Football: Bad, but not all bad

There are a lot of reasons I don’t like the culture of American football. I don't like the zealotry. I don't like its relegation of women to cheerleader status. I don't like its hypocrisy (good god, it's Janet Jackson's breast -- hide the children! good god, son, it's the commercial with the mud-wrestling bikini chicks! now those are real women!). I don't like its rampant homophobia. I don't like its hijacking of God and country, as in "God is football," and "football is patriotism." I don't like its commandeering of horrible, cataclysmic events (see 9/11, see Katrina) as a vehicle for fanning its fans' passions. I don't like its position in education, the way it so often relegates learning in high school and college to the backseat. And I especially don't like its potent powers of zombification: Since football season started, I haven't been to the gym once without seeing a guy, walking from one apparatus to another, stopped dead in his tracks by game highlights playing on the TV, as if some alien spaceship has trained its beam of light on him and zapped his brain, rendering him helpless. And the guy stands there, eyes glazed, mouth open, practically drooling, watching guys with no necks rehash highlights he no doubt watched already, live, over the weekend, but which he is incapable of turning away from.

Pathetic, I think. What a spectacular waste of brain capacity. And yet…

There are times when I am extremely conflicted about football, because I know what it means to so many people. For many players, it's their one ticket on the express train away from Povertyland, USA. For so many towns (so many families, even), it's the one positive thing they have to rally around. For so many strangers, it's one of the few things to bind them to their neighbors. And let's be frank: Come playoffs and the Super Bowl, it's a damn good excuse to have a blowout party.

I get all that. And so as much as I don't like football, I can't condemn it wholly. Typically I just don't bother watching it, or reading about it, or caring about it. When I do watch I tend to enjoy not so much the play itself, but individual players' occasional moments of honest-to-goodness greatness (not to mention so many of the players' fantastically cartoonish names). And every now and then I'll read something that does make me feel better about the game, despite its many flaws, its posturing, its sanctimoniousness.

The thing that inspired this little rant was actually this article from this past weekend's New York Times Magazine, "The Ballad of Big Mike." It's about a kid who had been abandoned, homeless, unable to read, unable to even comprehend the world around him, and yet who had physical gifts that made him destined to play in the NFL. And it's about the family who took it upon themselves to lift him out of what would have been a destitute existence. And yes, they were born-agains on a mission, and yes, they and their ilk are homophobic as all hell, and yes, if I overheard these people's conversations at a football game I would probably be very, very freaked out. But I can't begrudge them their good deeds, even if I don't agree with the agent behind their benevolence. This family helped change a doomed kid's life. And so did football. In fact, with articles like these (it's a stirring, exciting, heartbreaking and heartwarming article -- do be sure to read it), the kid is already on his way to becoming football legend.