The Football Fan's Manifesto

by Michael Tunison

  Billiards—Difficult to back a sport where ads for instructional tapes on how to make trick shots are more entertaining than the sport itself.

  World Series of Poker—Two journalists have written captivating books about trying their hands at playing professional football. Though Paper Lion and A Few Seconds of Panic are thrilling accounts of the exploits of George Plimpton with the Detroit Lions and Stefan Fatsis with the Denver Broncos, it is clear they are overwhelmed by the level of competition that they face. Meanwhile, writer James Mc-Manus takes a crack at the World Series of Poker in Positively Fifth Street and damn near wins the whole tournament. Viz: If a journalist can do it well, it isn’t a sport.

  Hockey—I thought we were only covering major sports here. Okay, okay. Easy now, hockey fans. Don’t go pelting my house with squid. I know your sport is enjoying a minor resurgence in recent years. That’s gotta put you on pace to overtake the runaway freight train of popularity that is the rock paper scissors championship circuit any year now.

  I.2 A People’s History of Football Fanaticism

  It was back in the time of the ancients (sometime pre-merger, I believe) that God gave unto man His only begotten sport, that of the most holy game of football. Man, being mired in benighted acts of civilization-building and fundamental scientific discovery, was not yet ready to accept this altogether amazing gift. Instead, humankind pissed away centuries occupying itself with the disgusting perversions of soccer and rugby before eventually coming to its collective senses. As with most things, the blame can be laid at the unwashed, hairy feet of the Europeans.

  The figure responsible for humanity’s overdue crawl from the muck was a man named Walter Camp, a visionary American hero in the truest and most badassed sense, despite the fact that he attended Yale and was therefore probably a privileged asshole. Camp saw the flaws inherent in lesser football imitations and implemented critical changes, including establishing the line of scrimmage, down-and-distance rules, and the two-point safety, and making what can be considered a holding penalty as vague and open to arbitrary interpretation by referees as possible. Soon, a golden age was born.

  In the generations since Camp laid these foundations of the game, professional football has supplanted baseball as our country’s most popular sport. Football accomplished this with the canny strategy of offering a spectacle that’s actually interesting and fun to watch. Somehow that seemed to resonate with people. This was not always the case. Long ago, the leather-headed greats of the past lined up in austere formations and dove into sloppy, sepiatoned piles. It was kind of like how the Tennessee Titans run their offense nowadays, sans LenDale White shedding fast-food wrappers as he waddles down the field.

  Much has changed in the NFL’s roughly ninety years of operation. It’s a much more offensively oriented game now. A defender who even so much as thinks of hitting an opposing quarterback or receiver outside his league-mandated “contact zone” (a two-inch area located on the chest between the jersey numbers) stands to get penalized for roughing the passer or pass interference and likely charged with second-degree aggravated assault (first degree if they have the gall to tackle him).

  One thing that has not changed is the endlessly intricate and nacho-intensive nature of football fandom. Even with modern game-neutering provisions (if you can’t horse-collar tackle, how is Roy Williams expected to play the game?), the visceral excitement of watching pro football is without equal. That is, unless you’re a fan of the Detroit Lions, in which case crocheting oven cozies is probably as engrossing and certainly more rewarding. In its ascension to the lofty heights of utterly ineffable awesomeness, the game has come to be littered with a multitude of arcane procedures, involved formations, and labyrinthine rules. For most players, the learning curve is measured in years and drunk-driving arrests. Football fandom has no fewer complexities, filled as it is with an endless supply of argued-over details, unspoken rules, and Byzantine game-day routines. Lacking an ironclad catechism for fandom, tons of NFL followers succumb to the pitfalls of face-painting, pink jerseys, and network pregame shows each year. This is a sad fate to befall anyone, even the already unfortunate fans in Green Bay.

