Are You Ready For Some Football?

By Mark Leyner

With our regular season half shot, football junkies, bloodlust barely sated, are already suffering proleptic pangs of withdrawal. And this year, cruelly, a false hope has been raised: the XFL. Right after the Super Bowl, Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Federation, in alliance with NBC, will kick off its brand of super-smash-mouth football. Vince and the WWF's think tank have come up with some rule changes to make the game more exciting, i.e., more violent. There will be no fair catches. No touchbacks on the kickoff. No "in the grasp" rule to protect the quarterback.

Granted, the NFL has got pretty lame. But Vince! No fair catches? No touchbacks? That's it? That's what all the fuss is about? We, as a television audience, have been weaned on Grand Guignol reality programming--standard fare like World's Grimmest Third World Postcolonial Descents into Anarchy videos. We're talking about entire families whiling the night away on the couch, munching toffee popcorn, watching kidney transplants and sex-change operations. You want to give us more bang for the buck (i.e., more violence), you're gonna have to do a lot better. How do you decrease the peace and infuse the sport with more savagery? Here's what I'd do:

ASYMMETRY A league with basically equivalent teams--the "on any given Sunday" ethos--is all fine and good, but surely will not result in as much grievous mayhem as will matching a team of hardened professionals against a team of hapless amateurs. Pepper some of your rosters with nonpros--defrocked priests, cashiered New Jersey State Troopers, tubercular sculptors and the like. I'd watch that!

MORE STEROID RAGE Make the use of steroids and erythropoietin mandatory and enforce it! Any athlete who tests negative for nandrolone or who has a testosterone/epitestosterone ratio of under 6 to 1 can't compete. It's that simple. Imagine players dumping a big cooler of human growth hormone on their coach after a victory. That's exciting!

MORE FAN ANIMOSITY We have no real equivalent of, say, Arsenal vs. Tottenham. We don't sing sectarian anthems and fling pub darts at each other. This is bad for ratings. So instead of determining teams geographically (New York, L.A., Orlando), I suggest organizing teams along ethnic, religious, political and tribal lines. There should be a Bloods team. A Crips team. A Lubavitch Hasidim team. Aryan Nations, Khmer Rouge, Hutu, Tutsi, Royal Ulster Constabulary, Jews for Jesus, Hizballah. Now you've got some fierce rivalries going--off the field and on. You try tackling a 275-lb. running back with 25 kg of Semtex plastic explosive packed into his shoulder pads!

MORE PUNISHMENT Arm the officials with police batons and stun guns. If players violate the rules (which should be as vague as possible), they should be handcuffed and forced into excruciatingly uncomfortable positions. To keep players on their toes, capriciously respond to trivial infractions (like illegal motion) with the bastinado or mock executions.

EXTENDED COVERAGE "OUT OF BOUNDS" The game itself is only a small part of The Game. If there's spousal abuse (surely a favorite avocation of today's professional athlete), let's see it! That's what the innovative kitchen-counter cam is there for. And replay those 911 calls from wives and girlfriends over the stadium's loudspeakers during huddles.

NO MEDICAL TREATMENT FOR SEVERELY INJURED PLAYERS Imagine how much less enthralling Homer's Iliad would be if impaled Trojans were carted off the battlefield on comfy stretchers. Leave the bodies on the field--play over them. At least consider employing primitive on-field-treatment modalities. The home team's tight end is writhing in pain with a torn anterior cruciate ligament. Lose the leg and get him back in that huddle. Imagine the excitement when the miked referee signals with a hacking, amputating motion, "It's comin' off!"

Vince, dude, this is no time for moderation. For months we've been subjected to the pandering pieties of two presidential candidates slithering inexorably into the soft marshmallow center. We deserve warriors who've got the moxie to go down in flames. When Achilles is informed by his mother, the sea-goddess Thetis, that vanquishing Hector on the battlefield will precipitate his own demise, he unhesitatingly opts for the gusto. "I'll lie in peace once I've gone down to death," he exclaims. "But now for the moment, let me seize great glory!" (The Iliad is way WWF.) Vince, don't choke with The Game on the line. To paraphrase the late Barry Goldwater, the last major presidential candidate who wasn't afraid to lose big, "Xtremism in defense of football is no vice."