How Football Explains America

By Sal Paolantonio

ESPN’s Sal Paolantonio explores just how crucial football is to understanding the American psyche
 
Using some of the most prominent voices in pro sports and cultural and media criticism, How Football Explains America is a fascinating, first-of-its-kind journey through the making of America's most complex, intriguing, and popular game. It tackles varying American themes—from Manifest Destiny to “fourth and one”—as it answers the age-old question Why does America love football so much? An unabashedly celebratory explanation of America’s love affair with the game and the men who make it possible, this work sheds light on how the pioneers and cowboys helped create a game that resembled their march across the continent. It explores why rugby and soccer don’t excite the American male like football does and how the game’s rules are continually changing to enhance the dramatic action and create a better narrative. It also investigates the eternal appeal of the heroic quarterback position, the sport’s rich military lineage, and how the burgeoning medium of television identified and exploited the NFL’s great characters. It is a must read for anyone interested in more fully understanding not only the game but also the nation in which it thrives. Updated throughout and with a new introduction, this edition brings How Football Explains America to paperback for the first time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Triumph Books
• Release date: Sep 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781633192911

Book preview

Also by Sal Paolantonio

Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big-City America

The Paolantonio Report: The Most Overrated and Underrated Players, Teams, Coaches, and Moments in NFL History with Reuben Frank

For my wife, Lynn

Contents

Introduction

Prologue

1. How Football Explains Manifest Destiny

2. How Football Explains Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett

3. How Football Explains Alexis de Tocqueville

4. How Football Explains John Coltrane and Jackie Robinson

5. How Football Explains West Point

6. How Football Explains the Battle of Midway

7. How Football Explains Father Knows Best

8. How Football Explains the ’60s

9. How Football Explains Show Business

10. How Football Explains Us All

Acknowledgments

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Introduction

When I first wrote this book, the New England Patriots had just lost to the New York Giants in Super Bowl XLII at University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, in one of the most bizarre endings to a championship game in American sports history.

Seven years later—same stadium, same city—the Patriots had a reversal of fortune. New England stole the Super Bowl title from the Seattle Seahawks at the goal line with 20 seconds remaining in the fourth quarter, winning in a way that nobody had ever seen before. That’s right: the NFL has existed since 1920 and nobody had seen a game, no less a championship, decided with 20 seconds to go on an interception at the goal line—by a player who, just eight months earlier, was making $7.25 an hour at a Popeyes restaurant in his hometown of Vicksburg, Mississippi. In eight months, Patriots cornerback Malcolm Butler went from fast food jockey to national fame.

Given the magnitude of the moment and relative inexperience of Butler, said NFL Films senior producer Greg Cosell, you could easily argue that that was the greatest single play in Super Bowl history.

Making it, in my opinion, the greatest single play in the history of pro football.

* * *

After the game, I did the first one-on-one interview with Butler for ESPN on the field at the University of Phoenix Stadium, confetti still floating in the air, still stuck in his hair. His chest still pulsated with the shock of the moment. I asked Butler to tell me what he thought of what he had just done. But his natural humility and obvious excitement conspired to block his candor and insight. In a word, he was dumbstruck. So, I said to him, Malcolm, you just saved the Super Bowl for Tom Brady and Bill Belichick. That’s when it sunk in—what he had accomplished and where he had come from to do it. He smiled and let loose.

The story of Malcolm Butler and his interception explains how football explains America. By interrupting Russell Wilson’s short 36-inch journey—it was second-and-goal at the one-yard line—and saving a Super Bowl title for two sure-fire Hall of Famers, Butler was catapulted through the quintessential American rags-to-riches story—you could say teleported, really. One moment, he could hardly afford a regular haircut. The next moment, Butler had been assigned a stylist so he’d be ready to sit next to LL Cool J at the Grammys. Vicksburg gave him a parade. Brady gave him his Super Bowl MVP pickup truck. It was red. Butler asked for a black one. Now, that’s America: the most famous football player on the planet gives you his truck and you tell him you’d like a different color, please.

But Butler making that play at that moment also perfectly explains the essence of the American game of football—what it takes to get to that moment, the preparation, the practice, the decision-making and the execution: it is as if the founding fathers of this profoundly American game drew it up themselves.

How did Butler get to make that play, to step in front of Seahawks wide receiver Ricardo Lockette just inside the goal line and pick Wilson? Let’s look at it, step by step.

