Beowulf and Rifts within the NFL

While football joy currently reigns supreme in Miami, dark clouds loom on the horizon (to use a hackneyed metaphor).  Even as more people than ever are watching football, the owners are unhappy with the current players’ contract and want them to take an 18 percent salary cut, along with shouldering some of the owners’ financial risk.

The players, however, like the current contract, point to the considerable physical risks that they take to play the game (along with their short career expectancy), and want to stay pat.  There is a good chance the owners will lockout the players for the 2011 season.  Negotiations on next year’s contract have been stalled for months.

What would Beowulf do?

The 8^th century Anglo-Saxon epic actually touches on some of the issues in the case.  Beowulf opens with Denmark experiencing a period of unprecedented prosperity and apparent social stability.  King Hrothgar, the fourth in a line of successful kings, has taken the wealth that is flooding into his kingdom and constructed a magnificent new hall (Cowboys Stadium?).  Yet the prosperity that should be a blessing attracts a monstrous malcontent.  Next thing we know, Grendel is wreaking havoc and we have “woe that never stopped, steady affliction.”

Grendel is the spirit of murderous jealousy, and he comes from within the society, not without.  He is our own darker self, which is why he’s able to strike at the very heart of the kingdom.  Like the National Football League, which has no rivals in American sports, King Hrothgar has nothing to fear from external threats.  It is his own relatives and warriors he must worry about.

In the current football unrest, there seem to be two divisions—that between the players and the owners and that between the wealthy and the not so wealthy owners.  One thing that has made football so successful is parity, which has created a fairly level playing field, both in money and in talent.  Virtually every team, except for those that are very badly run, has a chance of doing well in any given year, which is not the case with baseball.

The wealthy teams, however, chafe against the revenue sharing schemes of the League.  If Dan Snyder of the Washington Redskins or Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys had their way, they would use their superior resources to buy championship teams, somewhat like what the New York Yankees do in baseball.  Out of these imbalances arise jealousies, and those jealousies are well on their way to creating a season without football.

There are other rifts in Beowulf that also touch upon the problems within the NFL.  A good king is one who takes the revenue generated by his warriors and returns it to them.  This is the social contract of 8^th century Anglo-Saxon society: they are loyal to him, he is generous to them.  That contract is broken when the king becomes miserly.  There are a number of warnings throughout the poem about kings who behave this way, especially King Heremod:

His rise in the world brought little joy
to the Danish people, only death and destruction.
He vented his rage on men he caroused with,
killed his own comrades, a pariah king
who cut himself off from his own kind
even though Almighty God had made him
eminent and powerful and marked him from the start
for a happy life.  But a change happened,
he grew bloodthirsty, gave no more rings
to honor the Danes.  He suffered in the end
for having plagued his people for so long:
His life lost happiness.

The monster version of greed is the dragon.  Dragons refuse to share their treasure, even though they have more than enough, and they lash out against those who attempt to take even a single cup from them. They are scaly hard and poison runs in their veins.  Even more than Grendel, they have the power to bring the entire society (or organization) to its knees.

Living in the Washington, D. C. area as I do, I hear a lot about the dragon who owns the Redskins.

Does the poem offer any solutions?  Well, Beowulf is able to defeat Grendel (internal jealousy) by being firm and exerting a strong grip on things (literally).  Jealousy disintegrates in his presence and order is restored.  Could NFL commissioner Roger Goodell be a Beowulf? 

Unfortunately, Goodell, like King Hrothgar, comes from within the system and so is compromised.  Beowulf has the advantage of being an outsider, but it’s hard to imagine a contemporary outsider (the president? Congress?) stepping into the NFL battles and sorting them out.   By the time the fighting is done, there’ is a real possibility that Hrothgar will be left sitting disconsolate on his throne, his television screen dark.

If jealousy can’t be defeated, what about greed?  The key to defeating the dragon is collaboration.  In his old age, Beowulf has become a bit of a dragon, bitter and self-absorbed.  His battle with the dragon is, in some ways, a battle with dark tendencies within himself.   Just when he’s about to succumb to his scaly side, however, his nephew Wiglaf comes to his aid and helps him slay the dragon.  Think of Beowulf and Wiglaf as owners and players, working together to free the treasure that the greedy dragon spirit is trying to monopolize. 

When they do, they get to admire a (Super Bowl?) banner hanging from the rafters.  Here is Wiglaf entering the dragon’s treasure hoard following the battle:

And he saw too a standard, entirely of gold,
hanging high over the hoard,
a masterpiece of filigree; it glowed with light
so he could make out the ground at his feet
and inspect the valuables.

The dream here is that leaders and followers, working together, will make sure that the wealth circulates, benefitting everyone.  I know that America seems to be in a selfish phase at the moment (it is not only NFL owners that are dragons), but can owners accept the  input from players and can players skirt the dragon fire and come to the assistance of owners?  Can all rise above their egos and their narrow interests for the common good?  The situation calls for heroic action.