Unnecessary Roughness

Men who love men who love sports.

The last time I saw my father alive, he was distracted by a football game on a small TV bolted to the wall of his hospice room. Must have been a Sunday. Maybe it wasn’t officially a hospice, but it was definitely a place where people were sent to die, the last stop for the barely living, when any pretense of recovery had been abandoned.

Dad shared the room with an elderly Japanese gentleman whose name may have been Mr. Hashimoto. Mr. Hashimoto seemed like a very kind, very lonely man, who greeted us on our visits with an air of dignity, embarrassment that he couldn’t leave the room to give us the privacy the moment seemed to deserve, and grief over the fact that nobody was coming to visit him on his fade-away.

I remember talking to my dad, but he seemed to barely hear me as he stared up at the young men on the TV, vital in their strength, speed, and significance. Mr. Hashimoto might have sensed my heartbreak when he briefly roused Dad back to the room by launching into a chant that seemed to fuse the urgency of the game on TV with the clock running out on my father’s life:

“Fight, Frank, fight! Fight, Frank, fight!”

My dad laughed weakly and joined the chant for a round or two, before settling back into his distant stare. There was no fight left in him.

---

I think about my dad a lot when I watch football. I spent my credulous childhood years in western PA in the 1970s, which was something of a Promised Land for football at the time. The Pittsburgh Steelers dominated the NFL that decade, making it to the playoffs in eight seasons and becoming the only team in NFL history to win four Super Bowls in six years, as well as the first to win more than two.¹

The Steelers were not only the best team in the league, they were charismatic, funny and wild. Terry Bradshaw ran, threw, chewed tobacco, and talked like the good-old boy he was; Rocky Bleier darted through defenses on a leg doctors said would never function again after it was blown apart by a grenade in Vietnam; Mean Joe Green swallowed quarterbacks like a great black shark; Jack Lambert proudly sported two missing front teeth; Frenchy Fuqua was spotted in a Pittsburgh nightclub wearing plexiglass platform heels (each with a live goldfish inside); the star wide receiver who credited his study of dance for his balletic, graceful leaps was called, impossibly, “Lynn Swann.” And so on.

It was the 70s, man! I was in my early teens, living near Pittsburgh, and the Steelers were awesome. How could I not love football?

I loved to watch the games with Dad on Sundays, and sometimes, he’d tell me about his days playing football in high school and college. The stories were tied together with a common theme: “I wasn’t nearly as big, strong, or talented as some of those guys,” he’d say, “but I worked my butt off harder than any of them.” I knew he was trying to instill in me an appreciation for the joys and rewards of sustained hard work because he loved me, and this approach had served him well in his career and marriage, but I could never quite grasp it. To me, if something was really difficult, why not drop it in favor of something else that came easier? Instinctively, I sensed more value in cutting losses and moving on than in stubborn persistence.

My dad and I always loved and respected each other, and this was probably our most significant mutual incomprehension: he never understood my wariness toward ambition, and I never understood his embrace of it. (Of course, now I understand that it was precisely my parents’ hard work and sacrifice that allowed me the luxury of questioning the value of hard work and sacrifice. The big wheel keeps on turning.)

My skepticism about the lessons to be learned from football grew as years went by. It wasn’t long before I saw more brutality than grace in the game. It became increasingly hard for me to disregard the men writhing in pain or stumbling around like they’d just been ejected from a car after hitting a tree. The Hall of Fame center from that famous Steelers team, “Iron Mike” Webster, died at 50, after having lived out of his truck for years, exhibiting every symptom of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a neurodegenerative disease associated with repeated brain injury.

From 1990 to around 2010, I lived mainly in Barcelona, which is as central to “futbol” as Pittsburg is to “football.” I learned to love the speed, incredible body control, and friendly casualness of Spanish futbol. The player’s faces aren’t hidden behind helmet masks, their bodies aren’t encased in armor, and many go by their first names: Xavi, Ronaldo, Jordi. When someone scores a goal, they pile on each other like joyous puppies, and they look like more-or-less normal human beings (not “lobsters,” as a friend calls American men, with their strangely inflated upper bodies).

But now I’m back in the US, watching football again. Why? The Steelers are having another losing season, and despite the empty gestures toward safer helmets and minor rule changes, broken men are still carted off the field every week. Why do I watch — often, I fear, with a vacant stare not all that different from what I saw on my dad’s face that last Sunday of his life?

I saw an interview with the author Sebastian Junger a few years ago. He was promoting War, his book about a group of Marines who’d struggled for months to hold a strategic hilltop in Afghanistan, withstanding constant attacks, day after day. The interviewer asked Junger why. “Why do these men persist? They don’t know anything about trade routes, regional superpowers, or oil pipelines. Why do they risk their lives?” Junger replied: “They do it for love. They love each other. They fight to protect each other.” (I’m quoting from memory.)

When I watch football these days, what I see most are the open smiles behind the face masks, the easy embrace of men who’ve combined their talents successfully, the open emotion of a man who’s let his team down and the consoling hugs from his comrades, the shared elation after a score, where a 300-pound man might bust a joyous move in the end-zone and then lift the quarterback into the air as if he were the proud father of a very good little boy, the irrelevance of race and background among men with a shared purpose. I watch because this is one of the only places I see men who openly, unashamedly express their love for one another. I watch because I miss my dad.

1. It’s been fifty years, almost to the day, since the Steelers experienced The Immaculate Reception, one of the most memorable things to ever happen on a football field.