On Watching Football: Why Now?

I’ve written before in this blog about watching sports, particularly basketball (“On Watching Basketball” in the first Unf*#!ing Believable) and baseball (“Just Trying to Watch the Game” in Unf*#!ing Believable Redux, yet to be published), but the only time I wrote about football was to dis Beyoncé and Madonna while discussing the Super Bowl halftime show (also in the first Unf*#!ing Believable).

Actually, in the “On Watching Basketball” blog post I also wrote about football but only to reference the Buffalo Bills, Mark’s hometown team—that managed to lose the Super Bowl four times in a row—while questioning his ability to disassociate sports from his criteria used to judge just about everything else in life: “class structure, economic inequality, corporate greed , media misinformation, etc.” I also recognized that he “just got too much enjoyment out of watching the ballet of basketball, the gut wrenching physicality of football, and the beauty of the home run.”

This blog post is about the “gut wrenching physicality of football,” which I’ve found myself watching much more of lately. Maybe it’s because Jakob and Marcos, my grandson, remain Bills fans. Or maybe it’s because a couple of Super Bowls back I became aware of how hot the Kansas City Chiefs’ quarterback Patrick Mahomes is. After Mark died my friends Kai and Ki and I started the tradition of watching the Super Bowl at their house so we could evaluate the quality of the millions-of-dollars commercials that paid for the spectacle. Kai and Ki are the owners and chefs of the Sugar Nymphs Bistro in Peñasco who also fed me delicious food while we were watching the commercials.

This year I’m going to be watching much more than the commercials, however, because Patrick Mahomes is there once again. I actually watched two Sundays of football when the Chiefs worked their way through the playoffs. I even watched two football games last Sunday—the first time in my life—because I had to wait until 4:30 to watch the Chiefs and what was I going to do with the rest of this day I’d set aside for TV.

But I have to admit, the “gut wrenching” display of players landing on top of each other and either slowly getting up or failing to get up often too much. Max and I were trying to watch the Bills/Cincinnati Bengals game— the streaming channel was on the blink—when the Bills player Damar Hamlin actually died on the field of cardiac arrest but was brought back to life. I saw many reruns of that wrenching moment and I’ve seen plenty of other violent, wrenching moments and ask myself, “Why is it that a game so physically brutal is the most popular sport in this country?” On the phone the other night John Nichols told me why he loves to watch football: “Yes, it’s violent, but it’s so interesting because you never know what’s going to happen.” I’m not sure that’s what millions of other fans would say if you asked them the same question, but we’ll leave it at that.

Then when we were skiing yesterday, Jakob and I chatted about the impending Super Bowl and he told me that at the last game they showed the owner’s wife dressed from head to toe in fur. I Googled the owner and saw that his grandfather, H.L. Hunt, was an oil tycoon and the inspiration for the character J.R. Ewing from the long-running TV series “Dallas.” OK, what NFL owner isn’t a capitalist pig (the Green Bay Packers are the only publicly owned team with a president, not an owner)? So, like Mark, I’ll put aside the notion of corporate greed and just enjoy the Super Bowl this year. Go Chiefs!