Two things mattered most among the Easter men. The first was hunting. The second was football. Zac’s father had fallen in love with the sport as a youth and dedicated much of his life to it, as a high school and college coach as well as his sons’ biggest supporter. And football was something that Zac Easter seemed perfectly attuned to. The sport captured the imagination of all three Easter boys almost from the womb. But Zac was fearless, the toughest dude around.
In Zac’s developing young mind, he was more superhero than human. Zac Easter, you see, believed he was invincible. He was confident he could push his limits to the very edge yet always stay in control. His ethos was a controlled type of chaos. He was never the most gifted athlete on the field, and his body wasn’t the best suited for the sport. He worked on his physique, spending hours upon hours in the gym. Compared to the more hulking players, however, he was still fairly small. But it wasn’t his body that mattered as much as his mind. The way he thought—or the way he often didn’t think, instead throwing all caution into the wind—meant that he could beat you through sheer force of will because he was willing to take a risk with his body that you weren’t willing to take.
Zac Easter’s brain, it seemed, had been put on this earth to play football.
The moment when football fully captured the American imagination can be hard to pinpoint. We can definitively say that the seed of our national obsession was first planted in Brunswick, New Jersey, on November 6, 1869, four years after the end of the Civil War and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, when Rutgers and Princeton (then known as the College of New Jersey) played a sport that was a derivative of rugby. It was later billed as the first collegiate football game. (Rutgers won, 6–4.) But it wasn’t like the game of football was invented one year and had spread like wildfire by the next. The history of football, that most violent and disciplined of sports, progressed in fits and starts, and for most of its first few decades, it was played in the shadow of the more bucolic American pastime of baseball.
What we can say with absolute certainty today is that a century and a half after the sport was conceived, football has become an essential part of the American landscape and distilled the American psyche (in all its contradictory complexity) more than any other sport. The NFL has reached $15 billion in annual revenue, a number that is greater than the gross domestic product of some seventy countries and the largest of any sports league in the world. If the NFL were a publicly traded entity—legally, it considers itself a trade association with the thirty-two team owners functioning as its shareholders—it would rank among the top two hundred companies in America in terms of revenue, in the same ballpark as Visa, General Mills, and the Marriott hotel chain.
And that’s only the professional version of the sport. The twenty-five most valuable college football programs bring in $2.5 billion in revenue annually, and Forbes reported in 2019 that the most profitable collegiate team, the Texas A&M Aggies, brought in an average of $147 million in annual revenue over the past three years. When the new College Football Playoff held an auction for twelve years of television rights, ESPN’s winning bid came to $7.3 billion. That’s $7.3 billion for the right to televise just seven games a year for a dozen years. As Gilbert M. Gaul noted in his book Billion-Dollar Ball: A Journey through the Big Money of College Football, the football program at the University of Texas has a higher profit margin than ExxonMobil or Apple. More than a million Americans play high school football annually, a number that’s dwarfed by the estimated seventy-five million Americans who play so-called fantasy football, which involves fans choosing individual players for their “team” and using those players’ statistics to compete against friends’ teams to win money.
Zac started youth football in third grade, his father as coach.
A few decades ago, it was reasonable to argue whether baseball or football was the favorite American pastime. This argument can no longer be honestly debated. Football has become less of a sport and more of an ingrained feature of American life. As a character in the Will Smith film Concussion put it so memorably: “The NFL owns a day of the week. The same day the Church used to own. Now, it’s theirs.” In modern-day America, football is as much religion as sport.