Step one: Walter Camp, the divinity professor from Yale who invented American football, wanted to create a game that went beyond the mass movement of soccer, which America had inherited from Europe. Camp wanted a game that was more choreographed, more suited for the flourishing American industrial age of the late 1900s—a game that was more specific in its movement, more scientific in design.

Talk about scientific: the guy who designed Butler’s interception is Matt Patricia, the Patriots defensive coordinator who got his degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York—in aeronautical engineering.

I wanted to work on nuclear subs or aircraft carriers for the Navy, Patricia told me. Or fly jets. Instead, Patricia spent months and months sleeping on the floor of the coaches’ offices at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, learning the diabolical ways of Bill Belichick, earning a doctorate in how to destroy the ambitions of young quarterbacks.

Patricia’s goal-line defense was designed as a complex scheme to be executed with a few simple dance steps. To Russell’s right at the line of scrimmage were two receivers: Lockette and Jermaine Kearse. In the final Seahawks drive of Super Bowl XLIX, Wilson had thrown at Kearse twice. Both times, Butler was covering him. On the first throw, a seam route, Butler danced with Kearse step for step on his inside hip and broke up the pass. On the second attempt down the right sideline, right in front of the Seahawks bench, Butler was again stride for stride with Kearse, leapt three feet in the air, and swatted the Wilson pass. But, as both Butler and Kearse fell backward to the ground, the ball landed right in Kearse’s arms—a fluke, but a 33-yard completion nevertheless.

Seattle had first-and-goal on the five. Next play: Wilson handed the ball to running back Marshawn Lynch, the toughest runner in the NFL in the last decade. He rumbled between the left guard and left tackle. Just before Lynch crossed the goal line, Patriots linebacker Dont’a Hightower, who was actually playing the game with torn ligaments in his right shoulder, lunged just enough to grab Lynch’s right leg—36 inches from the Seahawks’ second consecutive Super Bowl title.

And that is where Seattle found itself: second-and-goal at the one-yard line, Lombardi Trophy polished and waiting.

The Seahawks could have handed the ball to Lynch—should have handed the ball to Lynch. There was confusion on the Seahawks sideline between head coach Pete Carroll and offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell. What to do? Pass or run?

We thought the Patriots were going to call timeout, said one member of the Seahawks organization. But Belichick did not stop the clock. Matt Patricia, the guy who wanted to fly Navy jets, was ready, forcing Carroll to make a decision.

Step two: there is an old military saying: Chance favors the prepared mind.

On the Patriots sideline, Patricia called for three cornerbacks. He yelled, Malcolm! Malcolm! And Butler, who had played a grand total of 14 defensive snaps in the previous two postseason games, frantically hustled onto the field.

Why was little-known, little-used Butler even called upon in this situation? Because the regular third corner, Kyle Arrington, who had been abused by the Seahawks wide receivers, was benched with 11 minutes and 51 seconds remaining in the third quarter. So, Butler, whose institutional memory of failure was non-existent, who had nothing to lose, who was willing to go for broke, was pressed into service.

But instead of covering Kearse as he had done on the previous two pass plays of that Seahawks fourth-quarter drive, Butler was assigned to cover Lockette, standing just inside the end zone. His eyes, however, were locked on Wilson. Standing in front of Butler, Patriots cornerback Brandon Browner was lined up in tight coverage on Kearse, right at the goal line. Stack alignment, stack coverage.

The decision was in: the Seahawks were going to throw the football. Wilson was in the shotgun. But he noticed that, perhaps born of the sideline confusion or the fact that the Patriots did not stop the clock, Lynch and the other wide receiver, Doug Baldwin, were both out of alignment. They were on Wilson’s right. So, the quarterback was forced to take precious time off the play clock to get Lynch and Baldwin, who appeared slightly confused, to move to the left side of the line of scrimmage.

That alignment tipped off the Patriots defense: the Seahawks were going to throw the ball to Lockette. Once again, Malcolm Butler was in the crosshairs.

Step three: here is another military adage: It’s not enough to aim at the target. You must hit it.

With exactly 26 seconds left on the clock, just prior to the ball being snapped, Wilson turned his eyes right for less than a blink, right at Butler. The ball is snapped just below Wilson’s waist and as he gathered the laces in his right hand, Patriots cornerback Brandon Browner jammed both arms into the chest of wide receiver Jermaine Kearse, preventing him from moving off the line of scrimmage. Kearse could not run a pick in front of Butler, as the Seattle design had called for.

