MYSTIQUE OF PRO FOOTBALL

By Champ Clark

Have trouble sleeping? Suffer from the predawn blahs--wakefulness and worries at 4 a.m.? Some people take refuge in sleeping pills, or another nightcap. Not me. I simply thrust the unpleasant thoughts from my mind and demidoze about great men and greater deeds. I think about Homer Jones, 220 lbs. of black thunderbolt streaking at a rate of 9.3 sec. per 100 yds. down a football field. Or about Dick Butkus, that splendid savage of a middle linebacker, actually biting an opponent's nose during a pileup. Or about four massive linemen in purple shirts named Eller, Page, Larsen and Marshall, holding off the mighty Los Angeles Rams three times from the two-yard line. Or about Running Back Gale Sayers, a Homeric combination of speed and skill and strength and courage, with only a wrecked knee (to mix a metaphor) as his Achilles heel.

There is no Mittyism about this. I could never for an instant imagine myself performing the feats of these uniformed supermen; yet thinking about Sunday's heroes does offer relief from mundane cares. When I fall asleep, however, I begin to dream middle-aged dreams. I dream that I am old, egg-bald Y.A. Tittle in high-top shoes, running a bootleg into the end zone on my weary legs. Or I dream of being Sonny Jurgensen, proudly puffing out my potbelly as if it were a chest, fading back and letting go with the most accurate arm in the game. And when I awake, I feel somehow fit and fresh and ready to go.

In short, I am a pro-football nut. And I share my insanity with thousands --nay, millions--of others who have turned a weekend entertainment into a mystique, an obsession, and a secular religion.

THE crowds at professional-football games sing the national anthem with a fervor found nowhere else. This is entirely fitting, since the game is a true red-white-and-blue, exclusively American sport. To be sure, Canada has a weak, watered-down version of the game, played primarily by onetime American college stars who couldn't cut it in their homeland. The British Commonwealth and certain nations associated with its cultural tradition indulge in a footballish sport called rugby, which seems to consist in considerable part of beefy mesomorphs huddling in a heap called a "scrum" and jostling each other for possession of the ball. Throughout most of the non-American world, football means soccer. It is finally beginning to catch on in the U.S., which may be a good thing, but to unsensitive unenthusiasts it is still a low-scoring charade involving men in short pants chasing after a round ball and occasionally butting it with their heads.

All these are excellent sports in their ways, but to the average American they bear about the same satisfying relationship to real football as chopped liver does to rare sirloin, or 3.2 beer to a belt of bourbon. Real football, for nine out of ten, is the pro variety. High school football is nice, if you enjoy seeing beardless adolescents trying to cripple each other. College football can be fun--picnics on the tailgate, and lots of juiced-up nostalgia --but the game itself is static, sloppy and full of mistakes. No. For the true fan, only the pro game will do.

As a peculiarly American sport, pro football inevitably illustrates facets of the American character. For one thing, it satisfies the national love for the underdog. Rarely does a Sunday pass when a supposedly outclassed team will not turn around and belt the daylights out of a reputed powerhouse. For evidence, consider the fact that after one month of the 1970 season, not a single team among the 26 in the National Football League remained undefeated. In other words, this game is no stacked deck, like the stabbing to death of a wounded bull, a pastime that has achieved the rank of high art in several Spanish-speaking nations.

Love of violence, including the spillage of blood, is nevertheless basic to pro football's mystique. Almost every game sees one or more players helped off the field in a wounded daze, and authentic pros suit up despite injuries that would send normal men reeling in pain to a hospital bed. Football, in short, is the ultimate demonstration of machismo. No one who was there is ever likely to forget the 1962 N.F.L. championship game between the Green Bay Packers and the New York Giants. It was the coldest day since Perry discovered the North Pole, and vast sheets of ice surrounded the playing surface of Yankee Stadium. On one memorable play, the Giant middle linebacker, Sam Huff, drove Packer Fullback Jimmy Taylor out of bounds, smashing him with elbows and knees as the two men skidded across the ice. Doubled over in pain and coughing pools of blood, Taylor staggered back on the field; on the very next play, he ran right over Huff, all but permanently imprinting him on the stadium turf. Even Giant fans cheered.

