Seven Oaks Magazine.

This weekend was of special significance to the National Football League and its players. For all of the games this weekend, and for all the games the Arizona Cardinals will play this season, the players wore a small #40 decal on the back of their helmets. This coincided with the retirement of the number 40 in Arizona, a rare honour in professional football. All of this was as a memorial to Pat Tillman, a former player for the Cardinals and probably the most famous American casualty from the most recent American colonialist misadventures in the Middle East. A player of some skill, Tillman was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan only a few months after turning down a multi-million dollar contract in order to join the Army. Although he himself will only be a footnote in the history of our time, the ties between the NFL and the military, on display this weekend more than most, are an under-discussed but extremely troublesome aspect of the spectacle that is professional football.

In the late 1980s, a popular (although untrue) news story told America that Super Bowl Sunday was also the day with the highest reported number of domestic assaults in the nation. The story remains popular to this day, largely because it is so believable. After all, professional football has come to unite what many believe are the classic traits of reactionary working class masculinity: violence, nationalism, sexism, and a pride in the nobility of hard work that in an earlier time would have been called a protestant work ethic. But pop gender scholars and anti-sports pundits have, I believe, reversed the field in this case. It is not that the sport of football, professional or otherwise, inherently represents these social values – it is that professional football as a spectacle has sought to shape conceptions of American masculinity using the appeal of football and associating it to all of these abusive ideologies.

The ties between militarism and football are impossible to deny. As this weekend suggests, football has been taken over my military symbolism. Coaches and players refer to the field as a “field of battle,” they discuss the game as a “war,” and all matches open with marching military bands and the Marines holding the American flag. Even here in Canada this holds true, as Canada’s equivalent to the Marines – the Royal Canadian Air Cadets – held the flag during the national anthem at BC Place before Saturday’s game. But this tie is not inevitable. Football is not war – it is a game. And the military connection to football, while old, is manufactured by the owners and managers of the NFL and other leagues.

The rampant sexism of professional football is much the same. In terms of players, while it is unlikely to ever be much of a co-ed sport, there are female football leagues, many of them playing at a high level. There is no publicity for this within professional male football, however, and no interest apparently in providing any. Instead, every team is equipped with cheerleading groups. Originally made up of injured players, cheerleaders have become a small piece of the sex industry available at every game. Every telecast broadcasts them, and every team has a group, only rarely co-ed. This heavily sexualizes the sport, and associates feelings of power and possession with the men watching the game. Just as fans are often possessive of their teams, and feel pride at their performance, so are they encouraged to be possessive of the cheerleaders, although in a way coloured by extracting sexual pleasure as opposed to offering vicarious support.

Of course, all of this is filtered through two lenses. The first relates to the players. Rarely are players identified as being raised within privileged homes, nor is much attention paid to the fact that all of them are degree holders and multi-millionaires. Attention is virtually never paid to the genetic lottery that they have won, which largely accounts for their amazing athletic ability. These indicators of their elite status are hidden under a myth that only allows for a ‘hard-work’ explanation of success. The players’ biographies are regularly told to enforce their heroic struggles with poverty or the temptation to do drugs. The message is, over and over again, that a ‘can-do’ attitude and a hard work ethic lead to success. Besides being the great American myth, this tale also targets a very specific audience. It tells men who do not like their position in life, do not enjoy their jobs, or are oppressed by their poverty or on the basis of their race, that success is only the result of hard work. It strips a sense of entitlement from the players, and from their adoring fans, and replaces it with a myth of hard work leading to just reward.

The second lens through which all of these ideologies are seen surrounds the game on television. Sporting events in general, but football especially, are hugely important to an advertising industry trying to reach men between 18 and 55. These advertisements serve to reinforce the lessons the spectacle itself teaches, as well as target these lessons to working class and middle class men. They also explain the motivation for the popular media and football owners and marketers who have created the abomination of professional sports presentation. By encouraging these reactionary values, they heighten the alienation and abusive context within which so many of their products thrive.

The result of all this is the construction of an ideal American man, according to the sport of football. The children (and, let’s be honest, adults) who identify with the players involved in the game and who idolize their athleticism are encouraged to believe that these values are inherent to their athletic success. To be a professional athlete, this ideological construct says, means that you must be violent, nationalistic, sexist and dedicated to work, even when it is self-destructive. This is not to say that all, or even most, football fans are swallowing this completely. But it is important to recognize that the combination of these ideologies around sports, represented here by football, is a deliberate attempt by advertisers and sports marketers to shape American conceptions of working class masculinity. It’s time more sports fans demanded their events be presented without the oppressive shroud, perhaps by turning their attention to more amateur sports.