Why We Love Football

I think now of a football story.

In 1976, the fierce linebacker Dick Butkus — to the surprise of almost everybody — started to make a small name for himself as an actor. He played an ambulance driver in the black comedy, Mother, Jugs and Speed. At the same time, he had a critically acclaimed role in the movie Gus, about a Yugoslavian mule who kicked 100-yard field goals.

His decision to become an actor after years of being the single most violent and terrifying force in football left sportswriters and players fairly astonished and uncertain.

“The Dick Butkus who graduated magna cum grouch from Illinois is an actor now?” asked Chicago columnist Bob Verdi.

He was. How tough a player was Dick Butkus? His name, Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray wrote, constituted “syllables of doom.” Butkus played middle linebacker nine years for the Chicago Bears, during which time, in the memorable phrase of football’s bawdy poet Dan Jenkins, he “mashed runners into curious shapes.”

“He went after you like he hated you from the old neighborhood,” running back Paul Hornung said.

“Dick Butkus hated everybody,” Deacon Jones added. “I think he even hated himself.”

“I never set out to hurt anyone deliberately,” Butkus protested. “Unless it was, you know, important, like a league game or something.”

How tough? One event can stand for many: Once, during a game against the Broncos, Butkus hit running back Floyd Little so hard that after the game, Little said, “my body almost liquified.” After the play, the normally merciless Butkus went over to Little after the play to see if he was OK.

“Of course,” Little said, surprised that Butkus cared.

“Then why are you in our huddle?” Butkus asked.

No player in the history of professional football took meanness and fury quite to the level Butkus did. But that was the football player Dick Butkus. The thespian Dick Butkus was entirely different. His co-star in Mother, Jugs and Speed, Raquel Welch, just adored him. She was baffled why anyone would have anything bad to say about him.

“I love everything about Butkus,” she said. “He’s funny. He’s charming. Why do people say such mean things about him?”

At which point a member of the crew said: “Yeah. Don’t pick up a football.”


Introduction

“Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life. Football begins in the fall, when everything’s dying.” George Carlin

I live a double life. On the outside, in public, I am a full-blooded baseball fan — mild-mannered, somewhat cultured, fascinated by poetry, swayed by romance, a student of history.

“Stan Musial, you say?” I might remark at a party while wearing a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows. “Why, did you know that Stan Musial had exactly 1,815 hits both at home and on the road? Doesn’t that just speak directly to the mathematical rhythms of baseball and life?”

“Did I hear you arguing about the designated hitter?” I might interject as I pass a conversation at the cheese board. “Funny thing: Did you know that there were efforts to add the designated hitter to baseball going as far back as 1891? Ha! I believe it was Harry Truman who said, ‘There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.’ And, oh, did you know that Truman was the first president to throw a ceremonial first pitch left-handed?"

Wow, it’s hitting me now: I’m actually quite annoying as a baseball fan.

But this is only the face I show the world.

I have another face, another side, a part of me that, as Jack Nicholson says in A Few Good Men, I don’t talk about at parties. This is a part of me that prefers gray days, that feels most alive as the days grow short, that feels like barking at a television set or gnawing on barbecue in a stadium parking lot or screaming about John Elway or falling into an angry sleep by counting the number of starting quarterbacks my hometown Cleveland Browns have had since the turn of the century.

Yes, I am a football fan. I am …

… no, wait, now I can’t get it out of my head, all those tragic Browns quarterbacks. The Browns left Cleveland after the 1995 season to go play in Baltimore. I was at that last home game. What was it like? It was like watching your own open-heart surgery without anesthesia.

They came back, though, in 1999 — well, a new team called the Browns came to town (the freshly named “Ravens” stayed in Baltimore) and since 1999, the Browns have been such a wreck that they have had at starting quarterback, deep breath now, Tim Couch (who was the first pick in the draft) and Ty Detmer and Doug Pederson (who would later coach the Philadelphia Eagles to a Super Bowl victory) and Kelly Holcomb and Luke McCown and also his brother Josh McCown (though Josh was actually the good McCown, he should be listed first) and Jeff Garcia and Trent Dilfer and Charlie Frye and Derek Anderson and Ken Dorsey and Brady Quinn and Bruce Gradkowski. Whew. That’s a mouthful.