Butler’s eyes flashed. It was his job now, it was up to him: jump in front of wide receiver Ricardo Lockette and break up the pass. He was to take exactly five steps to do it, planting his left foot and driving directly into the flight of the football. It’s exactly what Walter Camp envisioned around the time the Wright Brothers were figuring out how to fly: a scientific game of precise movement and execution: Five steps—that’s all that was between Malcolm Butler and history.

The problem was that Butler had never tried this in a real game, no less with the Super Bowl on the line. What’s more, during Super Bowl week preparations, Patricia had practiced this defensive alignment and assignment and execution three times. And each and every time, the pass was completed for a touchdown. Butler had whiffed, 0-for-3.

On Friday afternoon, on the long bus ride back to the team hotel, the Sheraton Wild Horse Pass, from the Arizona Cardinals facility, where the Patriots practiced during Super Bowl week, the team’s Pro Bowl corner, Darrelle Revis, gave Butler a pep talk. You might call it a pep talk, if you were at Harvard circa 1925. If you’re Revis and you’re from the unforgiving streets of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, and you’re talking to Malcolm Butler, there probably was more pop and less pep in the conversation: It’s not enough to aim at the target, Malcolm, you must hit it. Or words to that effect.

Twenty-three seconds left: Wilson cocks the trigger, pulls the football up to his chest. Butler takes those five beautiful, perfect steps and launches his body at Lockette’s right shoulder. Butler, football, and Lockette arrive just inside the goal line—in that order. In the air, Butler takes the football from Lockette, cradles it into his right shoulder socket.

And the 120 million people watching the Super Bowl are asking themselves: Did that just happen?

What just happened was that Malcolm Butler, a rookie from the little-known University of West Alabama, intercepted the first pass of his NFL career and saved the Super Bowl for two guys who will one day be enshrined in Canton, Ohio.

Butler, perhaps channeling Belichick, explained the technique, devoid of emotion: Goal line, preparation, the formation they were in with the two-receiver stack, I just knew they were throwing a pick route, Butler said. It was on the line, we needed it, and I just beat him to the route and made the play.

And another vision of the game’s founding fathers was realized: in America, on the football field, we will take what is yours from you—your territory, the football you possess—violently, if necessary. We shall deny your Manifest Destiny, fulfilling ours. Butler had writ large the essence of the game in exactly six seconds—and, in the process, he had written his own Hollywood ending. Except it was all too real.

Tom Brady, watching the Jumbotron from the bench, no doubt convinced he was about to be denied another Lombardi Trophy in the final minutes in the same stadium, jumped from the Patriots bench in disbelief. And Matt Patricia, a full black beard hiding his baby face, smiled.

Weeks later, Bill Belichick would say this about Malcolm Butler and the greatest play in pro football history: From West Alabama to Arizona and the Super Bowl is a long way. But he did it with a lot of hard work and he had an opportunity and he took advantage of it. So, it is really a dream story for him, and, you know, for all kids that play sports.

—Sal Paolantonio

Phoenix, Arizona

March 2015

Prologue

Everybody loves football, don’t they? —Steve Mariucci, former NFL head coach

It was the most-watched sporting event in American television history. And I was missing it.

The New York Giants were cobbling together the most unlikely comeback ever on a pro football field, Eli Manning was about to buy himself a house in Joe Namath’s neighborhood, the undefeated New England Patriots were about to cough up a chance at immortality, and I couldn’t see it.

It was dusk on February 3, 2008, and all this was taking place under the closed retractable roof of University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, and across America nearly 100 million people were mesmerized in front of their flat screens, wide screens, and big and small screens, watching Super Bowl XLII. Manning was caught in a three-pronged human vise of Adalius Thomas, Jarvis Green, and Richard Seymour. But, somehow, Manning wriggled free and heaved the football—a Hail Mary, Rodney Harrison would later call it—toward little-used wide receiver David Tyree, who pinned it between his red-and-white-gloved hand and his royal-blue helmet, and days later appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated and on a couch next to Jay Leno, explaining to America his improbable journey into a world inhabited by only Boyd Dowler, John Taylor, and Lynn Swann. And even though I was there, as a reporter covering the game for ESPN, I never saw any of that.