Pro football is thought of as a man's game, but women are not immune to its brutal charms. At a recent game between the Chicago Bears and the Detroit Lions, a sweet young thing was explaining to her father about some charitable enterprise on which her sorority at a local college had embarked. Suddenly, on the field, Bear Linebacker Dick Butkus very nearly decapitated a Lion runner. Out went charity. "Attaway, Dick!" shrieked Sweet Young Thing. "Attababy. Kill the sonofabitch." There is, in short, a bit of the beast in all true football fans.

But violence alone does not explain the peculiar fascination of the game. There is the appeal of its unique rhythm; the quick, heart-stopping instant of action preceded and followed by the emotional respite of time out, huddle, or penalty. There is the disciplined machinery of its teamwork: eleven men performing eleven separate actions in pursuit of a common goal--to move the ball forward. There is the balletic grace of a halfback on the open field, pirouetting from tackles with the practiced ease of Nureyev spinning through a double tour en l'air, or the split-second timing of a wide receiver and a quarterback on a 50-yd. pass completion.

Above all, perhaps, there is the bewildering complexity of the game, which more and more resembles a very physical brand of chess played by living pieces. Long gone is the day of the giant with the midget brain. The Kansas City Chiefs, for instance, use more than 20 different offensive formations, each of which has about 25 variations --all with different blocking, running, receiving and passing assignments. The studied intellectuality of the game is reflected in its colorful, ever-changing jargon: the blitz (once known as the red dog), the cock-I and the wishbone T, the wide five defense and the deep zone, the zig-out and the buttonhook, the post pattern and the safety valve, the flare, the hitch, the stop-and-go. The language is full of traps for the unwary. A team is not "defended against" but "defensed," and he who would describe a quarterback caught behind the line of scrimmage as having been "dumped" rather than "sacked" reveals his status as a postulant before the mysteries. The fan who has mastered enough nomenclature to dope out a game plan presumably feels much the way an early Christian did after having been initiated into one of the more esoteric Gnostic sects.

Is pro football too close to the jungle? Does it stir up the blood lust that lies, half-buried, in man's heart of darkness? Some think so. "It scares me," says one unathletic Manhattan executive. "I don't mean the game, but the crowd. I never go to a football game without feeling that I am sitting one pulsebeat away from wholesale riot and massacre." Undoubtedly crowd emotions do run high at pro-football games, but as a rule the audiences are extraordinarily well behaved. There is considerably less boozing than at a college homecoming game, for example, if only because pro fans feel lucky to get into the stadium at all--season tickets for most clubs are inherited, like family jewels--and they come, primarily, as expert witnesses. They compare favorably with fans of other sports. Enthusiasts of amateur tennis, enraged by a line judge's call, have been known to dash onto the court, pick up a ball and hurl it at the eyes of the offending official. It goes without saying that no insurance company in its right mind would write a policy on the life of a South American soccer referee.

The pro-football crowd is very much part of the game's mystique. The game's passionate followers include poets and production workers, billionaires and bankrupts. But in its essence, the football audience is Middle America in the raw. It is the Silent Majority at its noisiest, relieving its frustrations in the visual excitement of the nation's most popular sport. It is no coincidence that one of the most dedicated fans of all is that self-appointed spokesman for the Silent Majority, Spiro T. Agnew. He would just as soon miss a home game of the Baltimore Colts as he would permit Charles Goodell to sit on his lap.

After the final whistle has blown, when the stadium is bleak in its emptiness, the football fan returns home, weary but exhilarated from his vicarious participation in "the game." And then, in the blah hours of the early morning, he will lighten the dark night of his soul by meditating on the fawnlike grace of a Lance Alworth, the brute power of a Buck Buchanan, the quick, vicious moves of a Ray Nitschke. And when he sleeps, he dreams. Personally, I have decided to dream tonight about fat, creaky George Blanda, 43, trundling out on the field last weekend to throw two touchdown passes for the Oakland Raiders . . . Champ Clark

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