But we’re only getting started. They also had Colt McCoy and Jake Delhomme and Seneca Wallace and fellow philosopher Thaddeus Lewis and Brandon Weeden and Jason Campbell and Brian Hoyer and Spergon Wynn (probably the best Spergon ever to play in the NFL) and Connor Shaw and Johnny Football himself Johnny Manziel (who they drafted on advice of a homeless person) and Robert Griffin III and Cody Kessler. That’s absurd right?

Oh, sorry, also DeShone Kiser and Kevin Hogan and Tyrod Taylor and Baker Mayfield (who did lots of fun television commercials) and Case Keenum and Nick Mullens and Jacoby Brissett and Deshaun Watson (don’t get me started on him) and Jeff Driskel and Dorian Thompson-Robinson and P.J. Walker and Joe Flacco.

I think that’s all of them. I’ll save you the trouble of counting, that’s thirty-seven different quarterbacks … wait, no, it’s actually thirty-eight, I forgot about Austin Davis. How could I have forgotten Austin Davis? Made two starts in 2015. Lost them both.

By the time you read this, the Browns will probably add a couple more.

Yes, I’m a bit more fatalistic as a football fan. All football fans, I think, are at least a little bit fatalistic. Carlin was right. Baseball is about new life; Opening Day is about fresh beginnings. Football … not so much. In baseball, there’s always hope, as best described in the poem “Casey at the Bat” when things looked bleak for the Mudville nine.

A straggling few got up to go in deep despair. The rest
Clung to the hope which springs eternal in the human breast. . .

That’s a very different poem if it had been ‘Casey Drops Back to Throw.”

A straggling few got up to boo, their faces red with dread.
The rest, depressed, blamed the refs and called for the coach’s head.

Carlin got so much right in his famous “Baseball and Football” routine. Baseball has a seventh-inning stretch, football a two-minute warning. Football is about downs (what down is it?) and baseball is about ups (Who’s up?)

And then there’s this marvelous comparison:

·        In baseball, during the game in the stands, there’s kind of a picnic feeling. Emotions may run high or low, but there’s not too much unpleasantness.
·        In football, during the game in the stands, you can be sure that at least twenty-seven times you’re capable of taking the life of a fellow human being.

It feels so true. And yet, there’s something hard to explain. Every year during the 2000s, I would go out as a reporter to see at least one Oakland A’s baseball game. And the place felt sunny. The A’s uniforms glowed green and gold, and there were kids running around, and the fans were welcoming and friendly, it really was a picnic feeling. One fan actually offered to buy me a beer.

Also, every year, I would go out as a reporter to see at least one Oakland Raiders football game, and the place felt dark, foreboding, a Mad Max sort of hellscape. People dressed up as pirates and marauders. Spikes came out of their shoulders. More than one threw a beer at me.
Baseball and football, right?

Except — and it took way too long for me to have this epiphany — these were the same people. Baseball fans are football fans. Football fans are baseball fans.

Lots of us are living double lives.

* * *

Every childhood has its own mythology, I suppose, and a key point in my own is that I was born on the day of Super Bowl I. As the story was told again and again, I was born first in my family, not only ahead of my brothers but also ahead of all my cousins, and as such there were nerves galore throughout the family network. Relatives on multiple continents paced and worried and waited anxiously for news on that January day in 1967.

All, that is, except my father, who, as family legend has it, sat unbothered in the waiting room watching that first Super Bowl between the Green Bay Packers and Kansas City Chiefs.

“How can you sit there and watch football?” my grandmother somewhat famously yelled at him—famous in our family legend, anyway—at which point Dad said something to the effect of it not just being any football game but the Super Bowl.

This story was used often to explain why I grew up such a fanatic about football. What could you expect? My father was watching the Super Bowl when I was born. My grandfather — a Holocaust survivor who despised all games so intensely that he used to carefully pull out the sports section every morning so that he could happily jam it in the kitchen trash bin before beginning his reading, could never understand why his oldest grandchild would waste his time and energy on such nonsense, such mishegoss, as he called it.

I don’t think he ever fully forgave my father for watching the Super Bowl when he should have been properly pacing back and forth, nervously awaiting my birth.

But here’s the thing, the M. Night Shyamalan twist.

I wasn’t born on the day of the first Super Bowl.

I didn’t find this out until I was in college. I was raised on the certainty that the first Super Bowl was the day I was born. It was tops among my catalog of remembered historic dates. The moon landing was July 20, 1969. President Kennedy was shot on Nov. 22, 1963. Pearl Harbor was bombed on Dec. 7, 1941.

