The New Yorker on 'The Unbeautiful Game'

[Double Down]

It'd be nice if we can all just pony up and admit that if sports wagering was never invented, pro football would not become the bloated overfed pustule of a sport that it is today.

The players we hear about are strictly cookie-cutter. Dancing after a touchdown? How original. There are only 1,487 of your ilk in that rarefied air. Want to truly break the mold? Flip the script? Run in, hand the ball to the ref and run back. The sporting community will take a collective shirt in its collective pants. Promise.

Oh, gosh, what's this? A post-game press conference where even the winning coach looks suicidal? I'm shocked. In no way can I tell that these poor surly bastards are working 100 hour weeks and napping in their offices. Christ, what happened to Bum Phillips? These guys have all the charisma of oatmeal.

Wow, a loud fast-paced program packed to the ribs with ex jocks screaming about guys getting "jacked up?" Amazing. This makes me long for the subtle lilting voice of John Madden.

Look...the game sucks, the culture around it sucks, it all sucks. I'm usually not so over-the-top absolutist except to those close to me, but if this gets one person to never watch a pro football game again, it'll all be worth it. Gun to my head, I couldn't name last season's MVP. I can't name this year's MVP. And this is a point of pride.

Even if my "home team" ever makes the Super Bowl, I'm not watching it. First I'll go upstairs and masturbate. Then maybe I'll clean the magazines off my bedroom floor. I'll see if there's something good on TV, like a marathon of movies based on Danielle Steele novels. I'll empty the catbox and clean it, twice. Maybe I'll masturbate some more. We'll see. Then, for exercise, I'll go outside and hit myself in the nuts with a ball-peen hammer.

Anything but this present dreck.

I enjoy football, and the current NFL.

But I also enjoyed this post very much.

 

[write then drink]

football is nowhere near as boring as that story

 

[Alma]

Gopnik's trying to strip the myth from the game. I get that. I think, though, it would have been better if he had actually interviewed a coach or two, maybe talked to some current players - I know many who are open, honest, and spirited - and bounced some of these ideas off of them. This piece lives too far in the vacuum of one guy's head. To me, the piece is more about how once an idea start rolling in the head of a writer, it can select parts of facts from here and there to create a compelling argument - so long as it isn't exposed to the air of a player or game or experience that justly proves it wrong.

 

[shotglass]

The only thing I could wrap my head around as I read this was what J_D already said...

It was written for the New Yorker.

 

[friend of the friendless]

Sirs, Madames,

The only thing worse than romanticizing the past is romanticizing a past that you don't remember or weren't alive for. Gopnik's exposure to the game as it was came not with a media pass but a library card. His opinion is a literary conceit, nothing more. The game isn't boring. He is. The easy thing is to criticize an entire sport and its athletes for a dearth of stories. The harder but better thing is to go find somebody with a story to tell.

YHS, etc

 

[Boom_70]

Sirs, Madames,

The only thing worse than romanticizing the past is romanticizing a past that you don't remember or weren't alive for. Gopnik's exposure to the game as it was came not with a media pass but a library card. His opinion is a literary conceit, nothing more. The game isn't boring. He is. The easy thing is to criticize an entire sport and its athletes for a dearth of stories. The harder but better thing is to go find somebody with a story to tell.

YHS, etc

FOTF

Disagree- Gopnik's brief overview of Joe Namath Jet era is dead on and could only have been written by someone who followed the Jets in that time.

You guys are just upset because he poked fun at the writers enjoying free food in the press box.

Someone needs to get Roy Blount on here and ask him what he thinks. Could he have written "Three Bricks Shy Of A Load" in today's NFL. Ricky Manning might have beaten him up.

 

[heyabbott]

Terrell Owens is not boring.

Chad Johnson is not boring.

Ray Lewis is not boring.