But when was football’s tipping point? In those 150-some years between that day when a hundred or so people attended the Rutgers–College of New Jersey game of 1869 and the modern-day spectacle of 114.4 million Americans (more than a third of the US population) tuning in to see the New England Patriots defeat the Seattle Seahawks, 28–24, in Super Bowl XLIX on February 1, 2015, in the most-watched television broadcast in American history, at which point did football first solidify its iron grip on the American sporting imagination? Was it in 1880, when collegiate teams at the College of New Jersey and Yale decided to stage a contest of this new and exciting and most importantly American sport in New York City on Thanksgiving Day, turning this revered national holiday into a spectacle of sport? Was it when President Teddy Roosevelt threatened in 1905 to ban the game, which led to rule reforms and the formation of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, giving the sport an organizational structure? Was it when the forward pass was invented, which helped American football evolve beyond rugby to become a far more exciting, multifaceted game of military-like strategy? Was it the development of star professional players such as Jim Thorpe and Bronko Nagurski? Or was it during the 1972 playoffs when the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Franco Harris caught an errant ball and ran it in for a touchdown in one of the most famous plays in NFL history, which came to be known as the Immaculate Reception?
While each of these were defining moments in the sport’s march from a savage and unorganized game that was really little more than hazing for college freshmen to this national religion, none can quite stack up to the impact of the game that was played on December 28, 1958. It’s fitting that this game happened at Yankee Stadium, “The House That Ruth Built.” Football marched into the most iconic baseball venue in the world and proclaimed during this one stormy afternoon in the Bronx that it, not baseball, was the new king of American sports. It was the NFL championship game between the workmanlike New York Giants and the much more glamorous Baltimore Colts, and it was watched by forty-five million fans nationwide on NBC. It featured names that would become synonymous with the sport over the next half century: The Colts’ quarterback was Johnny Unitas, nicknamed “the Golden Arm” and still considered one of the greatest quarterbacks to ever have played the game. The Giants’ running back was Frank Gifford, whose Hall of Fame football heroics were later surpassed by the celebrity that came with a twenty-seven-year career as a broadcaster for ABC’s NFL Monday Night Football—and who was posthumously diagnosed with the same degenerative brain disease that befell Zac Easter.
Manning the sidelines for the Giants were two assistant coaches who were little known at the time but would soon become icons of the game. One was defensive assistant coach Tom Landry, who’d go on to coach “America’s Team,” the Dallas Cowboys, for twenty-nine years and win two Super Bowls in the process. The other was offensive assistant coach Vince Lombardi, who would become one of the most admired coaches in American sports history as he led the Green Bay Packers to win the first two Super Bowls, in 1967 and 1968. Lombardi’s aphorisms became synonymous with the machismo culture of both football and postwar America: “It’s not whether you get knocked down—it’s whether you get up.” “The man who wins is the man who thinks he can.” “If you can walk, you can run. No one is ever hurt. Hurt is in your mind.” Nearly fifty years after Lombardi’s untimely death in 1970, Zac Easter would make the seven-hour pilgrimage from his family’s home in Iowa to the famous frozen tundra of Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The Packers were his favorite team. And Lombardi was his favorite coach. Even though others in his family were fans of one of the Packers’ rivals, the Minnesota Vikings, what Lombardi stood for—toughness, dedication, and stoicism as the traits that define manhood—was powerful enough that it warranted a framed Lombar
di photo hanging in the Easters’ basement.
The Colts-Giants championship game on that cold, blustery December afternoon in 1958 was a historic sporting battle. As Michael MacCambridge detailed in his book America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation, it was a back-and-forth fight from the opening kickoff, filled with exciting miscues and jaw-dropping plays. Unitas fumbled on the Colts’ first drive, but on the very next play the Giants’ quarterback Don Heinrich fumbled the ball right back to the Colts. Not to be outdone in the quarterbacking struggles, the future Hall of Famer Unitas promptly threw another interception. On the Colts’ next drive, Unitas seemed to have the Colts heading in the right direction when he completed a sixty-yard pass to Lenny Moore, but then Giants linebacker Sam Huff, one of a record seventeen future Hall of Famers involved in this game, blocked the Colts’ field goal attempt.
