Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. You are reading an article about why people play sports, and suddenly the topic turns strange. Athletes become warriors, and games become “battles.” Take this long-winded guy for instance.
News Flash: Football is not war!
Here’s why…
Although this long winded guy claims:
The ground game is operated by the infantry; the throwing game by the air force. Or one may see the game in the air as the function of the “officers” of the team - those who throw and catch - as opposed to the dog-faced linesmen in the trenches, those literally on the line… The spirit of the game, the terminology, the uniforms themselves, capped by protective masks and helmets, invoke military operations.
So football is like war because they have a line, and they wear helmets. Yes, I know they are using it as a simile - but they are going way too far with it. Lets think about this a bit more.
First of all, what war are they talking about? In Vietnam, they hardly even saw their enemy. They were fighting in a jungle. There was no slow movement of some kind of “safe” line. There were land-mines and booby traps.
Have you ever heard of a football player becoming “shell shocked” and having to have years of therapy simply because he was involved in an 80-yard drive? No, certainly not.
Has anyone become a raving lunatic and start camping on the front lawn of an athletic directors house in protest because their son tore his ACL in a football game? No.
Lets go a few steps more and look at how war is not like football. When was the last time a blown call by a referee gave the victory to an undeserving army? When was the last time you saw spectators to a war show up spelling “CNN” on their bellies? 
After a battle, does the losing army have a press conference? When we stop an enemy from advancing, where is the band that plays the emperors march from Star Wars? Where are all the people moving their arms up and down with the emperor’s march? Where are the cheerleaders? Does the army do push-ups each time we kill someone? Does the army have a tailgate party for non-combatants prior to an offensive? When we annihilate another army, does anyone dump gatorade on our generals head? No. Because war is not football, and football is not war.
[Inspired by people like Roger Rosenblatt]
Leave a Reply