Against Football

by Steve Almond

  The same scenario was playing out all over the country, with owners securing eye-popping deals (and thus multiplying franchise value) by moving to new cities, or threatening to. Houston lost the Oilers to Nashville. St. Louis lost the Cards to Phoenix. Because of the insatiable market created by us fans—particularly in jilted cities—the NFL could also auction off the right to expansion teams, thus increasing the pool of potential civic suitors for owners to wield against their hometowns.

  Franchise Free Agency, as it is sometimes called, is better understood as a highly public Ponzi scheme. The league pits cities and citizens against each other and sweeps up the profits. A Houston billionaire eventually paid the NFL a $700 million expansion fee to replace the Oilers, outbidding Los Angeles. The public chipped in $250 million for a new stadium.

  And what about poor Cleveland? The NFL graciously bestowed the city an expansion team (franchise fee: a paltry $476 million) and lucky taxpayers shelled out almost $300 million to build them a new home. A fairytale ending, NFL style.

  As for my Raiders, our late owner Al Davis—a man best described as Corleonish—made a career out of extorting the City of Oakland. He moved the team to Los Angeles from 1982 to 1994, and secured $220 million in stadium renovations to return to Oakland, plus a training facility, moving costs and, presumably, his weight in cannoli. While the city is still paying off those renovation bonds, the team pays $525,000 per year in rent.

  I would be remiss if I failed to note one more fiscal oddity. The NFL—unlike the NBA and Major League Baseball—is tax-exempt. How did this happen?

  Funny you should ask.

  Back in 1966, when the league was hashing out a deal with Congress that would allow it to merge with the AFL, lobbyists managed to insert a provision into the tax code allowing “professional football leagues” to be granted not-for-profit status. All the NFL had to do was pledge not to schedule games on Friday nights or Saturdays, to avoid competing with high school and college games.

  The tax exemption (501(c)6, for those keeping score at home) was originally intended for “business leagues, chambers of commerce, real-estate boards, or boards of trade”—local industry groups that welcome new members. I wish all of you good luck in your efforts to join the NFL.

  This does not mean that the league’s revenues are all untaxed. The NFL League Office distributes earnings to its member teams, which are for-profit entities and therefore should pay taxes. However, because owners have proven so adept at cutting deals to reduce their tax burdens, and because their records are private, no one knows what sort of tax rate owners pay on their profits. We can safely assume they do better at finding deductions than those of us who don’t own NFL teams.

  As not-for-profit organizations go, the NFL isn’t exactly small-time. In addition to rent on their spacious Park Avenue offices, the league pays $60 million in executive salaries. Half of this sum goes to Commissioner Goodell.

  Last year, Senator Tom Coburn, a conservative from Oklahoma, proposed legislation that would bar any sports league with profits exceeding $10 million annually from claiming tax-exempt status. Coburn has noted that NFL officials not only duck federal taxes but use their exempt status to avoid city and state taxes when they travel on league business, to the Super Bowl for instance.

  Oh, one other key league expenditure: lobbying. The NFL pays $2 million per year for that.

  Coburn’s proposal has never been debated, let alone voted upon.

  Hosts on sports talk radio will sometimes argue that fans shouldn’t complain about the monstrous salaries athletes receive, because our support makes them possible. But the athletes are really just the public face of a much larger enterprise. We could call them pawns. A better analogy would be corner drug boys. They supply us our high and palm our cash. They run the risk while their employers, operating out of sight, collect most of the proceeds. Let’s at least be honest about whom we’re really enriching: the One Percent.

  Most fans turn to football for idealistic reasons. We love being immersed in its gallant meritocracy. We want to believe the game is played primarily for honor, not money. But, as the game has morphed from a ragged outlier into a corporate juggernaut, we’ve evolved as fans, too. Think about how much time we spend these days obsessing over the economics of the game. Hardcore fans think as much about salary cap hits as corner blitzes. We crunch numbers and debate player valuation and second-guess every move management makes.

