How Postmodernism Explains Football and Football Explains Postmodernism: The Billy Clyde Conundrum

The Billy Clyde Conundrum

Robert Kerr

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137534071
• Print ISBN:
  9781137555885
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology

American football and postmodernist theory are both objects of popular and scholarly interest that reveal remarkable sociological insights. Analysis of media-driven commercial football documents how narratives of sportsmanship/brutality, heroism/antiheroism, athleticism/self-indulgence, honor/chicanery, and chivalry/sexism compete and thrive.

1

Introduction—Why This Game, Why This Story

Kerr, Robert L. How Postmodernism Explains Football and Football Explains Postmodernism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137534071.0002.

FIGURE 1.1   Norman, Oklahoma, 1953

On a cool, bright fall afternoon on America’s southern plains, a boy plays in his yard with a football that is not much smaller than he is. It is a time, about halfway through the twentieth century, when just blocks away the game of college football is being played by some measures with more success than ever before or since.

The boy does not know that. Yet over the years he comes to believe that moment of childhood pre-consciousness somehow stayed with him. As a college professor much later he will have his students reflect upon Carl Becker’s once well-known essay on how memory’s “engaging blend of fact and fancy” works to “imaginatively recreate” for us “a mythical adaptation of that which actually happened.” He will ask them to seek and write about unrealized times that may have shaped their own beliefs more than expected, the times when, as Robert Penn Warren put it, “the meaning of moments passes like the breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaf of the willow.”

In another of the boy’s own earliest memories, all the grownups at a family gathering are particularly animated by what is happening on the little, black-and-white television. He watches only in fleeting moments between other amusements. But by the end of the day, he has come to grasp that a team from the University of Oklahoma has been playing football on TV. The way it commanded the attention of the adults stays with him.

As the years go by, he learns from family stories that his father was an all-state halfback who joined the Navy instead of playing for Oklahoma, despite an invitation from its most legendary coach. But earlier, in a high school, playoff game one cold November night in Altus, the father outplayed another team’s star who would soon make it big for the Sooners. The boy’s uncle will still be telling the story decades later.

The father teaches his son to pass and punt, and the boy spends countless afternoons and evenings playing football in the yard with his friends. At some point, it occurs to him to start scrawling out accounts of what happened in those games. His grandmother tells him he has “a way with words.” Again he does not know it, but the conceptual relationship of game and mediated game—actual football recreated via a medium of communication—has begun to faintly flicker within him.

The boy grows up in small towns where his take on social priorities leads him to assume the high school football team must be the reason the town has a school. When he is old enough to join the team himself, he rarely gets off the bench.

But then one day, on television, a small man from another country is kicking field goals in a professional football game in New York—by swinging his leg around sideways, instead of straight ahead in the style of everyone else the boy has ever seen. He takes his football outside and after a few days, to his great surprise, he is kicking the ball enough like the little man on television to suddenly be made his team’s starting kicker.

Television has changed his life. But then, on the very first extra point he attempts in a game, someone fails to block a tall, fast defensive end. The boy turned soccer-style place kicker is flattened before ever swinging his leg. Now he does know it—and feels it: the game is very different from the mediated game.

As time goes by, the boy learns he doesn’t seem to have many marketable job skills. Then he discovers newspapers are willing to pay people who can write complete sentences and semi-coherent paragraphs, almost a living wage. He goes to work reporting on sports—now mediating them for a living—and eventually a great many other things. It is what keeps a roof over his head.

But the years go by and suddenly one day the newspaper industry is largely replaced by Facebook and Twitter. Fortunately, by the time that happens he has discovered how graduate school also rewards complete sentences and paragraphs. Eventually it turns him into a professor employed to teach media law and history, as it turns out, by the University of Oklahoma.

And there, his office window looks out upon the very stadium where college football was being played so successfully when he was just a little boy across the way. It is being played extremely well still. But the professor spends his time writing endlessly about First Amendment law and grading exams, not going to football games.

The stadium is absolutely packed for every game anyway, and most of the rest of the state watches on television. The professor hears the roar of the crowds outside his window and finds his mind pondering what it means, in sociological terms, that so many Americans are so captivated by the game of football.

