Here comes Wrangler, he's one tough customer...

Last night I watched the ESPN documentary on the USFL “Small Potatoes: Who Killed the USFL?” I really enjoyed it, as I am one of the few people I know who has any real memory of the league, and the only person I have ever met who has been to a USFL game.
I lived in Phoenix for only one school year (1982-83), but for being such a long time ago, and being so young I still have lots of memories of it.
One of them was attending a USFL game at Sun Devil Stadium between the Boston Breakers and the Arizona Wranglers. The Breakers were a good team and the Wranglers were not. The stadium was half full, but the Wranglers were still popular since Phoenix was just burgeoning as a major metropolitian area, and were sports crazy. The only other sports team in the area was the NBA’s Suns, so getting a pro football, any team meant that the town was going places.
One of my classmates, JV invited to go with him and his family to a game. JV’s family was little odd, I remember being at his house and the only thing that was allowed to be on their tv was Christan Evangelicals. I would go over there and his mom, who was pretty and nice and her boyfriend, who was quiet and weird, would be sitting in front of it, as if they were enjoying it, if that is possible.
I remember one time being at JV’s house after school and we had just finished playing Intellivision and were watching Mtv, a new channels that was super-awesome. Intellivison was probably the only thing that JV and I had in common and probably the only reason we were friends since we were the only two kids who had the system rather than the dominant Atari. When JV heard his mom’s car pull he quickly changed the channel from the Mtv to the 24/7 Evangelical channel, before hustling us off to his room to go with play with Star Wars guys or something. This was before the Jim and Tammy Baker scandal hit, so this kind of thing on cable was dominant. I remember thinking that was weird. JV would also take me to an Awana meeting, which freaked me out, and to which I never returned but that is another story.
Part of the appeal of the USFL was that it was the “fun” league, it was the league without strikes and without penalties for spiking the ball. The league prided itself on being fan-friendly at the Wranglers game there was a rock band behind one of the endzones who would crank up middle of the road hits during time outs and breaks in the action. “Rockin’ Robin” must have been played three or four times, and that is the first time that I had ever become aware of the tune. I liked it. The game wasn’t very good, as Boston was a good team and Arizona was not. The Wranglers were just getting dominated all game and in the first half were down 24-0. Apparently at all Wranglers game a new car was given away at halftime to “some lucky Wranglers fan”. At our game the lucky winnere was introduced at half to the crowd, near the Wrnagler band and given the keys to her new car, when the MC asked the winner where she was from she replied sheepishly “Boston, Massachusetts”. Boos rained down from the stands.
We left the game early, which I didn't like, and the Wranglers went on to lose 44-23.

Football, Dog Fighting, People Fighting

I tend not to read the New Yorker. Maybe I am not intellectual enough, or maybe I just hate all of those annoying cartoons, or maybe it is my personal West Coast bias, which is simply a reaction to the East coast bias,that I couldn’t bring myself to read a magazine with such a title. But apparently there is a lot of good writing in it, I know my boy David Sedaris routinely publishes in there so maybe I should look at it more often.

However I do watch ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption, damn near everyday. The guest this Friday was author Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell has a couple of books on my ever increasing, rarely diminishing “Books I Want to Read” list. In his appearance Gladwell talked his New Yorker piece about the increasingly troubling incidents of brain damage, Alzheimer’s and dementia in former football players. Host Mike Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser seemed to be a little shaken by a good piece of writing, that indicts the football machine and as well as it’s fans.

Gladwell likens football to dog fighting an analogy that Wilbon and Kornheiser avoided, and for good reason. After the Vick episode, it has been universal accepted that dog fighting is cruel, and its participants (handlers and breeders) as well as its spectators are culpable in this inhumane criminal activity. Since this appeared on “world wide leader”, likening the football fan audience to red-necks, mouth-breathing yokels at a dog fight, would kill completely overshadow the evidence Gladwell presents which is disturbing.

There maybe a kernel of truth in the analogy though. I often compare football to Gladiatorial games. Stating that I like to eat chicken wings because "eating meat off the bone while watching football makes it extra Roman”. Watching a decadent game in a dying empire is one thing, but watching two dumb animals tear themselves apart is quite another. But I think that the appeal of both “sports” rests in a part of the brain that we are uncomfortable with embracing, and probably for good reason.

Is this the end of football? Unlikely, but is it the beginning of the end? Possibly, as the camera panned out, Wilbon turned to his co-host and said “I tell who isn’t going to play football, Matthew Wilbon” (his 2 year old son). If more and more people like Wilbon, a man who has made his living writing about athletes, then the fewer kids will be going out for football, and the game could wither, maybe becoming like boxing, an analogy that was also made on the show. But while boxing has withered, the more brutal Mixed Martial Arts seems to have taken its place. Boxing withered because the sport was seen as corrupt, crooked, and exploitive, not because people were concerned about brain injuries, Mohammed Ali is a cautionary tale though. But even the “Greatest of All Time” hasn’t stopped the rising popularity of people fighting one another in steel cages. I don’t think have steel cages in dog fighting, do they?