Richard Kostelanetz
Artistry in Football (1969)
Not unlike a mass of American males, I cannot go through an autumn Sunday afternoon without turning on the professional football games; for even though I usually have more than enough literary work to do, America's favorite pastime is also my own obsessively favorite way of passing Sunday's time. The haunting anomaly is that though my particular trade as a cultural critic-historian is indubitably esoteric, there I sit once a week sharing the same spectacular experience in unison with millions of other American men, if not admiring the same heroes for many (though not all) of the same reasons.
The sources behind the compelling power of this sport (and not another) have always been somewhat mysterious to me, and by exploring that mystery perhaps we can discover some reasons for its attraction. One sentimental explanation has it that football was the game I most enjoyed as a kid, more years ago than I care to count; and as a one-time wingback in the archaic single-wing formation (that phrase itself dates me), I did indeed always get an extra pleasure from watching Princeton, the last of the single-wing teams the last time I looked. I also remember that the earliest profound fight I had with my parents was over their refusal to grant me permission to play ninth-grade ball; and on that issue sprang our particular generation gap—to this day, they have not been entirely forgiven. However, today's football, with all its new formations and complicated signaling, scarcely resembles my own which succumbed to the game's awesome internal progress. Since I have phased out most of my childhood enthusiasms, some of which are embarrassing in retrospect, there must be more persuasive reasons for football's persistence, not only with myself but with others. Let me start with three personal observations which other habitual fans might find strange: I usually do not care who wins; the combat and violence offer me no pleasure (and I find none of the hidden sexuality that both Paul Goodman and Norman Mailer emphasize); yet as a critic I'm inclined to regard one game as better, or intrinsically more satisfying, than another. These observations in turn suggest that what makes the televised football game so attractive are perhaps those performance qualities I must call esthetic, in part because they cannot be defined as anything else; and therein lies much of its compelling appeal, not only to the masses, to whom it is a pop art more popular than rock, but also to people, like myself, attuned to appreciate contemporary art.
Perhaps too these esthetic qualities also explain why no mass-media presentation commands so much unabashed enthusiasm from artists and intellectuals who would not touch comic books, flip through Reader's Digest, think of voting for Richard Nixon, identify with "Middle America," or watch a televised soap opera. Among the Sunday afternoon aficionados have been such culturally distinguished acquaintances as the late historian Richard Hofstadter, the novelist Ralph Ellison, and the composer Milton Babbitt, each of whom is as obsessive about seeing Sunday's games as I am; and the only lady I know to share with equal compulsiveness our masculine enthusiasm is by profession a film critic. "Nothing in this country," Hofstadter once told me, "is done as well as professional football. Compare it to our diplomacy." The late Randall Jarrell once wrote a poem for the great quarterback Johnny Unitas the day after they first met; and Jarrell's wife has described how his Sabbath habit mixed partisan enthusiasm with esthetic responses: "On Sunday we had pastries with Lowenbrau and watched the National Football League on television. Besides quarterbacking plays, Randall was continually appreciating scenes of the crowd, half in light and half in shadow, or of half stadium and half turf with the athletes in combat on the bright limed lines of the grid." William Phillips, the senior editor of Partisan Review, once wrote, "Not college football, but the real thing, pro ball, is the opium of the intellectuals" and a very Brechtian Yugoslav theater critic once told me, after touring America, that clearly the most successful theatrical communication he saw here occurred at "a Homecoming game in Indiana."
The first time I met the second-string (and American-born) dance critic for The New York Times at a very esoteric concert, we decided to sit together; and during one particularly unengaging piece witnessed by no more than one hundred people, he leaned toward my ear and whispered, "Did you see the Jets game this afternoon?" I nodded that I had. "Wasn't the turning point in the second quarter when...." Another dance anecdote tells of an English art critic who saw Merce Cunningham's Field Dances (1963), where performers frequently come into the middle, contact in various ways, and then return to the sides; and the critic, noticing a suspicious formal resemblance, correctly guessed that the choreographer likes to watch football on television. This perception upset Cunningham, who would prefer to think of his choreographic forms as totally original abstractions that take nothing from either earlier dance or definable art. Not only the eminence but also the impressionableness of these football enthusiasts support my contention that the pastime must have certain esthetic qualities.