  Is it any wonder fantasy football leagues have become so popular? The fantasy, after all, is one of ownership, of competing to see who can best manage human capital. I spent two years in such a league. After a while I didn’t really care which teams won anymore. I just wanted to score more points than everyone else. I was rooting for my own acumen.

  With considerable regret, I must now ask you to take one final step backward, so as to ponder the NFL’s long-range game plan.

  In 2010, Roger Goodell (whose pay is based largely on how much he can grow profits) announced that he hoped the NFL would reach revenues of $25 billion by 2027. This represents an increase of 250 percent over the next fourteen years. It would put the NFL on par with global Goliaths such as Nike and McDonalds, and exceed the entire GDP of more than a hundred countries.

  Where do you think these additional monies are going to come from? They are going to come from you and me, in the form of more public subsidies for more palatial stadiums, and higher prices for tickets, parking, and all the rest.

  In an era of DVRs and digital streaming, football games remain one of the few events some people (i.e., us addicts) insist on watching live. And we don’t just tolerate the commercials during games, in the case of the Super Bowl we actually celebrate them. This has made NFL football, by far, the most valuable entertainment commodity in the world. And it’s what makes the league’s monopoly status so lucrative, according to John Vrooman, an economist at Vanderbilt University who has written extensively about the NFL’s fiscal ploys.

  League officials can negotiate all-or-nothing broadcast rights and advertising rates, and thus set prices much higher than individual teams in competition ever could. Those higher prices inevitably (and invisibly) get passed on to us consumers, who wind up paying more for cable TV and products.

  Vrooman predicts the league will eventually limit access to games unless fans are willing to pay a premium. “The monopoly rule is to gouge half as many fans more than twice as much on everything,” he says. League officials and owners insist they won’t turn football into a luxury item. But that’s exactly what they’re doing right now by building all those corporate suites and broadcasting certain games exclusively on the NFL Network.

  The tremendous value of these games is the reason Goodell—even in the face of a growing crisis over player health—is quietly pushing to increase the season from sixteen to eighteen games, and to expand the playoffs.

  We fans can romanticize the game all we like, but Goodell and his bloodless syndicate deal in leverage and maximization. Here’s how Brian Rolapp, the Chief Operating Officer of NFL Media, and the man tasked with making sure pro football dominates the digital age (he just brokered deals with Verizon, Twitter, and Microsoft) puts it: “We’re really in the business of aggregating America around events and around our game. There are fewer and fewer places that can do that. If you can aggregate audiences, you are going to be more and more valuable.”

  How romantic.

  Let us return, then, to that scene at the NFL Combine, to those defensive backs who have just finished their drill and heard that inspirational speech about the privilege of playing in the NFL and making the right decisions. “We all know why we’re here,” Bradley Roby shouts. “ ‘Get money!’ on three.”

  It’s easy for fans to dismiss a moment like this as reflective of some unfortunate “ghetto mentality.” It becomes much more depressing to admit that Roby is parroting the guiding ethos of the NFL, and the private sector.

  The truth is, I have a lot more respect for Roby. If you grew up amid
the kind of deprivation that a lot of NFL prospects did, and football represented your one best chance to lift yourself and your loved ones out of poverty, why the hell wouldn’t you want to get money?

  It’s a lot tougher for me to sympathize with mercenary executives and team owners who were born into affluence. Why must they squeeze every penny from their position of cultural power? Do they feel no shame in snatching taxpayer money they don’t really need from impoverished communities? Is the acquisition of capital the only way they know how to keep score? At what point do we admit that the NFL’s true economic function is to channel our desire for athletic heroism into an engine of nihilistic greed?

  6

  THE LOVE SONG OF RICHIE INCOGNITO

  I once made the mistake of watching a football game with an Italian woman who was studying medieval gender roles, and with whom, rather unimaginatively, I hoped to have sex. It was the sort of mistake one makes in one’s twenties, before one has developed a proper appreciation for the virtues of compartmentalization.

