Football and American Identity

Frank Hoffmann, Gerhard Falk, Martin J Manning

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135427214
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Learn the value of football to American society No sport reflects the American value system like football. Visitors to the United States need only watch a game or two to learn all they need to know about the American way of life and the beliefs, attitudes, and concerns of American society. Football and American Identity examines the social conditions and cultural implications found in the football subculture, represented by core values such as competition, conflict, diversity, power, economic success, fair play, liberty, and patriotism. This unique book goes beyond the standard fare on football strategy and history, or the biographies of famous players and coaches, to analyze the reasons why the game is the essence of the American spirit. Author Gerhard Falk, Professor of Sociology at the State University College of New York at Buffalo, examines football as a game, as a business, and as a reflection of the diversity in American life. Football and American Identity also addresses the relationship between football and the media, with much of the game's income generated by advertising and endorsements, and examines the presence of crime in football culture. The book discusses the development of the game—and those involved in it—at the Pop Warner, college, and professional levels, examining the social origin of players, coaches, cheerleaders, and owners. In addition, Football and American Identity analyzes the game's fans and their devotion to "their" teams, examines why Pennsylvania is considered the "mother" of American football, and looks at the National Football League and its commissioners. Football and American Identity examines:

• how individualism and achievement can lead to mythological status
  
• why a person's occupation is the most important indicator of prestige in the United States
  
• what the consequences are of earning more in a year than most Americans make in a lifetime
  
• why equality is vital to the ethnic make-up of American football teams
  
• why teamwork is important-in football and in industry
  
• how freedom is essential for taking the risks necessary for success
  
• and much more!

Football and American Identity is an inside look at football as an American cultural phenomenon. Devoted and casual fans of the game, as well as academics working in sociology, will find this unique book interesting, entertaining, and thought-provoking.

Chapter 1

The School and American Football

THE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF FOOTBALL

The relationship between education and American football is symbiotic. Football and schooling have lived together since 1823 when William Webb Ellis, a student at Rugby School in England, violated all the rules of British football. Ellis put the ball under his arm during a football game and ran to the goal in order to beat the five o’clock bell which was to end the game. “His schoolmates looked on dumb-founded and aghast at this maneuver that outraged all the proprieties.”¹

Some thought carrying the ball was a good idea, while others viewed that move as “heretical.” Consequently, the English organized two kinds of football, one to be known as soccer and the other as rugby. Soccer was a neologism derived from the abbreviation of the word “association,” as in “Assoc. Football.” The London Football Association formed in 1863 and decided to exclude rugby from their games. Hence the British game, now played all over the world, is called soccer.²

When a Canadian team visited Harvard College in 1873 and introduced rugby to America, American football was born. It took a century to develop the present game of football, including its heroes, its villains, and profits. It all began, however, in an educational setting, where it has remained despite the rise of professional football after the invention of television.

The reason for the great attraction football has had for young, collegeage men and those in high school and below is chiefly its appeal to masculinity. Of course, aspects of sports other than football are prized by Americans and others because they contribute to physical fitness, because they are enjoyable, and, most important, because they bring participants together with others, thereby inducing many friendships.

For adolescents, sport has additional functions. Because adolescence is a subculture derived from the difference between physical and social maturity, adolescents suffer from the lack of power over their own lives, which are generally controlled by adults. All the physical, mental, emotional, and social difficulties adolescence implies are blocked out by competitive sports. Football and other sports can be an escape from the realities of schoolwork, sexual problems, peer pressure, failure to understand one’s identity, and parental control.

Football, and undoubtedly other sports, contributes greatly to the construction of a sense of self for those who participate. Because football allows boys to compete with one another, free from parental supervision, it is a key experience for those who engage in it. Unlike the demands of teachers concerning scholastic efforts, football brings immediate rewards of recognition and status. This, of course, is of immense importance to college and high school students who are otherwise excluded from the rewards of the adult world. Adults can gain the attention and approval of others by conspicuous consumption, as Thorsten Veblen called it. Adults also have power and are in control of all social institutions as well as the home and the school in which adolescents live.³

The sports field, however, is the territory of the adolescent himself. There he rules and parents, teachers, and others sit on the sidelines. It is on the football field that boys can earn the adulation of others, particularly that of girls as well as their families. Furthermore, football permits boys to bond with their fathers, who are likely to give them considerably more attention for playing football than for any other activity in which they may engage. Football, certainly on the college level and among professionals, also serves as a gateway to recognition in the business, professional, and political arena. Witness the careers of “Whizzer” White and Jack Kemp.

