Why Football?

I get the impression from some of my friends that football is a nuisance to them; that every year when it rolls around they resent having to deal with rabid fanatics chanting “Boise State!” or “Defense!” or the odd semi-aborted curse about Jared Zabransky and bone-head passes or how the kicker “pulled a Brotzman” and missed the PAT.

Please allow me to explain. It’s simple, really, my obsession with football. First, I used to play, okay? And watching a great game and cheering on my fave team—the BSU Broncos—is a way I can relive the glory days. But mostly, the reason I love football is because we live in a woman’s world these days. Everything is clean, nice, orderly, and all our relationships are festooned with doilies and floral prints.

Football takes the sharp end of a bulldozer to all of that. It’s a gladiator sport. It’s for warriors. It’s for the masculine mind; it’s a military strategy game that pits commanders against each other, each one working to outmaneuver the other with trickery, skill, or just plain brute force. It’s all about the highlight reel hit, the one that knocks a guy flat on the turf and lights up the living room with stars and makes people spill beer on the couch.

I love football because it’s one of the few things out there nowadays that we feeble men have left. Our wives deign to give us permission to wallow in violence every Saturday in the autumn, and quite frankly it’s this season, more than any other, that I live for. It gets me through the triple-digit heat of July and August. And it’s the reason why, when January eventually expires, I tend to sink into at least a shallow depression. Because it means I have to get back to the civilized business of being a man in a woman’s world.

I love football because it is the antithesis to so very much around us these days: weak constitutions, effeminate men, being nice, smooth talkers, big talkers, all show and no go, and women pretending they have testes. Please. Men are forged in the fires of contention, not born. Men are warriors. And this is our season, our time. Forgive us this indulgence in the things that make us tick. That’s not an apology. Football rocks.