The late, great George Carlin had a classic bit on the differences between baseball and football. One’s a game, he explained. The other is, well, more like war. After all, baseball is played in a park, football on a gridiron. The aim is to blitz and sack the opponent, to break through the line with traps, bombs, even a shotgun. The object in baseball? To go home, and be safe.
As the Royals’ World-Series hangover finally faded into this scandal-scarred NFL season, the differences became particularly stark. Baseball, so long an afterthought around here, inspired and unified a city in the way that sports at its very best can do. Football, which has never been more popular, has also never seemed so violent, and so broken.
The games only come once a week, hardly enough to distract from the headlines in between, about the trauma this sport inflicts on its players, and that in turn they’ve inflicted on their wives, their children, themselves—and the NFL’s lazy and too-late efforts to do something about it.
Well-meaning fans have lived with cognitive dissonance for a while. Two years ago, former Chiefs lineman Eric Winston notably fired back at what he saw as a bloodthirsty Arrowhead crowd: “We are not gladiators,” he said. Really? Are you not? Do players not put their lives on the line, and are we not entertained?
Heck, when Chiefs all-Pro safety Eric Berry was recently sidelined with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, the league was quick to tout the resulting solidarity—and the treatable nature of his “non-football injury”—as a feel-good story.
Not to get all Ecclesiastes, but for everything, for every sport, there is a season—from spring and summer to fall and winter, from “batter up” to first down. There can be no joy without pain, no love without hate, no good without…the Oakland Raiders.
Let’s not forget that football has always been a mostly positive way to channel our darker impulses, to relieve our existential anxieties. It’s not war, but it’s no coincidence the NFL came to prominence as the Depression lingered and World War II erupted. Seventy-five years ago, season attendance first broke the one-million mark. In time, football would overtake baseball as the national pastime.
And let’s not be naïve—every big-time sport has some serious issues. There’s little that’s pure about any business that pays grown men millions to play a children’s game, and makes billions off their fans. Setting the right rules and enforcing them, on the field and off, is essential. When a sport loses credibility, it loses its power to inspire and its reason for being.
But the way Berry has handled his situation, with public grace and compassion for others confronting cancer, is inspiring. And the NFL’s earnestness is easy to question, and it’s anti-violence PSA easy to lampoon, but it is provoking dialogue about what’s important and what’s not—discussions that need to happen, whether football existed or not.
We marvel at athletes for their superhuman prowess, but it is in these elements and conversations that once again sports, and particularly football, mirrors the human condition.
By the end of this season, more than 17 million people will have seen an NFL game live, and more than a third of the American population will tune in for the Super Bowl. Football is the largest and most popular spectator sport—and one of the most lucrative industries—in the world. It may evolve, the problems may get worse before they get better, but football’s not going anywhere.
Why? Well, I think that’s what George Carlin was getting at, and which this fall has made a little clearer to us fans. We rediscovered how easy baseball can be to love. Maybe football gives us something we need.