HOME / sports nut: The stadium scene.

Flag FootballHow the NFL became the American war game.

By Michael OriardPosted Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2009, at 11:22 AM ET

On Nov. 8, two hours before the day's blitzes and long bombs were to commence, Fox's NFL pregame show went on the air from Afghanistan. The festivities were high on patriotism but low on militarism, leaving out any hint of blood or fighting. For the U.S. military, the Fox broadcast was an opportunity to tell a story about its humanitarian mission in Afghanistan, to sell the war at home at a time when anything like a clear-cut military victory appears unattainable. For Fox, it was an opportunity to reconnect the NFL with the military, to wrap the football in the American flag after three years of restraint.

There is a long tradition of likening football to war, from paeans to the "generalship" of quarterbacks in the 1890s to the "wars in the trenches" of the modern game. While coaches and sportswriters have adopted military language over the years, the military has sometimes adopted football terminology, as in Operation Goalpost and Operation Varsity in World War II and Vietnam's Operation Linebacker.

RSS

A deeper connection was claimed during both world wars: football as a training ground for soldiers and officers, the game as a mimic war requiring cool thinking, self-sacrifice, and physical courage. During World War II, some of the best "college football" teams played for outfits like the Great Lakes Naval Training Center (coached by Paul Brown) and Iowa Navy Pre-Flight. More than 130 college and universities fielded teams with players in the Navy's V-5, V-7, and V-12 programs and overwhelmed teams stocked with undrafted 18-year-olds. (It was the Navy, not the Army, that embraced football for its training programs.)

Football was "the American war game." Baseball was the "national pastime," a symbol for the cause for which we were fighting, not for the fighting itself. There's an interesting link between symbol and fact. The Pro Football Hall of Fame's Web site lists the names of more than 1,000 NFL personnel (including 638 players) who served in World War II; 21 of them died. In Playing for Their Nation: Baseball and the American Military During World War II, Steven R. Bullock writes that 90 percent of Major League Baseball Players served, but none died, as most of them played baseball throughout the war to entertain their fellow soldiers, build morale, and provide "bragging rights for officers."

The Pro Football Hall of Fame lists another 226 NFL personnel who served in Korea but has no such list for Vietnam, most likely because the number was apparently just six. Vietnam was the war to be avoided, not courted, by football players as well as college students generally. Several NFL clubs had connections to local National Guard units to keep their players out of combat. Within the larger culture the idea that football was "the American war game" unraveled or became more complicated. The radical left denounced football as fascist and imperialist, while the extreme right proclaimed it as a bastion of traditional American values. (For someone who was actually playing football at the time, the game bore no relationship whatsoever to the war in Southeast Asia, although in certain academic settings I considered it prudent to keep quiet about my alternative football life.)

Football in the 1960s became political, not just warlike. An ardent fan of the game, President Richard Nixon also used football—see his calculated attendance at 1969's "Game of the Century" between Arkansas and Texas—to identify with his "silent majority" against his enemies. Pregame and halftime at the Orange Bowl (and soon the Super Bowl) became showcases for elaborate patriotic displays. Over time, football fans came to take this football-related patriotism—a brand of flag-waving more like superpatriotism—for granted, as if it were embedded in long tradition, perhaps even in the very nature of the game. It wasn't and isn't.

The routine playing of "The Star-Spangled Banner" before sporting events did not begin until World War II. Twenty-some years later in Miami, a man named Earnie Seiler—the director of the Orange Bowl since its inception in 1935—seized the moment of war, civil rights protest, and countercultural discord to drench football spectacle in superpatriotism. Baseball might have been the national pastime, but college football had been the country's chief sporting spectacle since the 1920s. Bands and cheerleaders and all of the related pageantry were not incidental to the sport, but essential elements. Baseball had no pregame or halftime shows, only a seventh-inning stretch (which post-9/11 could include "America the Beautiful" along with "Take Me out to the Ballgame"). Football had time and space for the spectacle that Seiler created in the 1960s: elaborate salutes to the flag, Uncle Sam, and the Statue of Liberty.

Page: 1 | 2 SINGLE PAGE

E-MAIL

RECOMMEND... Get Slate RSS Feeds

Michael Oriard is the author of Bowled Over: Big-Time College Football from the Sixties to the BCS Era.

Illustration by Charlie Powell.

COMMENTS

I've long thought that the Vince Lombardi cult of the 1960s owed a great deal to military failure in Vietnam. He occupied the place in the American imagination that MacArthur and Patton had filled 25 years earlier and that Westmoreland conspicuously could not fill.

The other thing about American football is that its thrust, pause and thrust occupation of territory, so different from the continuous flow of soccer or basketball, recapitulates American history. The ball is in Jamestown, and its first and the Shenandoah; now the ball is in Illinois and its first and Nebraska. California is the end zone.

-- jack_cerf
(To reply, click here)

Back in the late 60s I was a freshman at a Big Ten university, and I was bewildered by the patriotic schtick at the football games. I was from the East Coast and never saw such a thing before. I am as patriotic as anyone but I think that all that hoopla at football games both trivializes what it means to be patriotic and makes the game come across as way too full of itself. C'mon, you're there to have fun and yell and watch a game, you're not being a great citizen! I think football takes itself too seriously like it is this huge solemn ritual or something. OK I know baseball is trending that way and I don't like it either, but it has a ways to go before it gets as self-important as football.

-- cat51
(To reply, click here)

George Carlin: Baseball vs Football

-- todji
(To reply, click here)

What annoyed me about Fox's pregame show: all the announcers wore fatigues, and the stage was draped in cargo netting and boxes. WTF? cuz' FOX goes to entertain the soldiers they also have to go native, and the announcers start wearing fatigues (how many actually wore fatigues as a part of the military). It struck me as unnecessary at best, and at worst propagandist.

I mean, if you were a soldier what would you prefer to see? FOX NFL pregame in all its glitz and glory with power suits and (relatively) sleek sets, or dressed up in the uniforms and props that you see EVERY DAY. I can't speak for what the soldiers felt, but *I* thought it was condescending. Plus it appeared that there was no seating for the soldiers.

In retrospect it now seems like a dead giveaway of how tacky and tasteless the whole event would be when Curt Menefee announced it saying "...regardless of how you feel about the war..."

-- Beaujoe
(To reply, click here)

What did you think of this article?

Join The Fray: Our Reader Discussion Forum

POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES