Why I'm Embarrassed to be a Football Fan

This is a piece that I wrote at Starbucks the other and it was performed at the Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan at approximately 2:12 am November 14th 2005. My apologies to whoever have already heard it, or who will hear it at the next open mike at this other place on Sunday.

Ahem

It all started the other day when I was watching the game and the announcers came on and said, "Welcome back fans, you're watching the first matchup in 56 years between left handed quarterbacks." I sat there for a minute with a puzzled look on my face as several large men with shoulder pads played a modified version of kill the man with the ball and I thought to myself, "Why would they say that?"

Because you know I can't really see how that helps anyone watching the game to understand it better, or figure out what they're looking at. It seems that this is about as relevant as saying that this is the first ever sold out game at Giants Stadium when in odd numbered years the temperature was exactly 49.3 degrees Fahrenheit at tipoff when hosting the Vikings.

But then it occured to me that maybe part of this was my problem in assuming that announcers are supposed to say relevant or important things to the fans at home watching the game on their 43" Sony Plasma Screen Television which can display NFL High Definition broadcasts in approximately a billion pixels per inch which enables the average viewer to see sweat droplets on the receivers face, and of course everyone understands how important that is to your viewing experience. It tells you that the receiver is working hard to get the ball. It's important for you to know this for your own personal well being so you aren't screaming things like "Come on, you're getting paid $555,000 per game and you can't even work up a sweat?"

After this you can relate to your buddy in detail about how in 1985 that you could run the 100 yard dash in 5.3 seconds flat, and that's a fact. Your buddy probably listening to you thought because he was completely absorbed in hearing the announcers explain what the quarterback is thinking after being sacked by a 350 pound lineman and he only has 43 seconds left in the half to move the ball 27 yards and score a touchdown.

I used to be impressed by football announcer's psychic ability to know exactly what all the players on the field, and coaches innermost thoughts were, until I realized that this is what separates them from announcers of other sports who merely give you play by play, and aren't privy to that kind of insider information. During a boxing match for instance, all you get to hear is someone droaning on about the number of hits that guy just took to the head and the subsequent body blow that puts him away. Now how interesting is that?

Football announcers are much different, it is their solemn and sworn duty to bring you up close and personal to the beauty and pageantry of a sport where dozens of similarly uniformed individuals are trying to kill each other for the entertainment purposes of millions of people.

I get on my knees every day and thank God for their wisdom and clairvoyant powers. Because I for instance would assume that a quarterback that just survived a vicious clothesline from what can only be described as a bloodthirsty assassin and seeing that he has precious little time left to move the ball would be first be muttering a serious of lewd expletives about the pain he is in, and then thinking, "I hope that sweaty receiver can catch the ball this time."

Fortunately for the world, the announcers see it differently from me and they know that the quarterback after hopping up from the near fatal injury is merely telling his teammates that he is okay and ready to go another 9 innings. The announcers also have to use the word football a lot when describing action like this. In this case, they would say, "That guy, now he's a football player," or after the game they will describe the coach as, "A real football coach. That guy, he knows how to coach football."

Clearly you or I would not have known that without them. We also wouldn't have known why it's called football when there was already a game played for hundreds of years under the exact same name. Maybe it would have been too complicated to call it the "throwing and catching and running with the large spheroid object league."

But, as Americans, we already stole this country for a handful of beads, so why should we go to the trouble of coming up with an original name for something that largely keeps our economy intact when there was already a perfectly good name to appropriate from the rest of the world.