White was a Supreme Court Justice from 1962 to 1993. He was appointed by President Kennedy, who knew him as a Rhodes Scholar when both lived in England in 1939. White gained his law degree at Yale but was far better known as a football player than as a lawyer. He played for the University of Colorado, where he became the first All-American player in the history of that university. In 1938 he became the Most Valuable Player (MVP) at the Cotton Bowl, moving on to professional status with the Pittsburgh Steelers of the National Football League. He was paid $15,800 that year and thereby became the highest-paid professional football player for a one-year contract. Thereafter he joined the Detroit Lions where he was the leading rusher (a player who runs with the ball).⁴

Undoubtedly, White was an outstanding student and lawyer. Nevertheless, his fame as a football player also gave him considerable prestige and contributed greatly to his appointment to the Supreme Court. White was confirmed by the U.S. Senate twelve days after his nomination, after staying in the witness chair only eleven minutes, because his football prowess was viewed as sufficient evidence that he could be a Supreme Court justice.⁵

Another example of the strong appeal of football to the American public is the career of Jack Kemp. Kemp was a college football hero at California’s Occidental College, where he earned three letters and a number of other athletic honors. Unable to land a quarterbacking job in the National Football League, he joined the newly formed American Football League (AFL), playing with Los Angeles and San Diego from 1960 to 1962. He then came to the Buffalo Bills, where he stayed as quarterback from 1962 to 1969. During those years he contributed to making the Bills one of the elite teams in the AFL. In 1965, after the Bills beat the San Diego Chargers 23-0 for the championship, he was awarded the AFL’s Most Valuable Player Award. Kemp retired from football in 1970, the year in which the AFL merged with the NFL. In 1984 he was elected to the Buffalo Bills Wall of Fame.

Thereafter Jack Kemp entered politics, winning a seat in the House of Representatives by a landslide victory in 1971. He remained a member of the House until 1989. He became a member of the cabinet of President George H. W. Bush in 1989 as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Kemp was repeatedly urged by his friends in the Republican party to seek the nomination for president, and did so briefly in 1988, and additionally was nominated for the vice-presidency in 1996. He has been a member of innumerable boards, mainly concerned with advancing conservative causes.

Kemp earned a degree in physical education at Occidental College. It is almost certain that without a football career he would never have been able to achieve the prominence he holds today, because he was elected to Congress on the basis of his football fame.⁶

Numerous other life stories demonstrate that football can be the catalyst for success in American politics, business, and industry. Every society has heroes. In some cultures, military achievements are most important. In others, business ability is most honored. Actors and religious leaders gain great admiration in other societies. All of these accomplishments are viewed with favor in America. However, the greatest heroes are famous athletes.

Because sports achievements are so important to male students at all levels of the school experience, many are blind to the danger that is inherent in a total absorption into the football subculture. Although there are indeed those who profit greatly from their exceptional ability as football players, there are also those for whom that very ability in their younger years becomes an albatross around their necks.⁷

The inclusion of football and other sports in schools is most positive for those who are capable of participating. Those boys receive great applause from their families, particularly from fathers. In addition, they achieve considerable acclaim from their peers. By age nine, most boys know whether they are good at sports. Those who are, commit themselves to continuing participation. There are those, of course, whose sports abilities are limited and whose athletic competence is overshadowed by others the older they become. Some boys cannot or will not involve themselves in any sport. This does not mean that anyone who is not a sports participant is therefore unable to relate to the status system in schools. The schools offer several alternative status systems. Certainly, excellence in scholarship is valued in some schools but not in all. Among the black population an excellent student may even be ostracized and rejected because of his or her good grades.

Sports, and particularly football, are seen as sources of masculinity in American culture. Winning is so highly prized that the phrase “winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing,” attributed to famous football coach Vince Lombardi (1913-1970) and others, is repeated again and again in schools, in the media, and in social situations. Boys have this drummed into them so that losing becomes a real trauma for those who cannot win. Losing in this context does not only mean losing one or more games. Losing means being a loser in the sense of failing to gain the attention and applause of those who define the situation in which football is played.

The definition of the situation decides a great deal of human action and experience. This means that an act may have a number of meanings, depending on how it is defined by the audience observing it. For example, a man who shoots another person may be defined as a hero by the army in which he serves. He may also be defined as a cold-blooded killer by a prosecutor in a criminal trial in civilian life. Likewise, someone who accepts the definition of “winner” in the Lombardi sense will view himself as a loser if he cannot “play the game.” Nevertheless, numerous other students care nothing for sports and instead excel in theater, journalism, or mathematics and are satisfied. However, many other students feel they are left out, unwanted, and failures because they cannot excel in any of the alternative status systems available in schools and because this is important to them.

