By Kyle Smith
Thursday, August 22, 2019
The casual observer of our most popular sport, American
football, may notice that it shares a lot of qualities with America. The
players are incomprehensibly mammoth, overpoweringly strong, startlingly
violent. The more analytical viewer will note that football shares less obvious
qualities with our country as well: It’s beautiful, it’s complex, and it
exemplifies the American work ethic, our genius and innovation. Football is a reminder
that while sheer might was what our enemies most feared about us in World War
II, it was a small coterie of physicists who sealed the final victory.
The writer Michael Lewis, whose books on baseball and
football changed the way we think about both sports, and who played a lot of
baseball himself as a youth, once told me that baseball players are amazingly
dumb but football players are highly intelligent. They have to be; they are
pieces in a risky, brutal, fast-moving chess game who act according to a
rigorously designed set of human blueprints that requires them to adapt to
changing circumstances in fractions of a second, based on the actions of 21
other players. Far from being a sport about brute force, football is such a
cerebral affair that there is no question that the most valuable professional
in the game is a coach, Bill Belichick, whose record speaks, or rather shouts,
for itself. Despite managing to keep only a single player with him across his
many New England Patriots teams since 2000, with most positions other than Tom
Brady’s churning through many rounds of replacements, he consistently leads the
best, or very nearly the best, team in the hotly competitive National Football
League, whose salary-cap structure makes it impossible for any single squad to
hoard a highly disproportionate amount of individual talent.
With its rednecks and its Poindexters, its outcomes
equally likely to turn on the actions of a pudgy little placekicker, a fleet
cornerback, or a lineman the size of Mount Rushmore, football is a simulacrum
of the glorious breadth and diversity of America. Muscle and finesse each get
their due. In other sports, with their fluid play, coaches are primarily
concerned with whom they put on the field and only occasionally intervene with
strategic choices. In football, every few seconds things stop so that each side
may implement elaborately pre-choreographed tactical plans made on either side
of the ball. Brain matters at least as much as brawn, just as America’s success
is not just about our continental reach, our large population, or our economic
preeminence.
That’s how it may look to outsiders, and how our global
chorus of detractors may describe us (as they secretly long to live in Dallas
or Chevy Chase). They deride us as big, sloppy golden retrievers who are
forever knocking over the world’s furniture, but they know that we are more
remarkable for our thought than for our power. We lead the world in everything
from Nobel Prize–winning scientists to comedians. Scary strength and
breathtaking ingenuity: That’s football, that’s America.
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