And the first Super Bowl was on my birthdate, Jan. 8, 1967.

Only, it wasn’t. The first Super Bowl was one week later, Jan. 15, 1967.

When I confronted my family with this shattering news — was everything a lie? — they insisted that my father WAS watching football when I was born. But how could that be? I was born in the bye week before the Super Bowl. There was no football on television. And this is when I learned, for the first time, that from 1960 to 1969, the NFL—to provide counterprogramming to the upstart American Football League—created a consolation game they played in Miami called the “the Playoff Bowl.”

This game matched up the second-place teams in each conference.

Vince Lombardi called it “a loser’s bowl for losers.”

That’s the day I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on the day of the loser’s bowl for losers. And my dad was attentively watching the game. What chance did I even have?

From my earliest memory, I marked my life with football. I loved baseball, sure, basketball too, tennis, soccer, any sport really. But my relationship with football was something bigger and more complicated than love. The first season I remember was 1975. I was 8 years old. The Browns lost their first nine games of the season.

On the day before a sixth-grade science exam I had not studied for in 1977, the Browns almost came back and beat the Pittsburgh Steelers behind a backup quarterback and full-time dentist, Dr. Dave Mays. Almost. The loss sent me into a tailspin. I failed that test.

When I was 12 years old, I “had” to go with my father to a school-sponsored sex education class. All I remember is racing to the car afterward and listening as Don Cockroft kicked a field goal with one second left on the clock to give the Browns a 13-10 victory over the Colts.

Nothing mattered to me as much as football. In 1980, a classmate invited me to some sort of memorial for John Lennon, who had been killed earlier that week. As I recall, he said a girl I had a crush on would be there. I passed and instead watched the Browns lose to the Vikings when Ahmad Rashad caught a Hail Mary pass as time expired.

When I was a sophomore in high school, I skipped a debate — costing me two letter grades in my debate class — so that I could watch (on television) the Browns lose 14-13 to the New York Jets. And that was in a lost year; the Browns had been eliminated from playoff consideration weeks earlier.

I thought about football — specifically the Browns but also everything else football — more or less every minute of every day. During boring classes (and I found just about all my classes boring), I would write long football stories just to make the time go by. I’d predict champions, celebrate moments, salute players and coaches, unleash anger. I never even thought of showing these stories to anyone. They weren’t for reading.

Those stories just poured out of me. Football just poured out of me.

Over the years, much of that obsession has faded. Football can be a hard sport to love for any number of reasons, particularly the violence and danger. When I told a friend, television producer Michael Schur, that I was writing a book called “Why We Love Football,” he said: “Is it a one-word book and is that word ‘bloodlust?’”

But even Mike can’t quit football. It’s inside us. Writing this book — writing about all these incredible moments and players and miracles — I felt like I was back in high school, and football poured out of me again. I lost myself countless times. Perhaps the only difference is that when I emerged from this latest trance of football writing, I wasn’t sitting in front of an algebra quiz that made no sense to me.

* * *

This book comes with no instructions. You can read it anyway you like — front to back, back to front, open up to any page and just start. Inside, you will find 100 reasons why we love football, from throughout football history — not just pro football but also college football, high school football, lots of other bonus stuff that comes free with the purchase of this book! Well, you’ll see.

I think these also are the game’s 100 greatest moments, and I use the word “greatest” as a generality. I was looking for something very specific with these moments. When I chose the moments for my last book “Why We Love Baseball,” I used a formula of sorts:

(I+D+E) x A = Great Moment Score!

I represented the Importance of the play. D stood for its Distinctiveness; was the play unique somehow? E stood for emotion. And finally, A was for Awesomeness.

For football, essentially, emotion was the whole deal. Football is a game of constant emotion, skyscraper highs, subterranean lows, boiling rage, gasps of relief, irrepressible joy that is immediately repressed because there was a flag on the play.

During a baseball game, you relax, chat with friends, reminisce …

During a football game, you live and die and live and die again.

My friend Michael Mulvihill, President of Insights and Analysis over at Fox, explained this best:

 “What,” he asked me, “do you think the biggest off the field event is in baseball?”

After thinking about it, I said: “It’s probably the Hall of Fame induction in Cooperstown every year.” The Baseball Hall of Fame is, by far, the most talked about, argued about, cherished and celebrated Hall of Fame in all of sports. Every year, tens of thousands of people show up in this hard-to-get-to little village in New York so that they can salute their heroes and remember their childhoods and be a part of baseball history.