Sports, and in particular football, segregates boys from girls, men from women. Football does of course promote social bonding for men. However, it also excludes men from women. Sexism is virulent in the sports world and most extensive among those who play football. Derogatory language concerning women is common in locker rooms, and men who appear weak or incompetent in sports are called “girls.” The outcome of these learned behaviors is male domination in the sense that these sexist attitudes rehearse conduct in later life.⁸

It has been a major complaint of female athletes that the sports facilities available to them are far inferior to those available to men. This is of course true of facilities available to adults as well as children, as visible by looking at the football stadiums, gymnasiums, number of spectators, and money spent on female sports as compared to male sports. Men also have the most exciting opportunities in the sports arena, an opportunity hardly ever available to women. In addition, it can hardly be overlooked that football and some other sports are married to violence, which is the antisocial aspect of masculinity.⁹

Acceptance of physical pain and the concomitant need to portray men as powerful are also taught by football and other sports. The outcome is to teach boys that “real” men bear pain in silence, that “real” men do not complain, and that “real” men do not cry. Evidently, the infliction of pain on others is therefore also seen as an important male attribute, so that hurting others is acceptable conduct. Surely, the victims of violence are expected to conform to the same ethos as those who inflict it, particularly because these are the same men. The will to win in a contact sport depends on the ability to dominate others, so that the determination to succeed can easily lead to hostile aggression. We can therefore support the view that football is a form of warfare.¹⁰

The warfare analogy is widely supported by the media and becomes a part of every American’s worldview. Football players who are unusually aggressive and ruthless are praised highly with such labels as “killers,” “murderers,” “butt kickers,” etc. Because violence is so highly prized and so many Americans attend football games because they want to see violence, many players use illegal acts of violence on the opponents because they know that this is approved by the fans and the huge television audiences, as demonstrated in the book Fighting Fans: Football Hooliganism As a World Phenomenon, by Eric Dunning and colleagues.¹¹

THE ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENTS OF FOOTBALL PLAYERS AND OTHER ATHLETES

Because football originated in the arena of higher education and because it is now of major importance in secondary schools, it is vital that we be concerned with the relationship between football performance and academic achievement.¹²

Anyone who reads the popular press, watches television, reads magazines, listens to the radio, or otherwise pays attention to the media must come to the conclusion that the only purpose of education in America is to conduct sports events. Indeed, there are occasional remarks made in the media about failed school budgets, large gifts given to universities, or medical breakthroughs by professors which promise to defeat this or that disease. Nevertheless, these stories are easily overshadowed by the enormous coverage given to high school and college football alone. Almost all daily newspapers have sports pages which recite the accomplishments of college and high school sports as well as professional sports. No regular newspaper feature deals with the academic achievements of students except for a few stories about graduations.

All this has been criticized again and again by numerous observers. Nevertheless, these media-driven “heroics,” first developed in the 1940s and 1950s, are with us to stay despite the half-hearted effort of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) to introduce some academic requirements into eligibility rules for participation in college sports.¹³

These requirements demand that any freshman wanting to participate in a Division I sport must be a high school graduate who successfully completed thirteen academic courses, including mathematics, English, social sciences, physical sciences, and either a foreign language or a computer language. A reasonable grade average is also demanded by these rules.¹⁴

As soon as these rules were published, Tai Kwan Cureton and three other minority athletes sued the NCAA on the grounds that their poor performance in high school should not prevent them from playing in NCAA sports. They claimed that the academic requirements under Proposition 16 of the NCAA constitute racial discrimination because minorities failed to meet the required academic standards more often than is true of white students. They further contended that minority students were the victims of discrimination because their SAT scores were generally too low to meet the requirements of the NCAA. They contended that these requirements had a “disparate impact,” meaning that the same requirement applied to majority students should not be applied to minority students.

In March 1999, U.S. District Judge Ronald J. Buckwalter of Philadelphia ruled in favor of the minority students. However, in December 1999 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia overturned the ruling of Judge Buckwalter, so the minimum scores on standardized tests and a minimum grade point average remained in effect.

Thereupon President Clinton signed an executive memorandum that expanded the rules under Title IX of the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987 to the effect that any federally funded school activity would have to avoid the NCAA rules and therefore allow minority students to participate in NCAA sports without meeting minimum academic qualifications. The NCAA claimed that Clinton had redefined the presidency as a monarchy.¹⁵

In 1993, economists Michael T. Maloney and Robert E. McCormick published a study of course grades for all undergraduate students enrolled at Clemson University in South Carolina during 1985 to 1988. This study was designed to discover whether intercollegiate athletic participation affects scholarly classroom success. Their findings were these: first, they found that college athletes do not perform as well as nonathletes in academics. They ...