The great irony is that while 71,101 disbelieving, delirious fans were inside the stadium, which looks like a cross between one of those bright tin-foil Jiffy Pop containers fully pregnant with popcorn and an odd alien spacecraft that didn’t quite make the final cut in The Empire Strikes Back, I was stuck in a bewildered and frustrated knot of TV reporters and producers, on a long concrete apron in the unusually damp Arizona evening, waiting for a giant thick steel door—obviously designed with al-Qaeda in mind—to open and let us in for the postgame interviews. We were waiting behind carts and carts of those police barriers that look like bicycle stands and 20-dozen temporary security personnel wearing yellow Windbreakers, waiting to go first—to actually provide a wall of humanity and metal that would prevent us from reaching the triumphant players we were pre-staged to interview.

My colleague, Trey Wingo, had his cell phone pressed up against his left ear. From his home in Denver, another colleague, Mark Schlereth, was providing the game details and—like Ronald Reagan, who used to get the teletype of the baseball games in Chicago and re-create the play-by-play for radio audiences across the Midwest in the 1930s—Wingo barked out each play of the most dramatic fourth quarter in Super Bowl history, and we hung on every detail like the last survivors on a besieged planet.

And I was processing the perfectly symmetrical irony of it all. Here I am, a national correspondent for ESPN, the most-watched sports network in the history of worldwide television, and my job is to observe these events, using every ounce of curiosity in the deep reservoir of my 25 years of reporting experience, and deliver to the viewers a unique observation, an incisive bit of analysis—anything that would justify the fact that I’ve been given the honor of getting paid to attend this event.

Eli Manning and the Giants provided an improbable ending to Super Bowl XLII.

But in a great twist of fate, in perhaps one of the most important moments in NFL history, I had been stripped of my status as television-content provider. I had been unwittingly jettisoned from that privileged perch and was now a member of the television audience, which in this case turned out to be nearly one-third of all men, women, and children from Cape Cod to California. And it was at that moment that I began to fully understand and appreciate the powerful connection between football and America. Deprived of the opportunity to see and hear and feel the game, I was like some junkie desperate for a fix. I wanted to know what happened, how it played out. Even without the images, I was still addicted to the story itself—maybe even more so. I wanted to know what happened to the hero, Eli Manning, on the final steps of his journey. At that moment, I imagined him as any other fictional protagonist—Odysseus, Indiana Jones, or Luke Skywalker—trying to prevail against forces arrayed by the gods, the unforgiving wilderness, or, in this case, the maniacal genius of Bill Belichick. And what would happen to the Patriots who, in the final acts of the 2007 NFL season, had been portrayed more and more as the villainous occupiers of a land they did not deserve—would they be vanquished in the end?

Standing outside that stadium, I really began to understand how football explains America.

It’s funny, too, because everything you read about how football became so popular in America, every scholar you talk to, you come up with the same answer: television made football spectacularly powerful in America. Every conclusion is nearly the same: TV grew up with Unitas and Lombardi and Namath, and that explains how football and America were woven together to become the most profitable professional sports empire known to man.

Well, they have televisions in Japan, don’t they? In fact, they have more televisions per capita in Tokyo than they have in New York or Chicago. So, if American football is so perfectly suited to presentation on television, why didn’t TV make football popular in Japan? Or England and Germany, or South America and South Africa? They have television in those places. The same color images are parading across the same screen dimensions. How come football is not popular there?

And if it is TV that drives the popularity of American football, then why—after years and years of trying, and millions and millions of dollars invested—has the power of American television (apologies to Beckham and one-fifth of the Spice Girls) failed so spectacularly in making soccer a popular spectator sport in this country?

What is it about American football that resonates here and fails to catch on abroad?

The answer is in the complex fabric of America itself—all starting about the time Colorado joined the union in the year of our nation’s 100th birthday, on the muddy Ivy League fields where they played a nasty little game nobody had the patience to watch. It all started when the men playing that game decided on a few simple changes in the rules to Americanize something that had been bequeathed to them by a bunch of wool-clad ruffians from England and Wales. One of those rules changes was clearly inspired by the cultural and economic forces of the nation’s march across the continent in the late 19th century, known collectively as Manifest Destiny, a movement that these days is treated with embarrassment and disdain. But, in this book, in explaining How