The opposite of boring, in the instances cited above, is not interesting. A trainwreck is not boring, but it's not interesting. Watch a someone with cerebral palsey shoot heroin is not boring, it may be interesting, but it's still offensive and hurtful.
Owens & Johnson are just insecure, under educated, ignorant narcissists, whose act has gotten old, tired and stale. Ray Ray is just a dimwitted sociopath.
Boring, maybe not, but far from interesting

 

[Columbo]

A litigious U.S., a world where you cannot trust ANYONE, paparazzi on roids.

That is what has sucked the personalities out of athletes.... most celebrities for that matter.

 

[friend of the friendless]

Mr 70,

Like me, Gopnick was wearing short pants and following the Montreal Expos when Namath's Jets won the Super Bowl. I appreciate any kind words you can give Canadian writers but with Gopnick, well, he had to experience the NFL's glorious past when it had already moved into the past--second- third- and fourth-hand. He was an Expos fan as a kid and I'm sure that he stayed one as a McGill student in the mid- and late 70s. As for free food in the press box, I've never had a press box hot dog--I haven't eaten meat since 1974. I could care less about Gopnick's stereotypes of scribes--they're probably as accurate as the stereotypes of NYer writers.

YHS, etc

 

[shotglass]

My main bone of contention is that many of you aren't finding these players as interesting and/or charismatic and/or romantic because you deal with them on a personal basis. There's every possibility that the home-spun charm of a Unitas might have come across as Tom Brady-like vanilla if you were having to interview him today.

 

[Boom_70]

Terrell Owens is not boring.

Chad Johnson is not boring.

Ray Lewis is not boring.

The opposite of boring, in the instances cited above, is not interesting. A trainwreck is not boring, but it's not interesting. Watch a someone with cerebral palsey shoot heroin is not boring, it may be interesting, but it's still offensive and hurtful.
Owens & Johnson are just insecure, under educated, ignorant narcissists, whose act has gotten old, tired and stale. Ray Ray is just a dimwitted sociopath.
Boring, maybe not, but far from interesting

Johnson , Owens and Lewis are ESPN fueled bores. Back in the day the closest thing to those fellows was Fred the Hammer Williamson.

Well the Packers shut him up. We've all seen the classic NFL film of Packers/ Chiefs Super bowl with The Hammer being carried off field and Willie Wood proclaiming "We got the Hammer we got the Hammer"

Some might have considered the 67 Packers boring. I think they were far from it collectively. Even today those guys are more interesting to hear from than most of todays players in the NFL.

 

[21]

Hmmm...lot to chew on there. A whole lot.

What do you think, 21?

Oh God, I'm having that dream where I sleep through final exams.

Somewhat ironic that the author is bemoaning the complete lack of fun and humor in football today, which is exactly how I felt reading the story. He is no Groucho Marx.

The whole piece is a very long cliche, which better writers have applied to virtually every sport: it's just a big boring corporate business out there, bring back the good ol' days when players could laugh and a writer could find some good material for a book. This is hand-wringing by a wide-eyed fan, lamenting the 'silly putty' reshaping of the sport by media and league drones. The complaint is trite and unoriginal. Football purists don't fall for 'reshaping' and hype and dazzle--they just want to see the game.

As for the books: short-sighted to mention Semi-Tough without also mentioning North Dallas Forty. Not everyone laughed through that era. Three Bricks is a classic because of Blount, not because of those Steelers...you could tell Blount to go write about some random 1980s Tampa Bay team, you'd still die from envy that anyone can make it look so easy.

Did Pierce or Feinstein et al set out to write another Three Bricks? Doubtful....so why the comparison? (And to respectfully disagree with Boom and others, I think Pierce would be perfect for that kind of book.)

Finally, this sentence near the end sums up a philosophical difference I can't reconcile: 'The essential experience of watching sports is experiencing loss...' No: To me, the essential experience is the anticipation of the unknown, the instant drama and unpredictable twist of fate that truly tests the limits of human emotion.