Richmond's Rumblings

Richmond’s Rumblings

Now that football season is (almost) over…

We can, as fans of our teams, calm down enough from bouncing from our chairs during a great play or bemoaning (to be polite) the referees when they make a dubious (for our team anyway) call on the field. We can celebrate our team’s wins, grieve for their losses, and for all but the team that wins this Sunday’s Super Bowl (Go Seahawks!), look forward to next year when everyone begins the year 0-0. For those who are not fans of our American sport’s central passion, you now can have at least a few weeks of respite before we who are fans start talking about next year’s hopes and dreams. Those weeks are good, and we all can celebrate them together.

I am a fan of the sport in general, as you know, but I am also someone who sees football as an expression of how we Americans understand ourselves as a people. Over several years of thinking about it in those terms, I have appreciated how football (in different, but parallel means to baseball) gained significant popularity as a means virtually just to let off steam. The first recognized college game took place in 1869, only four years after the end of our Civil War, between two northern-based universities of Rutgers and Princeton, but whose players undoubtedly carried memories of others who had only recently completed fighting horrific battles against their fellows from the South. When Southern schools such as Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia began to play during roughly the 1880s, their athletes certainly carried their own memories of military conflict as well. 

What football allowed these men to do, I believe, was release their stored energy in a (sort of) controlled atmosphere where not military triumph was not the objective, but still the same through a contest of intense violence just the same. Football gave these players, we can suggest, a chance to emerge victorious on a contested spot of land, which in the latter part of the nineteenth century also conveyed the notion of a battlefield. From those beginnings, our national sport has continued to seek victory at the conclusion of a given game, and whose language of “going into battle” expresses a direct analogy to military conflict. Other sports have adopted the same analogy, but when compared to either basketball or baseball, our version of football most closely resembles the image of two armies trying to annihilate one another on a particular space of ground. 

What football has also come to embody more recently, in my estimation, is how we as Americans now understood it in much the same way as our immediate ancestors looked upon steel as a product that helped us to defeat the Nazis in the Second World War. Steel as that notion existed throughout the early twentieth century and during the war, but gradually began to give way to football as multiple games began to be televised to mass audiences in the 1950s. Today, one can see an immense multitude of games on a single day via developments in streaming technology that seem almost incomprehensible. I can’t prove my notion of steel giving way to football as of yet, but I am working toward doing so, which I will come to share with you over the course of time. In the meantime, I need a break from football: it’s exhausting! 

Thank you for being the church and people you are, and God’s blessings continue to be yours and to those you love.

Shalom, Live Long, and Prosper,

Richmond