  “They are spending most times hugging,” Elena observed.

  “Those are blocks,” I said.

  “Then at the end, they make a big pile on the ground and grind each other.”

  “There’s no grinding.”

  “Then they spank the others on the behind. It’s a gay ritual!”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “But look. Before each time, the skinny one, the sex leader—”

  “The quarterback—”

  “He makes all the big boys bend over. Then he chooses his favorite and comes up behind the lucky one and makes a pantomime of sodomy.”

  “No,” I said. “No no no. That’s the snap. It’s how the play starts. And the quarterback gets the ball from one guy, the center. It’s not a choice. He can’t just come up to, like, the tight end.”

  Elena looked at me for several complicated European seconds. “The what?”

  Earlier this year, a University of Missouri football player named Michael Sam announced that he was gay. He’d never worked hard to hide who he was. He dated a man throughout college. He frequented a gay club in Columbia. He came out to his college teammates before his last season. Many of them already knew.

  As a kid growing up in Texas, Sam watched one of his older brothers die from a gunshot wound. Two more of his seven siblings died, and two others were imprisoned. He was once maced by police officers who had come to his house to arrest a relative. He also lived, briefly, in his mother’s car. These events probably helped Michael Sam put the issue of his sexual orientation into perspective.

  In May the St. Louis Rams drafted the highly touted defensive end in the seventh round. If Sam makes the team, he will be the first openly gay player in NFL history. And thus his decision not to hide his sexual orientation—what we heterosexuals think of as living—became a huge story.

  The underlying premise of this story was that the NFL might not be “ready” for an openly gay player. Reporters found sources to mouth the necessary misgivings. Anonymous team officials fretted that Sam’s draft stock would drop because of the media distraction he might cause, to which they were naturally (and, again, anonymously) contributing.

  It was one of those media narratives in which the alleged subject (Michael Sam: Gay Guy in Shoulder Pads) was much less interesting than the actual subject: A Workplace Exists in America, Circa 2014, in Which the Prospect of Accommodating a Single Openly Gay Employee Is Enough to Induce Panic.

  In what other setting would this sort of bigotry be tolerated? The Armed Forces used to be an acceptable standby. At this point, we’re down to outfits run by fundamentalist religious groups.

  The logic seems to be that football is a domain of hyper-masculinity, a physical and psychological space where alpha males do battle. And gay men can’t be alphas because they are fragile and frightened and weak, which is to say feminine.

  And everyone knows (and curiously consents to the fact) that the assigned roles of the feminine in football remain safely locked in the pre-suffrage era. The two archetypes seen most commonly on television are cheerleaders and players’ wives. Got that, ladies? You can either dance around on the sidelines as a half-naked sex object or sit in the stands cheering on your man. It remains unclear to me why so many women watch football, given how dismissive the game is of them.

  But I’m more interested, for now, in the way a figure like Sam exposes the neurotic sexual conflicts at the heart of football.

  Here, for instance, is how a linebacker named Jonathan Vilma explained his concerns about having Sam as a teammate: “Imagine if he’s the guy next to me and, you know, I get dressed, naked, taking a shower, the whole nine, and it just so happens he looks at me. How am I supposed to respond?”

  Vilma’s point is that, unlike employees in other lines of work, he might have to be naked in front of Sam, which would make him feel uncomfortable. Fair enough.

  But can I just ask: Why is Jonathan Vilma haunted by a fantasy of his own devising in which he is standing naked next to Michael Sam and being visually inspected by him, maybe even (gasp) admired? What is Vilma—a player so vicious that he was suspended for four games last season for attempting to injure opposing players—really afraid of here? That the simple act of a gay man looking at his naked body will call his own sexuality into question? That he’ll catch gay cooties? That Sam will overpower him and force him to have gay sex? Why does Vilma imagine that he has to respond to Sam at all?

