Real Men Play Football AND Read Poetry

football2Sports Saturday

Professional football is a super violent sport and its 16-game season is a war of attrition. One never knows, from one week to the next, what team will have its Super Bowl hopes derailed by critical injuries. For a while this year, everyone was certain that the NFC would send either the New Orleans Saints or the Green Bay Packers to the final game, but both teams have lost key players and are now stumbling. Now the consensus belief is that the Pittsburgh Steelers will win the final trophy, but all it will take is for a couple of their superb defenders, say Troy Polamalu and James Harrison, to tear or break something and suddenly we will be naming other teams as favorites.

Yet we celebrate as well as lament the violence, and it has been that way since the beginning. My college president Joe Urgo, a Willa Cather specialist, recently alerted me to some laudatory comments about football that the Nebraska author wrote in the 1890’s. What I find interesting is how Cather manages to work literature into the conversation as well.

Cather believes that civilization, including literature, is losing touch with its brute animal instincts.  Thus, along with her praise of football, Cather also singles out certain works that can be as invigorating as a touchdown run.  Her examples are Homer, Tolstoi (presumably War and Peace), Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade,” and Robert Browning’s “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix,” a poem I liked as a boy because (to quote Pope) the sound seems an echo to the sense.

I SPRANG to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;
I galloped, Dirk galloped, we galloped all three;
‘Good speed!’ cried the watch, as the gate-bolts undrew;
‘Speed!’ echoed the wall to us galloping through;
Behind shut the postern, the lights sank to rest,
And into the midnight we galloped abreast.

Here’s what Cather wrote, the first piece appearing in a school publication, the second in her journal:

Of course it [football] is brutal. So is Homer brutal, and Tolstoi; that is, they all alike appeal to the crude savage instincts of men. We have not outgrown all our old animal instincts yet, heaven grant we never shall! The moment that, as a nation, we lose brute force, or an admiration for brute force, from that moment poetry and art are forever dead among us, and we will have nothing but grammar and mathematics left. The only way poetry can ever reach one is through one’s brute instincts. “Charge of the Light Brigade,” or “How they brought good news to Aix,” move us in exactly the same way that one of Mr. Shue’s runs or Mr. Yont’s touchdowns do, only not half so intensely. A good football game is an epic, it rouses the oldest part of us. Poetry is great only in that it suggests action and rouses great emotions. The world gets all its great enthusiasms and emotions from pure strains of sinew.”

Hesperian, Nov. 15, 1893

Apropos of football, it seems to be one of the very few thoroughly reputable and manly games left in the nineteenth century. It is one of the few games which offer no particular inducement to betting and which are not conducive to strained or unnatural excitement. It arouses only the most simple and normal emotions. It requires strength and skill and courage, attributes which no young man can afford to be without. In answer to the old objection that many young men of leisure go to Yale only to play football, it is certainly true that football is the most wholesome and reputable of all the many diversions of young men of leisure. The extreme popularity of the game and the ambition to be on the “first eleven” has done more to purify the living of young men in the larger colleges than all the precepts of their instructors. The average public can hardly appreciate the value of keeping gentlemen of leisure under rigid training for four months in the year. The necessity of eating plain food, of sleeping eight hours, of abstaining absolutely from tobacco and stimulants and other things more or less harmful for four months is a novel experience to most young men of the “fast set,” and an experience which cannot be other than beneficial. There is another thing. Athletics are the one resisting force that curbs the growing tendencies toward effeminacy so prevalent in the eastern colleges. Football is the deadliest foe that chappieism has. It is a game of blood and muscle and fresh air. It renders distasteful the maudlin, trivial dissipations that sap the energies of the youth of the wealthier classes. It is all very well for old grandmothers over their tea to sigh at the cruelties of the game. But it is not half so dangerous as many other things. It doesn’t do Cholly or Fweddy any harm to have his collar bone smashed occasionally. He is better off than his soft handed, soft-headed friend who, for reasons not very creditable to himself, could not play on the eleven if he wanted too. Anything is worthy that encourages a young man to keep his physical manhood perfect. The field is the only place that some young men ever know anything of the rough and tumble of life. Like the fagging system at Eton it is good because it lays the mighty low and brings down them which were exalted. Neither his bank book nor his visiting list can help a man on the eleven, he has nothing to back him but his arm and his head, and his life is no better than any other man’s. It is well for the gilded youth to be placed in that position occasionally.

