Radiolab on American Football (January 2014)
I’m a lapsed football fan who hasn’t dealt with my conflicting feelings about the game, and so I was profoundly grateful to hear the folks at Radiolab dedicate their considerable skills to a 75-minute double episode titled “American Football” (aired at the end of January – I have a pretty relaxed podcast listening schedule). Part one is devoted to the history of the game, particularly the pivotal, troubling, and inspiring role played by the Carlisle Indian School football team in the late 19th and early 20th century. I’ve had an itch to write about it because it coalesced so much of what I love about Radiolab and exactly what I’ll never stop loving about football.
The last time I really watched football regularly was during the 2012-13 NFL season, when my team, the Baltimore Ravens, won the Super Bowl. I didn’t make a conscious decision to stop watching after that, like some attempt to leave on a high note; I stopped because I moved to a new city, didn’t feel like paying for cable, and found I didn’t miss it enough to finagle an online solution. But there really is nothing like watching your team go all the way in a single-elimination tournament, beating better and better opponents each week until the moment you know they’ve won it all. I’ve had the pleasure of following both the Ravens’ Super Bowl runs, and I loved, loved, loved it both times.
Now when I watch a game, though, I just get irritated by all the commercials and the huge time suck of the whole affair. Sure there are great moments in every game, but they’re not worth it to me anymore. And there’s the concussions that turn into debilitating brain diseases that seem inseparable from the game, and the league’s preposterous non-profit status, and the way the cheerleaders are treated, and the fact that there are cheerleaders. Jason Kottke at kottke.org wrote a great adiós to the game last September:
“It’s overwhelming. Enough is enough. […] Pro football, I love you, but we can’t see each other anymore. And it’s definitely you, not me. Call me when you grow up.”
It is exactly in this spirit of ambivalence that Radiolab set out to do their show. American football gained prominence of course through the late-19th century Ivy League rivalries, but back then the game was more of a slog and incomparably more dangerous. Rather than having four downs to go ten yards, you had three downs to go five yards, and there was no passing. Any progress you made was through the flesh-wall of the other team. As now, there was concern for the well-being of the players, concern that peaked after the 1905 season in which 19 players died on the field of play – nineteen. President Theodore Roosevelt, whose son played football, got involved, asking that the rules be revised to make the game less punishing. One result of these rule changes was the innovation of the forward pass.
One of the leading national stories in the game at the time was the Carlisle Indian School team. So-called Indian schools had been devised as a way of whitewashing, in every way possible, Native American children, disallowing their home languages, religious practices, ways of dressing and general mode of being in the world and replacing them with Americanized identities. At Carlisle, founder and superintendent Richard Henry Pratt decided that football was just the thing for the boys in his school. And they loved it so much that when he tried to end the program they begged him to reconsider. On the condition that they compete at the highest levels of the game, he did as they wished.
Radiolab beautifully tells the intersecting stories of Carlisle and football taking to the air. In November 1907 the University of Chicago was the national powerhouse team, and Carlisle was competitive and respected. The two teams met that month in Chicago, where the home team had a plan to smother Carlisle’s vaunted passing game. In the podcast, Sally Jenkins, author of a book about the Carlisle team called The Real All Americans, explains that the culture had itself taken flight with the increasing presence of gliders and hot-air balloons and the Wright brothers’ iconic first flights in late 1903. Chicago largely succeeded in shutting down Carlisle’s best receiver, Albert Exendine (whose voice is part of the episode from a 1970s interview he gave), by knocking him down or out of bounds nearly every play. But late in the game, on a play in which he’d been pushed out, Exendine simply ran around the back of the bench and back onto the field to catch the winning touchdown.
So much is contained in the story of this one play. There is the haphazard way in which football’s rules are written in response to questionable but not technically prohibited plays like Exendine’s. There’s the pure joy of imagining this team of young Indian men traveling to Chicago and beating the best team in the nation that had taken everything from them but their lives. And there’s the moment that every football fan – maybe every sports fan – knows, when the ball is hanging in the air. Sally Jenkins’s description of the pass to Exendine after his trip around the bench is too good not to quote in full (I've transcribed it from the audio):
“For a moment, it was a frozen scene in a staged drama. The ball hung in the air, a tantalizing possibility. Could Exendine reach it? Would he catch it? Or drop it? Defenders wheeled and stared downfield. Spectators watching from the stands found that the breath had died in their collective throats. The spiraling ball seemed to defy physics. What made it stay up? When would it come down? In that long moment, twenty-seven thousand spectators mashed together on benches and crammed on platforms may have felt their loyalty to the home team evaporate in the grip of a powerful new emotion. They may have noticed something they never had before: that a ball traveling through space traces a profoundly elegant path. They may have realized something else: that it was beautiful. The ball struck its human target. Exendine caught the pass all alone and trotted over the Chicago goal line. The stadium exploded in sound and motion. It was the game-breaker. The rest was just anti-climax.”
Right before Jenkins says, “The ball struck its human target,” she pauses and we hear the low wind that’s been welling up behind her voice, and a spiraling ball whips by and smacks a receiver’s jersey. Then a crowd erupts. We know from the episode’s first scene that the show’s hosts, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, gathered a group of 70 listeners on a cold day in a Brooklyn park to perform cheers, chants, gasps, and the other noises we’ve been hearing at different points in the story. These aural elements are something that Radiolab does extraordinarily well. They’re one reason the show is such a consistent pleasure to listen to.
As Jenkins read her excerpt, it occurred to me that the stretch of time between when the ball leaves the quarterback's hand and finds its home are among the most wonderful in sports (and how much more exhilarating it must have been when it was by no means expected). In fact, any extended arc of any ball in any game basically contains the whole excruciating experience of fandom. It made me feel, as they say, "ready for some football." Or maybe some baseball.
You should listen to the full episode, which covers much more on the tragic history of Indian schools, the scoundrelly coaching style of Glenn “Pop” Warner (whom I hadn’t realized was a real guy – and a coach at Carlisle), and a great conversation with a football mom and her eight-year-old football-star son. And Radiolab has a good page on Carlisle’s team, with several archival photos.