Football is a mysterious thing

Monday, October 19th, 2009

Football is a mysterious thing to those not raised in these United States:

I have attended just one football game in my life. It was a college game, and furthermore was in the South, where, if you try out the cliché about college ball being a religion down there, people tell you, without smiling, that it is much more serious than that. What a spectacle that game was! The colors; the chants; the erotic prancing of the cheerleaders; the masked and padded players, their size grotesquely exaggerated, like Polynesian warriors; the guttural war cries; the fenced-off areas of the stands with strange and distinctive populations — one contained nothing but young men in blazers. I felt like an anthropologist watching the Ghost Dance of the Sioux. If a foreigner should tell you that a nation as young as this one has had no time to develop a unique culture, take him to a college football game.

The ferocity of the coaches took John Derbyshire by surprise:

From exposure to the sensitized, feminized, sissified, litigation-whipped culture of the public schools, I had come to suppose that the sterner kinds of pedagogic verbal chastisement had gone the way of switch and tawse. Not here at junior-league football practice. The coaches barked and roared like Marine Corps drill instructors. Inattentive boys had their inattention terminated with great prejudice, often with a set of push-ups or a lap around the field added to drive the point home. When Coach got tired of yelling, the whole team was sent off to do laps, marking pace with military-style antiphons in which the word “kumbaya” seemed not to figure at all. It was wonderful to see, especially from the comfort of a folding chair in the shade, with a cup of iced coffee close at hand.

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