Taken as a game, it is a royal one. It is one of the few survivals of the heroic. It is as strictly Anglo-Saxon as fencing is Latin. It is founded on the bulldog strength which is the bulwark of the English people. It has in it something of the old stubborn strength that goes clear back to the day of the Norman conquest. The descendants of King Harold can never be entirely gentlemen; there must always be a little of the barbarian lurking in them somewhere. When the last trace of that vital spark, that exultation of physical powers, that preference of strength to dexterity, that fury of animal courage dies out of the race, then providence will be done with us and will have some new barbarian people ready to come and conquer.

Journal, December 2, 1894

Football is a guilty pleasure for me and reading Cather helps me understand better my mixed feelings. When I was a child I avoided football, even though football is king in rural Tennessee.  For all I know, she might have called me a “chappie,” although I think she has in mind effete East Coast upper class snobs.  Yet sensitive boy that I was, I felt the need to get in touch with the “brute instincts” and did so by turning to the poetry that she mentions.  I read The Iliad and The Odyssey over and over (in children’s versions) and thrilled to Homer’s battle scenes.  I memorized “Charge of the Light Brigade.”

But there is a danger in what she says. Her words seem to echo Teddy Roosevelt, American manifest destiny, and the sentiments that would send us charging into the Spanish American War and then World War I. When she prescribes smashed collarbones as the means to cure soft handed and soft headed chappies of their affected lisps (“Cholly,” “Fweddy”), she engages in caricature.  You’re either a brute or (to use an epithet that my sixth grade teacher Miss Esther once bestowed on me) a “sissy.”  Either/or.

I realize that Cather is actually arguing for both/and.  Throw yourself into competitive sports and read Homer both, just as the teacher in Dead Poets Society preaches.  (I wrote a series of posts on that film last year, beginning with this one.) But as so often occurs, our society insstead went to the other extreme.  When I was a boy, I didn’t see too many of my companions reading poetry.

Cather may have been trying to right an imbalance in the society of her time.  Certainly she was doing so as far as her own writing was concerned.  To establish her own midwestern regional voice, Cather needed to break with the hypersensitivity and ultra-refinement  of such East Coast sophisticates as Henry James and Edith Wharton.  Put in that context, one can see why she would celebrate the barbarian lurking within.

As I say, however, we may have bent the stick too far in the other direction.  Football is worshipped, both in Nebraska (where the Cornhuskers are once again in the hunt for a national title) and in the country as a whole. Ritually on Sunday afternoons, much of the nation gathers around their television sets to watch large men hurl themselves at each other.  Vicariously we get to imagine ourselves as warriors.  The “fury of animal courage” appears to need very little defending, thank you very much (although I can’t imagine that the athletes themselves would wax quite so poetic about smashed collarbones).

I suspect that Cather would particularly approve of one new development, that being the way that we want our lady chappies as well as our men chappies to be toughened up.  I am amazed at the courage of my women students as they play soccer and lacrosse and field hockey and rugby.  I am faculty advisor of the women’s lacrosse team and gaze in amazement at how the players stand up to the pain that gets dished out. Cather would applaud Title IX.

If she were writing today, however, I’d ask her to right the imbalance in the other direction.  I’d especially like to see more moderation in professional football, what with doctors warning that repeated concussions lead to permanent brain damage.  Football players are so much bigger and faster than they ever were in the past that severe injuries are skyrocketing.  Thankfully, we now have a rule that teams must bench players who have been concussed, regardless of what the players themselves want. So the “just gut it out” culture is changing.  But much more needs to be done.

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