  To be a truly hard-core fan, one must be inured to the highly regimented lifestyle that drives grown men to invest all of their emotional energy, lingering shreds of sanity, and disposable income to live vicariously through other, overgrown men they’ll probably never meet (and if they do, wish they hadn’t), who are paid handsomely by a corporation with yearly revenue in the billions. Other than their seven-figure salaries, extensive perks, and adulation, what do these athletes have to live for? Fans give these men purpose, and they in turn give fans a figure of worship. The circle of life, it twirls on. Will you, the fan, be asked to sacrifice to keep it moving? No, because asking implies that you have an option. Baseball fans ask. That’s why they fail.

  I.3 The Football Fan Is the Next Evolution of Man

  To the layperson, the above football fan may come across as contented and entertained, if not in an alcohol-induced catatonic state. But behind the drunken haze lies a troubled and sorely bereft fan aching for the most basic accoutrements of true NFL fanhood. Where is his laptop to get live fantasy scoring updates? Is he watching on HD with a satellite package or simply relying on national networks to dictate which game he watches? His food options are also shockingly thin, to say nothing of the staggering lack of NFL licensed gear adorning his person. If his team is to perform well, who is he to mock? If they lose, who can he get into a fist fight with?

  This man deserves better. Likely he is only carving out a meager allotment of time with football so that later he can repair to what he considers to be more important tasks. That’s bullshit, of course. Fanhood is bigger than life. It’s part of the larger cause of advancing the interests of your team. Football fans oftentimes get a bad rap. We are considered the most boorish, the most idiotic, the most violent, and the most Zubaz-pants clad of all spectators in the sporting world. All this, of course, is completely true, but is that such a bad thing? Well, except the Zubaz pants—those things really are horrendous. The rest you should embrace.

  Counting sixteen regular season games, up to four postseason games (fans of the Bengals, Rams, Lions, and Raiders please disregard), four or five agonizingly pointless preseason games, the Pro Bowl, and the two days of the draft, fans get less than one full month each year to spend watching their favorite team do anything remotely football-related. The other 330 or so days are about filling blank space, a task that becomes more and more difficult with each passing off-season. Seriously, any chance we can get some free tickets for having to go through that shit? At least a team schedule printed on a refrigerator magnet? Anything?

  To make matters worse, with each year football as we knew and loved it is being wrest away. Roger “Fidel” Goodell, in his brief tenure as commissioner, has shown the unyielding iron fist of a tyrant in trying to shape the league into the anodyne version of football that he has convinced himself will broaden its appeal. Included in his authoritarian bag of tricks are expanding and cracking down on what he considers an excessive show of force on the field with an outrageously liberal application of fines. At the same time, Goodell autocratically attempts to curb our American-born right to enjoy football as loutishly as we like with an oppressive fan-conduct policy. In response to a spate of fines of his teammates, Troy Polamalu (the heavily tressed Pro Bowl safety of the Pittsburgh Steelers), dubbed the machinations of exalted chairman Goodell as the transformation of the NFL into a “pansy league.” Though Polamalu was only referring to the tactics Goodell has employed to neuter the sport of its core toughness on the field, we would like to think the soft-spoken but hard-hitting Samoan was also alluding to the lengths the Ginger Generalissimo has gone to Disney-fy the game on its periphery, alienating its established base of fans in favor of attracting the kind of lifeless, halfhearted spectators who characterize a baseball crowd.

  The metaphor of football as warfare has always struck
some as ridiculous, but in recent years it has become more apt, if only for the way armed conflicts and professional football are presented to us in increasingly sanitized ways. Certainly, the ugliness is scrubbed from each for different reasons: war, so the country can continue to wage them without losing public opinion; football, so the league can cozy up to tight-assed corporations and the so-called family market those companies covet. But we want the truth, warts and all. The game is dirty, violent, and ugly and meant both to excite us and make us a bit uncomfortable. In turn, we should not be expected to act like we’re watching a match at Wimbledon.