By the end of the first half, after Unitas threw a fifteen-yard touchdown pass to Raymond Berry, the Colts held a 14–3 lead. At the beginning of the third quarter, after the Colts turned the ball over at the one-yard line on the doorstep of a big touchdown, the Giants pulled off one of the most exciting plays in NFL history. Charlie Conerly, who had replaced Heinrich as the Giants’ quarterback, took the snap deep in his own territory. He faked a handoff, and it looked like a broken play as Gino Marchetti, the Colts’ hulking defensive end from a coal-mining town in West Virginia, broke past blockers and ran straight at Conerly. Conerly threw an off-balance pass from his back foot as the Colts’ lineman jumped in his face. Somehow, the pass made it to midfield, where Giants wide receiver Kyle Rote caught the ball, shed a tackle, and then streaked toward the end zone. At the twenty-five-yard line, Rote was hit from behind. He fumbled, but the fumble was improbably picked up by Giants running back Alex Webster, who ran it all the way to the one-yard line. The Giants scored on the next play, and momentum swung their way.
Nobody could turn their heads from the drama on the field. Marchetti broke his ankle during a play in the fourth quarter, but he wouldn’t leave the field to get it treated. By this point, his Colts were losing, 17–14, with just under two minutes left in the game. Marchetti watched from a stretcher on the sidelines as Gifford nearly made a first down, a gain that would have sealed the game for the Giants. But referees controversially ruled Gifford was down before the first-down marker, and the Colts had a chance to tie things up. Unitas methodically marched his Colts down the field, and they tied up the game with a field goal from the thirteen-yard line with seven seconds left. At his family’s home in New York, six-year-old Bob Costas stared at the television in wonder as the game went into overtime. It was the first sporting event the future sportscasting legend remembers watching on television.
It wasn’t just because it was a one-game spectacle that Costas and millions more Americans would remember this NFL championship game for as long as they lived. It was because they were witnessing, in real time, this sport claim its dominion over modern American culture.
The modern age was synonymous with post–World War II corporate America. The undisputed victor of the war, the United States saw a prosperity boom after 1945, and participating in and viewing sports, whether live or on television, became a preferred way to spend that extra cash and free time. What’s more, football seemed perfectly suited to a generation of soldiers who had returned from the battlefields of World War II: Veterans valued the discipline, violence, and game planning that has long made football the most militaristic of sports. In fact, football is in many ways a sporting allegory for the type of land-grabbing wars that marked the rise of human civilizations. Think of how football works: One team is trying to gain ground on another team. A group of blockers—foot soldiers who do their work in the trenches—clear the path for the team to move the ball forward. A quarterback is called a field general. The passing game is called the air attack, a long pass called a bomb, a short pass a bullet. Multiple defensive players rushing headlong at the quarterback is a blitz, stemming from the German military’s blitzkrieg of World War II. When both teams line up before a snap, they’re lining up in formations. As the military-industrial complex built up during the Cold War, the militaristic, us-versus-them nature of football played right into the American psyche. It is not just some coincidence that eleven days after the beginning of the first Gulf War in January 1991, Super Bowl XXV was infused with patriotism: from Whitney Houston’s galvanizing rendition of the national anthem, to the tiny American flag each fan was given upon entering Tampa Stadium, to the taped halftime address by President George H. W. Bush, during which he referred to the Gulf War as his Super Bowl. If the writer George Orwell once referred to Olympic and international sports as “war minus the shooting,” then football is that view’s apotheosis.
But there was another aspect of football that was on display during that NFL championship game three days after Christmas in 1958: the power of television. Televisions were becoming ubiquitous in American households during the 1950s. In 1948, 172,000 American households had televisions, but by 1950, nearly four million American homes did. A decade later that number was a stunning forty-six million, more than a tenfold increase. And at a time when America was primed for a sport with a national following instead of the more regionalized sport of baseball, there was no better sport for television than the back-and-forth pitched horizontal battles of football. As James Michener noted in his book Sports in America, football and television have an “almost symbiotic” relationship. By the 1970s, the Super Bowl would become an unofficial holiday, and announcers like Frank Gifford and Howard Cosell would become celebrities.