  Before I go any further with this disquisition, let me confess that I get what Vilma was saying. And if you stripped away all my sensitivo politesse—or just plunked me in front of an NFL game with a bunch of soused buddies—I would cop to the same worry. That’s why I feel comfortable speculating about Vilma’s motives. We’ve got the same issues. Almost all straight men do. We’re afraid of being gay, and that fear (whether we like it or not) contains an unconscious wish. Freud himself believed that we begin life with unfocused libidinal drives and that, though most of us settle into an orientation, we retain an attraction to both sexes.

  For the record, if this isn’t already clear, I grew up in a male-dominated home where insecurity and bullying and homoeroticism ran rampant. I dealt with my confusion by throwing myself into sports, as a player and fan. Like a lot of guys, I believed that being a jock, albeit an inept one, would vouchsafe my heterosexuality.

  And yet it’s also true that I found in the world of sports a way to sublimate my feelings of affection and desire for men. I did look at other guys in the locker room and I thought a lot about their bodies. I didn’t fantasize about having sex with them, but I did envy the power and confidence they possessed and I wanted to be close to them. It got sloppy. I can remember my mother walking into my room one night only to discover, to her obvious distress, that I was giving a back massage to a shirtless friend. Another time, behind a locked door, two soccer buddies and I measured our erect cocks in anguished silence. That’s a decent executive summary of my adolescence: endless dick measuring.

  After his first year in college, my twin brother Mike told me he was gay. I was absolutely floored. I’d been harboring the suspicion that he was sleeping with my girlfriend. He had dated women in high school and been a standout on the swim and water polo teams. But I wonder now if my obsession with sports was in some ways a response to whatever part of me recognized Mike as gay. Later on, it would become clear that Mike tended to date African-American men. Was my fandom in some ways a coded expression of the same attraction?

  My own view of sexuality at this point lines up with Kinsey. Our desires are a lot more fluid than we like to admit—a spectrum, not a duality. I like to joke that my friend Billy (who hates sports and dresses like the New Jersey equivalent of a peacock) is 23 percent gay. What I’m really saying is that I’m 23 percent gay. That’s how it works with homophobia. It’s just one big projection racket. Anybody who says he hates gay people is really saying he hates the secret gay parts of himself.

  I belie
ve there have always been people who are more sexually attracted to their own gender than the opposite gender, and the ones with the courage to admit to these impulses and act upon them get labeled gay. In the end, if you look at things objectively, it should make very little difference how people find sexual happiness. It’s their business, just like your sex life is your business. Parts is parts.

  Our sexual morality is almost entirely culturally determined. In the world of the Old Testament—a world defined by the patrilineal inheritance of land and the expansion of power by marriage—homosexuality mucked up the given order. So God told a story about how it was deviant. In ancient Greece, grown men wooed and bedded teenage boys. The mightiest Greek soldier of all time, Achilles, loved his friend Patroklus more than any concubine. Nobody freaked.

  Here in America, at the dawn of the third millennium AD, 60 percent of us support same-sex marriage. But there’s still this huge undertow of masculinity anxiety. And the preserve where this anxiety finds its purest and most obvious expression is in the Athletic Industrial Complex, especially in the game of football.

  No other major sport defines masculinity in such radical terms, as both violent and physically intimate. It is my own belief that the brutality of the game is what allows for such intimacy. Men purchase the right, through their valor, to love other men without experiencing shame. Football is a form of camouflage, a display of manliness so overt that the viewer never questions the game’s subtle oddities.

  And I suppose this brings us right to the main event, a document called The Wells Report, which was compiled, at the NFL’s direction, after the starting left tackle for the Miami Dolphins, Jonathan Martin, left the team last October and checked into a nearby hospital for psychological treatment. He quit due to “persistent bullying.” The Wells Report offers a rare peek inside the sanctum of an NFL locker room. It also presents a riveting and unintended saga of homoerotic turmoil.