America is in a state of shock. It has discovered there is cheating in football. How could that be? Football teaches you values. That’s why most Republicans place football next to God and cleanliness. Football is a metaphor for life. It’s where young boys become men ready for life’s challenges — the mantra of every Army-Navy Game.
We could handle a ref betting on games in basketball. We even shrug off point-shaving scandals that erupt every now and then. That’s basketball.
Cheating has always been a part of baseball. You steal bases. You steal signs. Pitchers throw spitballs. Some players take whatever drug will help them hit the ball farther or pitch the ball faster. Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa did it and we all thrilled to the greatest home run race of all time. Barry Bonds was different. Cocky and arrogant. He wouldn’t play the game and pose as a hero. He stuck it in our face. Bonds went too far. But still it was baseball, isn’t that Japan’s national pastime? But when they messed with football — America’s game — they went too far.
Football is about manly virtues. Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. The gridiron as sacred ground. It’s why we could only accept John Facenda as its narrator. We needed someone with a full orchestra to chronicle the exploits of our gods. It is why there is NFL Films. The game of football as the game of life. Football as war. The coaches stomping the sidelines like so many Gen. Pattons. John Madden grunting about the dirt and sweat and the big greasy sausages on the grill. Football made beer drinking our favorite rite of passage. It sanctioned girls shaking their cleavage, all in good clean fun. I mean what is more American than a cheerleader? Football is testosterone and testosterone is our hormone of choice. You can’t have too much of it when you play football.
Every American executive talks in football terms. We’re gonna blitz the opposition. Let’s score a touchdown with this sales pitch. This is crucial, gentlemen, we are in the last two minutes of play and this business will survive. Our presidents are all football fans. They’re guys we’d want to share a beer with and watch the game. Nixon called the Redskins coach with his favorite play right in the middle of the Watergate scandal. Even Condi Rice, our secretary of state, seeks world peace using the lingo of the National Football League. Condi would reportedly rather be the NFL commissioner than president because she, like every American, has her priorities in order. Our women take lessons to learn football so they will be better wives and girlfriends. We are football.
At its heart, football is as dirty as any other sport and all sports are dirty at every level — from Little League to the professional arena. We’ve known it, but we’ve turned a blind eye to continue the myth. For college recruiting violations, we have NCAA sanctions to help us pretend everybody plays fair. Deep down we know a university isn’t worth its salt unless it has a winning football team. No one can name an academic at Penn State, but we all know earnest Joe Paterno. Paul Bryant down in Alabama wasn’t just a football coach, he was the most powerful man in the region. Our great coaches are gods, all molded in the image of Knute Rockne or Vince Lombardi. Ronald Reagan didn’t play George Gipp of Notre Dame in the movies, he became the Gipper. But at the heart of this myth, we know given the choice between scholar-athletes or great athletes taking basket-weaving at our alma mater, we’d take the touchdown-making basket-weavers every time. So we corrupted our professors, forced them to change grades, for the sake of winning.
Then along came Bill Belichick, winner of three Super Bowls, and his handsome quarterback Tom Brady, whose ability to impregnate multiple girlfriends at the same time didn’t bother us nearly as much as when black pro basketball players did it. NFL films had the 100-piece symphony orchestra all tuned up to send Belichick and Brady to football Valhalla when they retired.
And then the coach, like some football version of Enron, went and crapped on our American dream. The great sin in American life is not to cheat; it is to get caught. But the coach got it right. He apologized in the uniquely American tradition of phony apologies. He’s taking his punishment from the league like a man. He ended his press conference by refusing to take any more questions about the cheating scandal. We’ve got a game Sunday night, is how he put it, let’s move on.
That’s how we’d all prefer it.