To my senses, football is a more artistic experience on television than live at the stadium, where one is surrounded by rooting fans who genuinely care which side wins and, therefore, establish the game as primarily a combative event. Also, probably because the games are so few and the preparations for each are so extensive, while mistakes can be so costly, football players perform more perfectly than other athletes (track men excepted). I find that professional games are more attractive than college events, largely because the pro teams are less sloppy and their individual performers are superior artists. My first critical perception then is that the rhythm of activity in televised football, where each play pursues a rapid cycle of premeditated action-to-result, has a form more appropriate to a narrative representational medium (and perhaps the esthetic sensibility too) than basketball and soccer, with their jagged rhythm of emphases, or baseball and cricket, which become boring through both an excess of moments in which literally nothing happens and a limited repertoire of significant events. Other sports are not, by any count, as various in forms of visual order as football. In this sense too football also appeals to what the sociologists David Reisman and Reuel Denney call "a pronounced American taste for action in sport, visible action."
As most every American knows, the pattern takes this form: The players huddle on each side for a brief period of time (while the more sophisticated spectators and the media's announcers calculate each team's strategies), and then emerge into opposing formations, their play beginning in unison with eleven men moving as one. However, this initially synchronized activity eventually takes, thanks to individualized instructions, diffused and idiosyncratic paths that cannot be repeated. Their prescribed instructions are thus by design worked out in innumerable approximate ways, until either the plan is superceded by some breakaway activity and/or the play ends with a tackle or pass incompletion (and the whistle symbolically blows), forcing players to return to the huddle where the cycle begins anew. The structure of this action runs from stasis to purpose to passionate pursuit to chaos and back to stasis again, itself a resonant pattern worthy of emulation in contemporary narrative art; and this mythic quality is itself so universally appreciable that it seems odd that football has not been as successfully exported as other American pastimes.
Another esthetic point is that the rectangular two-dimensional screen is especially appropriate for the rectangular shape of the visible action (again unlike baseball or even basketball, where the action assumes circular forms); moreover, the variable focusing of the televised eye, as well as the use of several, diversely situated cameras, continually changes the home-screen's distance from the action and thus the viewer's perspective upon it. There is also an unwritten artistic law which holds that all nonrectangular images in televised football must be resolved by returning to a rectangular arrangement. After disinterestedly observing the huddles of both offensive and defensive teams, the camera usually takes a perpendicular view of the nose-against-nose scrimmage and, once the play begins, closes in upon the ball carrier. I hugely admire the ability of football cameramen to keep their lens (and my eye) on the ball, even when my mind is faked into looking elsewhere; and, despite the increasing variousness of not only offensive but defensive plays, they and their directors usually manage to put the home-viewer's eye precisely where on the field it wants most to be.
In the past few years, what has made home-spectatorship so vastly superior to live viewing has not only been the finer color transmission but also those isolated cameras connected to videotaped monitors. Exploiting the intervallic rhythm of the game, these extra eyes enable the directors instantly to recheck in slow-motion the details of a crucial maneuver, or to regard a recent play from totally different angles or even to watch on the "split screen" two distant men (like the passer and his immanent receiver) simultaneously. (Thus does the screen guide the home eye to where it wants ideally to be but physically cannot go—two different places at once; or, with playback, at various times in the past!) These mediumistic techniques radically rearticulate the characteristic space and rhythm of the game; and so truly restructured has my own perception become that "live" games now seem peculiar, inept, incomplete and pedestrian. Secondly, this set of techniques esthetically echoes the fracturing of classic time and space that was achieved by cubist painting, which regarded a single image from multiple perspectives (and, by implication, from separate moments in time); and precisely in this way, as McLuhan suggests, does advanced modern art forecast the radically different structural forms of subsequent technologies. (Furthermore, as Leni Reifenstal discovered definitively in her film Olympia [1938], athletic movement that is replayed in slow motion invariably seems strikingly beautiful.)
One conclusion of this analysis is that television's mediumistic affinity for football has helped make it a more popular game than baseball, the pre-1955 favorite, where the ball itself is simply too small and moves too quickly (if not imperceptibly) for the scale and speed of the screen; or basketball, where the camera's eye seems too immobile to be in the most propitious place at the right time. The only other major sports that television handles especially well are track, where it can provide close-ups of the action on the distant side of the oval and yet return focused for a perpendicular overview of the finish line; and swimming events, which also lay out well on the rectangular screen. Need one add that a football game heard on radio is news or journalism, however, and not an esthetic experience.