“Right,” he said. “It has to be the Hall of Fame induction. Now, what do you think is the biggest off the field event in football?”

That was even easier to answer than the baseball question. “The draft,” I said instantly. The NFL Draft is not only the biggest off-the-field sporting event in football, it probably draws more interest than anything in any other sport. The NFL claimed that 54.4 million people watched the 2023 NFL Draft at some point during the three days. More than 300,000 people attended the draft live in Kansas City.

“Of course,” Michael said. “It’s the draft.”

“So, it seems to me that’s the biggest difference between baseball and football. In baseball, fans look back. And in football, fans look forward.”

I do hope you’ll join me in looking back a bit.

* * *

One last thing: In “Why We Love Baseball,” I wrote about beating my friend Jim Banks in the most important Strat-O-Matic World Series ever played. It made me so happy to enshrine in the permanent record my glorious victory and the role that Red Sox star Dwight Evans played in it.

But … fair is fair. Strat-O-Matic, a tabletop sport simulation board game, has a football version which we were every bit as obsessed with as baseball. And in our biggest football game, I was coaching the Oakland Raiders, and he was coaching the San Diego Chargers, and I was leading by five with only time for one more play. His greatest player, by far, was wide receiver Wes Chandler, and so using all the tools Strat-O-Matic offered, I essentially put my entire defense on Wes Chandler.

His quarterback Dan Fouts threw the Hail Mary touchdown pass to Chandler anyway.

This is only one of the many football heartbreaks I will never, ever live down.

No. 100:

Aaron Donald

"You're supposed to win the one-on-ones."

-Aaron Donald

-

February 13, 2022

In the moment, the key moment, the winning moment, only one thought raced through the mind of Los Angeles Rams coach Sean McVay: "Aaron Donald is going to make a play."

The thought so surged through him that he almost involuntarily said it out loud for all of his coaches and players (and, later, the television audience for the NFL Films recap) to hear. He did not say it as a wish or a prayer but as a simple truth, the sort of thing you say to remind yourself of something important.

Don't forget to get milk.

Be sure to turn left after the gas station.

Augusta is the capital of Maine.

Aaron Donald is going to make a play.

In truth, Aaron Donald had just made a play, a nearly impossible one. With less than a minute left in Super Bowl LVI, Donald's Rams led the Cincinnati Bengals by three, 23-20. But the Bengals and their irrepressible quarterback, Joe Burrow, were driving. They moved the ball into Rams territory and were 10 or 15 yards from field goal range. On third and 1, Burrow handed off the ball to Samaje Perine, a 240-pound monster truck of a man.

There was nothing in front of Perine but green and the first-down line.

Much of watching football is built around expectation. You see Perine in the clear; you see the first down; you expect the first down. That's how it goes every time. The monster truck men always get the first down when there isn't a defender standing between them and the line.

Only this is what Aaron Donald did: On the snap, he smashed into Cincinnati's right guard Hakeem Adeniji, a 6-foot-4, 315-pound bruiser. Donald spun him around like he was a revolving door and grabbed a sprinting Perine from behind.

From behind. Any rudimentary understanding of mass in motion will tell you that Donald could not stop Perine's forward motion from behind him any more than someone could grab the caboose of a moving train and stop it from rolling forward. Nobody is that strong without CGI.

Only Aaron Donald is, in fact, that strong. Two Archies made him so. When Aaron was growing up in Pittsburgh, his father, Archie Sr., worried about him being undisciplined. "He was kind of chubby," Archie Sr. said. Father and son cut a deal: Every day before school they worked out together. These sessions evolved into massive two-hour workouts beginning at four thirty a.m.

This made the body strong. Aaron's older brother, Archie Jr., strengthened the mind. Aaron could never remember a time that he didn't idolize his brother. Archie played linebacker at the University of Toledo, where he was among the nation's leading tacklers. He was all heart. "You gotta put every single thing you have into every play," Archie Jr. said.

"I just want to play like my brother," Aaron said whenever anyone asked about his football goals. "I just want to have an attitude like him."

Here at the Super Bowl, third down and 1, he combined the life lessons of the Archies and pulled Samaje Perine back before he could get the first down.

"That," Al Michaels said on the broadcast, "is why people say he's the best player in the league."