While televisions fueled the growth of football, they affected baseball in the opposite fashion. In 1948, shortly after televisions were introduced to a mass American audience, baseball’s live attendance was twenty-one million. Five years later, in 1953, that attendance had dipped dramatically, to 14.3 million, as more and more baseball-loving Americans chose to stay home and watch the games from the comfort of their sofas instead of heading to the ballpark. Meanwhile, television actually proved a boon to live football attendance: Average attendance nearly doubled from 1949 to 1959. Baseball is an individual’s game, more suited to America’s agrarian past. As America moved into a less individualistic, more regimented future, football—more militaristic, more group oriented, more corporate—took over.
But as the 1958 championship game went into the first sudden-death overtime ever in an NFL playoff game, tens of millions of Americans got to witness the precarious side of live television. A moment after the twenty-five-year-old Unitas completed a twelve-yard pass to Raymond Berry for a first down at the Giants’ eight-yard line, a win firmly within the Colts’ grasp, American television viewers were treated to an infuriating message on their television screens. At the height of the drama, their televisions turned to black. “Please Stand By” read a message on the screens, at the most inopportune of times. “PICTURE TRANSMISSION HAS BEEN TEMPORARILY INTERRUPTED.” In Yankee Stadium, NBC officials panicked. They quickly identified the problem: Rowdy and excited Colts fans next to the field had accidentally disconnected a cable, which cut out the television signal. But the game was still going on.
Until, that is, a drunk sprinted onto the field. The whistle blew, and the game was halted. Three New York City cops wrestled the drunk to the ground. He was arrested, and play eventually resumed. Fortunately, enough time had passed during the interruption that NBC officials were able to reconnect the television cable and continue the broadcast. It wasn’t until later that it was revealed the “drunk” was actually an NBC business manager who had purposefully run onto the field to delay the game, the very definition of taking one for the team.
The television broadcast flickered back on. The afternoon skies were darkening under the Yankee Stadium lights as Colts running back Alan Ameche was stuffed for a one-yard run. Then, Unitas completed a six-yard pass to tight end Jim Mutscheller, putting the Colts at the one-yard line for a critical third-down play. Unitas handed the ball off
to Ameche again. Ameche was a swarthy, dark-haired twenty-five-year-old from Wisconsin who’d won the Heisman Trophy in college for the University of Wisconsin. He was nicknamed “the Iron Horse,” and he lived up to the moniker on that play. He took the handoff, ran slightly to his right, and dove over a defender who awaited him at the goal line. The Colts had won what would become known as the greatest game ever played. Baltimore fans ran onto the field and tore down the goalposts. Ameche went into Manhattan to be a guest on that night’s The Ed Sullivan Show, which a little more than five years later would present the Beatles and thereby launch another American cultural sea change: the all-encompassing takeover of rock ‘n’ roll. In Baltimore, a crowd of thirty thousand fans awaited the victorious team at Friendship Airport that night, bringing traffic on the highway to a near standstill.
Football was no longer “Savagery on Sunday,” as a 1955 Life magazine cover had proclaimed. That story just a few years earlier had displayed some moral ambivalence about the rise of such a violent sport. After the 1958 championship game, Life tweaked its wording when it wrote about football, still calling the sport a “celebration of savagery” but recognizing that there was something about that violence that Americans adored: “an audience eager to embrace savagery as heroic.” A Time magazine cover in 1959 about the explosion of football featured a photo of Sam Huff and the headline “A Man’s Game.” It is no coincidence that this surge in popularity of professional football came during a postwar reckoning of the blurring of the roles of men and women, and during a prosperous period when American society became increasingly conformist, yet worried about a physical decline. President-elect John F. Kennedy wrote in Sports Illustrated that the “age of leisure and abundance” had created “The Soft American.” Esquire published an essay during this period titled “The Crisis of American Masculinity.” The solution to this crisis, of course, was more football. Even the most genteel American thinkers realized football was on its path to becoming known as a sport of selflessness and sacrifice, of teamwork and of real American men, the true American sport.
Love, Zac Page 2