  To those with the fortitude and the desire to meet the standards of a steel-willed, ravaged-livered fanatic, I urge you to press on, flask and giant foam finger in hand. Being a true fan is a lifelong commitment more demanding than either your career or your marriage (that is, if you happen to be saddled with such things—please note that they are fine distractions for the spring and summer but they only serve as encumbrances come autumn time). Ultimately, it’s the fandom that sustains you and gives you purpose, not to mention a socially acceptable excuse to get sloppy drunk for weekends at a time. More importantly, it gives you a fellowship with others who follow the creed and live the code. These are the people who understand you, who spill beer on you and call you nasty hate-filled epithets in the parking lot. In short, they are extensions of yourself, but in a way that doesn’t make you sexually uncomfortable. Well, most of the time. People can be excused for getting carried away when the team wins.

  ARTICLE II

  The Fundamentals of Fandom

  II.1 Pick a Team, Any Team. Just Pick One and Only One

  Picking a team is the most important decision of your life, so don’t screw it up by picking the Lions and know what you’re getting into if you pick the Cowboys (being loathed). Time is of the essence, so don’t be like Brett Favre and drag out your decision for an eternity. The absolute deadline to pick a team is your eighth birthday. Before that, you are in sports infancy and can be as willy-nilly and bandwagon-prone with your fandom as your wee widdle heart desires. Up until the third grade, kids don’t understand even the basic principles and pathologies of rooting for a team. Because kids are stupid. At that critical eighth year, something activates in the brain that solidifies sports allegiance. Ask any neurologist, they’ll back me up on this. It’s science. Political leanings can be fluid. You can have an epiphany later in life that can make you change parties, change philosophies, hell, even change gender, but if at any point after that eighth birthday, even so much as one day later you switch teams, you are rendered a failure as a person and subject to public shunning and completely justified brutality.

  There are any number of factors that can determine who your favorite team may be. For most, it’s a matter of where they spent their childhood or who their parents pulled for. These are perfectly reasonable and probably the most universally accepted justifications for liking a team. But they should not be considered the only ones.

  Contrary to the hometown rule, you can latch onto a team for any number of superficial reasons. For example, Chiefs fans share a common love for suffering multiple heart attacks before the age of forty. Others may be captivated by one superstar athlete. You can be stuck in an area that skirts several fan-base boundaries. Hell, you can adopt a team for otherwise contemptible causes, picking one that wins all the time or even one that has uniforms and a logo you like. For the latter two, you’re going to have to make up another excuse when someone asks you the origin of your fandom. Under no circumstances should you divulge those disgraceful enticements.

  What matters most here is the timing. As long as you commit to a team early enough in life, no one can question you for it. Though they will find a way to insult you, it’s because that’s the way football discourse works. And, of course, you can never switch teams for any reason other than your team relocating from a city. If the overwhelming power of your allegiance demands you to follow that team to its new hometown, more power to you, but you are by no means compelled to do so. Just remember, don’t pick the Browns. Or the Bills. And God help you if you end up with the Texans. But then, He only helps those who help themselves, leaving you doubly forsaken.

  2.2 Who You Root for Defines Who You Are

  Maybe you thought the choice of your favorite team really was an offhand decision you could make based solely on who has the coolest uniforms or which player endorsed your favorite car dealership. Maybe think again. Even though Haroldson’s Toyota is the tits, there are many other more important considerations, life-lasting ones, to account for before making this most critical selection.

  No matter which team you settle on as you own, a set of prevailing stereotypes and shorthand associations will immediately be assigned to you by fans of other teams and by the media at large. Knowing these beforehand will prove instructive and may inform your selection process. After all, you’ll want to know why everybody else at Gillette Stadium only boos the black players.

  Arizona Cardinals—Now that the team’s been to a Super Bowl, people actually realize that you exist. Moreover, once the team made it to the dance, Arizona Cardinals fans themselves finally came into existence, as if the NFC championship victory over the Eagles were a big bang to begin the Arizonaverse. Prior to that, any Cardinals-following was about as tangible as the campus of the University of Phoenix, the unfortunate naming rights holders for the team’s stadium in Glendale.