Now the Bengals faced fourth down and 1 with the game in the balance.

And Sean McVay said, out loud, to everyone and no one at the same time: "Aaron Donald is going to make a play."

Here's something kind of funny: The ultimate compliment a football coach can offer-the highest commendation, the most stirring tribute, the grandest praise-is to call a football player "a football player."

That probably doesn't look like much when you put it quite that way. It doesn't really work the same way when you say, Tom right there is an electrician, or Sally does our taxes and-let me tell you-she's an accountant.

But football coaches have a way of saying "football player" just so-in hushed tones, with bowed heads-and it is clear that they are reaching for something beyond words. A "football player," in coach-speak, is a player who lives up to the coach's most soaring ideals, someone who works harder than others, plays smarter than others, takes the blame, shares the credit, and, more than anything, yes, makes the play when a play is needed most. Aaron Donald is a football player. He's one of the footballest football players in the history of the sport.

The strange part is . . . for so long, very few people saw it. None of the big-time colleges wanted him. No Alabama. No Georgia. No Ohio State. No Michigan. No Texas. No Notre Dame. They apparently thought him too small-at 6-foot-1, 260 pounds-to be a starting interior lineman at the highest level of college football. Akron wanted him. Toledo. Rutgers. Schools like that.

Fortunately for Donald, about twelve miles away from his high school, the head coach at the University of Pittsburgh, Dave Wannstedt, saw film of Donald. Western Pennsylvania is sacred football country-it's the home of Unitas, Montana, Ditka, Dorsett, Huff, Ham, Namath, on and on-and Wannstedt is as Western Pennsylvania as you can get. He watched Donald make five plays. That's all it took.

This guy, Wannstedt thought, is a football player.

Donald was incredible at Pittsburgh. As a senior in 2013, he won the Bednarik Award as the nation's best defensive player, the Nagurski Award as the nation's best defensive player, the Lombardi Award for being the best defensive lineman or linebacker, and the Outland Trophy for being the most outstanding interior lineman. There were no more trophies to give a defensive player. He made more tackles for loss than any player in America. He then went to the NFL Combine and ran the fastest time any interior lineman had ever run.

He still was not taken until the thirteenth pick of the 2014 draft. Scouts were mixed. "Lacks ideal height and has short arms," the St. Louis Post Dispatch wrote.

But, again, people missed it. They missed that with Aaron Donald you didn't measure his arms or his height or his weight. He was something new. You couldn't block him no matter how many blockers you used. You couldn't keep him out of the backfield no matter what schemes you designed. By his second year, Pro Football Focus wrote that he was the best player in the NFL. Not the best interior defensive lineman. Not the best defensive player. The best. All of it.

In his fourth season, he won his first of three Defensive Player of the Year awards. In his fifth season, he became the first defensive tackle ever to record twenty sacks in a season. In his first ten seasons, he had forty more tackles for loss than any other player in the NFL.

There has never been another one like him.

So, yeah, Sean McVay knew what everyone knew: Aaron Donald would make the play.


Super Bowl LVI, fourth down, 1 yard to go for the Bengals, and Aaron Donald was thinking about confetti. Three years earlier, the Rams had played in the Super Bowl against New England, and Donald was so confident the Rams would win that he promised his five-year-old daughter, Jaeda, that after the game they would lie down in the confetti and make snow angels.

The Patriots won that game instead-the Rams only managed to score 3 points-and Donald was devastated by the loss. But it got worse after the game when he was hugging his sobbing daughter and she said, "I thought we were going to get to play in the confetti." That just about broke him.

Donald lined up, expecting another run. Then he saw Burrow in the shotgun, and he shouted out: "They're throwing the ball." The Bengals had two blockers ready for him, obviously. Left guard Quinton Spain had the main assignment and center Trey Hopkins was supposed to slide over to help.

But Donald's speed is perpetually stunning. No matter how many times you face him, it comes as a jolt. He broke right and left Spain standing like someone who missed a bus. Hopkins was not nearly quick enough to get over in time. By the time Burrow tried the pump fake that was meant to slow him down, Donald was already behind him. Donald grabbed Burrow and spun him around like they were square-dancing. He then laid Burrow on the ground.

He made the play. The Rams won the Super Bowl. And when a reporter came up to him for a postgame interview, Donald saw his children, saw Jaeda, and smiled.

"Excuse me," he told the interviewer. "We're going to play in the confetti for a minute, man."