Much of his pondering has long been drawn to such questions of culture as an “ensemble of meaning-making practices,” especially when they concern the way we “dwell in symbolic worlds mediated by mass communication.” As John Pauly laid it out in one of the most important articles ever written on media research, scholars may never contribute more than when they help us all “simply to know our cultural habitat.”

So what about that remarkable habitat constructed by the culture of American football? Sociologists have been for some time saying things like, “Mediated sport has been firmly established as a significant institution in American culture,” and “Sport is a microcosm of the larger society—a social phenomenon that provides important clues about the nature of society.”

Thinking it through, he arrives at the conclusion that what the world needs is a scholarly book that will apply postmodernist theory to explain American football—and vice versa. And then, lo and behold, a publisher one day says it agrees.

As he begins, he has in mind Mary Winsor’s Every Person Her Own Historian, reminding twenty-first century academics of the enduring wisdom from Becker’s Everyman His Own Historian, that scholarship “will be of little import except in so far as it is transmuted into common knowledge.” They were both speaking in particular to the point “that writing history that no one will read is a vain and pointless business”—but the rest of the scholarly community should be listening as well.

And the prof decides that this time around, he will. He knows the days of thousands reading his newspaper articles are long gone. But he wouldn’t mind if a few more than the usual handful of ivory-tower eggheads like himself read the book.

Doubtless, you have concluded by now that the little boy with the football, who became the prof in quest of a scholarly tome on the meaning of the game, is the author of this book. You are correct.

I have written a few other books and learned that people seem to ask authors more about why they wrote books than what they wrote about in them. So I tell you the story above to go ahead and explain why I wrote this one. And how it came to be something of a hybrid of scholarship told as a story for more than just scholars. Everything on the pages that follow aims for that anyway.

Yet it is still a hybrid, so there are tradeoffs. It is scholarly in its essential conceptual grounding, and thus some of the story must be told in those terms.

So for my fellow eggheads just briefly: Methodologically this study relies on framing as an interpretive guide, in the sense of Gamson’s conceptualization of the media frame as “a central organizing idea used for making sense of relevant events” that helps explain how audiences may “understand and remember a problem.” Specifically helpful in that guidance was Altheide’s “document analysis” process for connecting media representations to broader ideas in discourse and ideology. I have detailed that process in a number of journal articles, including some in this book’s reference list.

And for everyone, unfortunately metanarrative, narrative, and related terminology likely will seem overused in many passages ahead. But they are too essential to the basics of postmodernist theory to misrepresent it by underusing them.

So that’s the introduction. From here, we will start in the next chapter working our way through the full story.

It is a story of how, among other things, a sport both appealing and horrifying, the power of media, the far-reaching metaphors of Frank Merriwell and Billy Clyde Puckett, and a remarkable show about football and drinking and women and men all help us understand the way a game played by boys in the yard has become the American national pastime, a multi-billion-dollar industry, a clinical obsession.

2

America Meets Football, and Football Meets Frank Merriwell

Kerr, Robert L. How Postmodernism Explains Football and Football Explains Postmodernism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137534071.0003.

For us today, trying to think of American football’s beginnings in anything close to their actual historical context is a challenge bordering on the impossible. The game is too much with us. We cannot escape it, especially in its mediated form.

For most people, the first time they encountered a football game was when one form of media or another presented it to them. Early on, that would have been print media creating representations of the game, soon to be joined by radio, then television. Today, all are engaged in more of that than ever before—far more. And still that represents only a fraction of the mediated connections that now flourish between the game and audiences. As with so many other aspects of human activity today, for football those connections beyond any number and variety once imaginable now proliferate in virtually all places and all times via an ever more digitally cyber-networked world.

So football for Americans today exists as a fully formed social institution. It is omnipresent as an obsession for far too many, as just entertainment for others, as nuisance or even scourge for many others. Yet we all believe we know what “football” is. We know it the way we know what Coca-Cola is. It is quite simply a fixture for us today, socially, materially, culturally, economically.

That is what makes trying to picture the game’s actual beginnings so challenging. Trying to imagine what “football” would mean to us if we encountered it unawares as it existed earlier in American history, takes effort. Considering its earliest form as “more or less a series of controlled riots,” as writer Steve Almond has accurately called it, helps us start to readjust our senses from the relentlessly choreographed and monetized media spectacle that saturates them today. But even that still could be a catchphrase from, say, an ESPN documentary, so often casually and routinely employed today to hype a game in which violence plays as intrinsic a role as the ball. So let’s attempt the flashback another way.

