I said. “Right, right, right.”

“Awright. Aw-right, Gary boy.”

“Right, right, right.”

“Awright, Aw-right.”

“Get it up, get it in.”

“Work, work, work.”

“Awright.”

“Awright, Aw-riiiight.”

Football does not stand second to business and literature with its jargon:

“What we want to establish is a planning procedures approach whereby we neutralize the defense. We’ll be employing a lot of play-action and some pass-run options off the sweep. We’ll be using a minimum number of sprint­outs because the passing philosophy here is based on the pocket concept . . .”

And from this activity it is possible in the best Ben Franklin tradition to extract a formulaic approach to life, a religious philosophy in fifty words or less. As Coach Creed exhorts:

“Write home on a regular basis. Dress neatly. Be courteous. Articulate your problems. Do not drag-ass. Anything I have no use for, it’s a football player who constantly drag-asses. Move swiftly from place to place, both on the field and in the corridors of buildings. Don’t ever get too proud to pray.”

Thus is football a symbolic activity. It is an acting out of our frustrated dreams; it is a small voice of meaning in a loud babble of non­sense. If football seems a trivial amusement, Exley and DeLillo would remind us that it is much more than that; their novels invite us to understand its symbolic, cultural significance. 

“Football, Literature, Culture” appeared in Vol. 60, No. 4, Fall 1975.