Artistry in televised football depends upon stunning kinetic images; and in this respect, as well as in its concern with precise execution of planned strategy, the game expresses qualities close to modern dance. Perhaps my favorite kinetic passage is a long run by the slithery halfback who gracefully eludes several oncoming tacklers (Gale Sayers, Leroy Kelly, and Hugh McElhenny are exemplary at this tour-de-force), while the best replay follows a swivel-hipped runner from another angle—ideally directly in front or behind. Their various graces, in my art-critical judgment, exceed those of a skier, a high-diver or even a matador, in spite of the last's practical advantage of an opponent far less likely to succeed. My esthetic canon also includes the criss-crossing of moving players and fixed lines on a kick-off; the blocking lineman pulling out on an end run; the low devastating block that thwarts an incipient tackler just before the kill; the individual head-on tackle of a full-steam runner (representing the collision of two powerful lines of force); a long pass into the outstretched arms of a distant, moving receiver (indicatively called "threading the needle," itself an esthetically successful ritual); a strong runner breaking loose from a spate of tacklers (Jim Nance, Calvin Hill, Mike Garrett); several players scrambling for a loose fumble; a speedster's touchdown runback of a kickoff (a feat mastered by Travis Williams a few years ago); and the visibly anonymous helmeted players enthusiastically but discretely hugging each other after a touchdown. Most of these choreographic gestures can be appreciated by people scarcely familiar with the game's technicalities.
One esthetic measure of a "good game" would thus be the sheer number of first-rate kinetic images, while a weak one contains but a few; and for that reason too, professional matches are generally preferable to college games, while those on wet fields are usually a disappointment, no matter how exciting the stakes. (Similarly, I find injuries to be an esthetic distraction that, were this a movie instead of a live event, would need to be spliced out; and while people at the game generally rivet their eyes on the reviving player, the television announcers usually manage to run an advertisement or talk about something else.) Sometimes a sloppy team or player (such as a lineman inadvertently carrying the ball) will inject a kind of esthetic freedom into the conventions of the art, an achievement analogous to Robert Rauschenberg's combines in painting—I remember one muddy game riddled by spectacular fumbles; but such forays into esthetic impurity can rarely follow a strategic design. They could also become dull through repetition. "The [football players] do what red Indians do when they are dancing, their movement is angular like red Indians move," noted Gertrude Stein, of all writers, in Everybody's Autobiography (1937). "When they lean over and when they are on their hands and feet and when they are squatting, they are like an Indian dance."
Then there are players who offer esthetic pleasure simply because they move with especial grace, like the legendary Jim Brown, once of the Cleveland Browns, Paul Warfield of the Miami Dolphins, Lem Barney of the Detroit Lions, Jim Plunkett of the Boston Patriots, George Sauer of the New York Jets, and Lance Alworth (appropriately nicknamed "Bambi") of the San Diego Chargers, or even such mammoth linemen as Deacon Jones of the Los Angeles Rams and Buck Buchanan of the Kansas City Chiefs; and the football pros seemingly acknowledge this choreographic distinction when they refer to the "beautiful moves" of a particular player. (Like other increasingly self-conscious new arts, football verges on developing an indigenous critical language to supplement its technical jargon.)
This last quality of exemplary personal grace also links football to contemporary dance, much of which attempts to eschew the affectations of classic ballet by programming practical physical activities that, if done well, will produce beautiful movement—in pieces by Yvonne Rainer and Ann Halprin, in particular; and in both football and this strain of modern dance, the choreography is easily accessible, as noted before, to people who hardly understand the game or the art.
That last point in turn connects this essay to that peculiarly contemporary (and yet quintessentially American) theme of discovering esthetic qualities in what has customarily not been regarded as artistic (as well as, by converse implication, the related theme of artistic work that successfully rejects the "artificial" conventions of intentional art). At any rate, the next time you appreciate the rhythmic structures of football's activity, the complexity and precision of their ensemble activity, the variable patterns of their evolution and solution, the skill of the individual players, etc., you should remember that there is much solid American artistry on that field, or screen.