“What I seen was this whole raft of people a-sittin’ on these two banks and a-lookin’ at one another across this pretty little green cow pasture,” begins this recounting of an unworldly young man accidentally stumbling into a stadium in which a football game is about to take place. Andy Griffith’s “What it Was, Was Football” comedy routine came forth after the game had been played in the United States for several decades. But it invaluably—and hilariously—captures a historical snapshot of how someone who had never encountered the game before might well have attempted to give meaning to the inexplicable phenomenon before him.

“About the time I got set down good, I looked down there and I seen 30 or 40 men come a-runnin’ out,” it continues. “And everybody where I was a-settin’ got up and hollered! And about that time, 30 or 40 come runnin’ out of the other end . . . and the other bank-full, they got up and hollered.” The narrator turns to the man next to him and asks, “Friend, what is it that they’re a-hollerin’ for?”

That could be the plainest way to articulate the question at the heart of this book, and a question that helps us today try to imagine what “football” might mean to us if media didn’t so ceaselessly do that job for us. Just what was it about football that so combustively set so many “a-hollerin’ “ from the very beginning, and what is it that has kept ever greater numbers engaged so intensely ever since?

Griffith recorded “What it Was, Was Football” in 1953 when he was a young, unknown comedian from North Carolina, and it became a hit that launched his long career on stage and screen. Attempting to answer his question in the monologue, the narrator recalls that possession of the football “made the other bunch just as mad as they could be,” with the struggle over it causing “the awfulest fight. . . . They would . . . kick one another and throw one another down and stomp on one another and . . . I don’t know what-all and just as fast as one of ‘em would get hurt, they’d tote him off and run another one on!”

It helps to start our story by focusing on the notion of a bunch of young men doing all that kicking and shoving one another about a “cow pasture” as the fodder for launching an enduring commercial enterprise with apparently still boundless market potential to this day. Because even in the game’s earliest years we can see the fundamental elements that seeded both its popular success and its inherent scandal and controversy. Both its astounding appeal and its violent, corrupting propensities were all there, all along. And so were fiercely competing narratives, seeking from the start to prevail in the making of the game’s meaning.

The beginnings

American football was created on college campuses in the Northeast in the nineteenth century, most prominently in what is popularly referred to as the Ivy League. Those colleges quickly discovered the remarkable reality that fielding teams in their names attracted many thousands of spectators who had no direct connection to the schools involved. It was a “commercial enterprise from the start,” one indeed “both commercialized and professionalized” at venerable temples of learning like Harvard and Yale, Ronald Smith wrote in his definitive history of that period in American sports. Quite simply, students preferred playing and watching and celebrating football over studying, and football fascinated alumni and other fans as well—far more than anything transpiring in the classrooms and libraries. Football would become “the emotionally integrating force of the American college,” a Lafayette College president wrote. “It is the symbol about which are gathered the loyalties of students, faculty, alumni and friends of the college.”

So it was in the American East that virtually everything associated with college football to this day originated—all the pageantry and spectacle, as well as the Faustian pact that brings to campus bountiful revenue streams and enthusiastic support from alumni and the broader public, along with also endless scandals over violence in the game, illegal payoffs to players, and salaries for coaches that dwarf those of university faculty. The success of football there quickly led colleges and then high schools across the country to begin developing teams—by the 1930s, even high schools that had too few students for regulation eleven-man teams were playing a version of the game with six-man teams. Between the two world wars, football’s popularity grew to rival that of baseball as the American pastime. The era after World War II saw professional football for the first time attract popular interest.

Almost from the beginning, the game’s development was characterized by raging controversy at the same time its popularity an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  IntroductionWhy This Game, Why This Story
• 2  America Meets Football, and Football Meets Frank Merriwell
• 3  Time Runs Out on the Wholesome Warrior
• 4  Center Stage for Billy Clyde
• 5  Scenes from the Conundrum in Motion
• 6  A Postmodernist Theory of Football
• 7  Life in the Hyper-Mediated Marketplace of Football Narratives
• 8  A Merriwellean Billy Clyde from a Postmodern Beer a Minute
• 9  Two-Tiered Gender System Encounters Emotion Work
• 10  ConclusionFootball, Postmodernism, and Us
• References
• Index