Dreary Meetings: A Year Inside the NFL

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Dreary Meetings: A Year Inside the NFL
By Marc Tracy - February 1, 2014

Collision Low Crossers
A Year Inside the Turbulent World of NFL Football
By Nicholas Dawidoff
Little, Brown, 2012, 496 pp.

At the beginning of the 1963 season, George Plimpton joined the Detroit Lions. The idea was to embed with the players, report what it was like, and then transmit to the rest of the universe the unique experience of being a football athlete. The result was the classic Paper Lion (as the title spoils, Plimpton didn’t make it past training camp). This past fall, fifty seasons later, came Nicholas Dawidoff’s Collision Low Crossers. It’s a report of his year—centered on the 2011 season—embedded with the New York Jets. Like Paper Lion, it will stand as its era’s exemplary document of how the National Football League is consumed. Dawidoff received a truly heroic amount of access to the Jets, especially once you adjust for the hyper-secretive nature of NFL franchises, which guard playbooks as though they’re nuclear suitcases. And he has used it to write a story almost all about the coaches.

The book’s myopic perspective is not all Dawidoff’s fault. He is a creature of his times. The gulf between middle-class readers and players today might be insurmountable. Through the 1970s, most players were normal-sized and clocked in at ordinary jobs during the offseason. Today, most fans who do not come from the same (predominantly poor, predominantly black, disproportionately southern) neighborhoods as the players fail to see any themselves in most of the athletes. It is probably no accident that the popular nickname for Calvin Johnson, the best wide receiver in the league, is Megatron—a robot. (Incidentally, for a good player’s-eye view of the NFL, I recommend the former tight end Nate Jackson’s memoir, Slow Getting Up, also published last year.)

Fans’ approach to the players has changed the way they view and consume the sport itself. Early in Collision Low Crossers, a coach compares players “in their helmets and pads to armored knights on horses—‘You knew there was somebody in there but you didn’t know who the hell it was!’” The metaphor is especially telling. Football is an endeavor in which the players have one code of honor to uphold among themselves, but the spectators just want a triumphant winner as well as a loser bloodied and knocked off his horse. For this reason, more “sophisticated” fans’ reverence has shifted mainly to the coaches and executives (and to the five or six best, invariably white, drop-back quarterbacks), whose jobs seem much more intelligible to them. They dissect their brilliant and/or stupid decisions to go for it on fourth down; they analyze the decisions to be made in the annual draft; they ponder the respective advantages of the 4-3 and 3-4 defenses. This sort of thing can be fun, but it is a strikingly dispassionate way to root, root, root for the home team. To paraphrase Susan Sontag, perhaps we need an erotics rather than a hermeneutics of football. (Then again, given that the fundamental unit of football is one extremely oversized man pummeling another, an erotics may be the last thing football needs.)

Either way, Dawidoff is as guilty as the rest of us. He has composed history from the top down. The Jets’ upset victory over the New England Patriots in the playoffs three years ago, he tells us, was mainly the coaches’ doing: “they’d forged an intricate mousetrap for Tom Brady.” The players barely exist until training camp begins, nearly 200 pages in. Dawidoff writes frankly about the coaches’ spring boredom due to an owner-initiated labor lockout that forbade the coaches from contacting their players. But when he writes, “The lockout wore on everyone,” it is impossible to believe him, because there is every indication that at the time he had as much contact with Jets players as the coaches did. “On the one hand, the players were actual people the coaches guided, taught, and came to know and care about,” Dawidoff reports. “On the other,” he continues, “the players were abstractions, works perpetually in progress for the coaches to edit, improve, even transform.” Any reader of Collision Low Crossers will see that Dawidoff primarily sees the players this second way. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-players-were-abstractions-a-year-inside-the-nfl