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Are You Ready for Some Football? Sal Paolantonio’s How Football Explains America

By Aaron Venar 2 Comments

Here is an interesting stat: The NFL sold 7,000 tickets to fans for Super Bowl Media Day on Tuesday, January 31. This is not so fans could be a part of Media Day or interview players or even get their pictures taken. Fans paid twenty-five dollars each just to sit in the stands to watch the interviews take place. In what type of football-crazed society do we live? This is the exact question ESPN reporter Sal Paolantonio asked himself when he examined the ties between Americans and our national pastime, professional football. In his book How Football Explains America, Paolantonio seeks to understand what makes football, and specifically the NFL, America’s most popular (and profitable) sport.

As we near kickoff for Super Bowl XLVI, it is interesting to step back and think about how we got to the point where a hybrid rugby/soccer kids’ game from 100 years ago has become the single most popular event in the country. A former player and coach, I was raised on the game and never stopped to think why I was drawn to the sport. It was on TV, it was played in the park, and the kids I looked up to were the football-playing rock stars of my high school. Paolantonio is able to find common threads in football and the growth of our country where the maturation of a game and a nation share similar values and themes, and unite the masses. Perhaps more than what football’s place in our national psyche says about us as Americans, it reflects deeply on who we are as individuals.

Paolantonio points to many critical events, themes, and institutions to find commonalities between the growth of our culture and our obsession with football. The origins and growth of Jazz, the ideology of Manifest Destiny, and even the social revolution of the 1960s all find common ground with football. One of the most powerful themes is wrapped up in Old West lore: that of the cowboy. Americans love the image of the daring cowboy who lives life on the edge, only to pull victory from the jaws of defeat. In modern times the quarterback personifies this; journalists have even long referred to these men as “gunslingers.” Paolantonio rightly asserts that fans can easily project the image of the hero onto the quarterback who calls the plays, distributes the ball, and in the end, takes credit or blame for the outcome. No wonder people love football so much -- it’s a direct reflection of one of the most “American” icons, and its combatants fill the void left with the taming of the West.

On Super Bowl Sunday, when your friends are busy discussing point spreads and injury reports, take a moment to consider why so many of us paint our faces or adorn ourselves in team colors. The answer may be as simple as, “This is America, and this is what we do.”