  Atlanta Falcons—Your threshold for dogfighting jokes is shorter than most, though you can’t deny the appeal of the occasional canine brawl to the death. It’s a cultural thing, after all. Pulling for the Falcons makes you an ardent Home Depot apologist and leaves you unable to watch a football game unless a Ludacris track is heard every stoppage in play. If you’re white and dancing the Dirty Bird, you’ve waived any legal expectation not to be dragged from the back of a truck. Same goes for anyone who considers Matty Ice an acceptable name for a crappy domestic beer, let alone a quarterback.

  Baltimore Ravens—Wait, what’s that? What happened to your legs? I can’t see them with those purple-tinged army camouflage pants you’ve got on. Those must come in handy when engaging in tactical military missions in fields of lilacs. Yes, Baltimore is the proud home of John Waters, and therefore a bastion of tackiness, but c’mon. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. I only mean to poke fun, Ravens fans. I’d hate for your defense to take out a bounty on me.

  Buffalo Bills—Oh Lord. You poor wretched thing. The pain you’ve been through. The crushing disappointment, the wrenching stench of defeat, the unbearable suffering that comes with each passing day. Oh, I’m just talking about living in Buffalo. You root for the Bills too? Quite the glutton for punishment, aren’t we? No wonder you signed Terrell Owens.

  Carolina Panthers—The Panthers made it to the NFC Championship Game in only their second year of existence and had a Super Bowl appearance in their first decade, so fans have had it a little better than most during the team’s brief run. (Still, they’d give it all up for one more national championship for the Tar Heels.) Don’t envy them too much, though. They’ve each had a relative gunned down by Rae Carruth in callously indifferent blood.

  Chicago Bears—A team with a hard-nosed tradition and a proud history is bound to foster some committed fans. But when those committed fans assume that every iota of team news, no matter how esoteric, is worthy of universal attention, that’s when you must forcibly sterilize them with garden shears. To their credit, Bears fans, and players alike, can cultivate a damn fine neck beard.

  Cincinnati Bengals—You’ve been conditioned to despise owner Mike Brown and continually live in despair, yet you still manage to root for the least embarrassing modern-era team in your state. Go you! Being a fan of the only Ohio team to reach a Super Bowl can be a heady experience. Try not to be too smug to the Browns fans when the Bengals pick up their third win in Week 16. The team’s brief flirtation with respectability brought with it a reputation for lawlessness. F
ortunately, the Bengals have cleaned up their act and, in doing so, have plunged back into irrelevancy. No wonder they keep bringing back Chris Henry.

  Cleveland Browns—The milkbone in your mouth lost its flavor months ago. Your sons are named for Bernie Kosar and your daughters for Brady Quinn. Lawlessness is certain to descend upon the city’s streets now that “fucking soldier” Kellen Winslow Jr. has been dealt to Tampa Bay. You will have to rely on your nonpareil bottle-throwing skills to protect you.

  Dallas Cowboys—The Cowboys were dubbed “America’s Team” by the vice president of NFL Films in the ’70s after he asked Steelers’ owner Art Rooney if he wanted his team to have the distinction and Rooney refused it. Sorry, Cowboys fans, you were America’s second choice. But if ever there were a vote on which fan base to wipe from the earth, there’s no doubt Dallas backers would finish first.

  Denver Broncos—While other fans struggle with high elevations, Broncos fans are capable of being irritating up to ten thousand feet above sea level. The franchise has been lingering in a rough patch since the retirement of horsey-faced quarterbacking demigod John Elway. At last it seemed Broncos fans had a suitable successor in sulking extraordinaire Jay Cutler. That is, until new coach Josh McDaniels floated his name in trade talks, causing Cutler’s face to go from sulk to full-on makeup smearing sob. At least Denver fans won’t have to invest in a new player’s jersey for a while.

  Detroit Lions—ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO WORSHIP HERE. The 0-16 season has allowed your team its stake in history, however opprobrious. You’re still convinced Barry Sanders is going to return one of these years. When he finally does, he’ll be swarmed by a rabid pack of Lions fans demanding answers. He’ll run ten yards backward, reverse field twice, fake out six of them, and still get tackled for the prettiest two-yard loss you ever saw.