by Brian Watkins
I’ve found recently that many of my decisions are influenced by the National Football League. Things like how to plan my day, how to spend money, and what to be passionate about are variables in part of a series of strings that Roger Goodell yanks and guides like some sort of evil marionettist in the ivory tower of NFL headquarters in
Each year, with the onset of training camp, there’s something inside me that results back to some sort of adolescent abandon; a reckless sense of juvenilia in the excitement of the new football season. And this only exists for the NFL. Although I’ll watch it and follow it, I am not a college football fanatic in the purist sense. In truth, the NFL has conditioned me with their branding and marketing. Like some sort of Disney-infected, sugar-hyped ten year-old girl screaming at a Jonas Brothers concert, the excitement at the start of the NFL season is my drug of choice come this time of year. I am the victim-equivalent of what hippie parents hate Michael Eisner for… except with football.
When the regular season rolls around John Madden, Rich Eisen, Joe Buck and Jim Nantz will wield my Sunday will: who is playing, what games will I be able to see, if I can’t see a game where can I see it. My financial decisions will have repercussions for months: Should I get this cable package or should I watch games at restaurants and bars? If I watch at restaurants and bars is there a greater cost there than if I were to get cable? Can I somehow afford to travel with the team by private jet or osmosis or some sort of Quantum Leap situation?
I am a Coloradan (or “Coloradoan” depending who you talk to), and hence, a Broncos fan (a team whose training camp started yesterday). Awaiting this day for weeks, I followed the team and players like a gossip magazine covers Britney Spears; watching all the ESPN clips and interviews, reading all the blogs, keeping track of Jay Cutler’s progress with diabetes and Brandon Marshall’s run-ins with the law. I got angry (sort of) when
The problem I run into here is that I can very easily justify all this. At the heart of this consumer-cancer is something good. Something rarely found in the increasing autonomy of our culture. The “good” is that millions of fans across the nation are dealing with this exact same excited addiction… the communal will of a city all at once turning from “me” to “we” for three hours on our day of rest. That’s good.
The unanswerable question I have to ask here is if this optimism is just a healthy bi-product of all the market conditioning; a tactic in place to keep me hooked. Or, underneath the slime, has the “good” somehow truly survived? Is this question even worth asking or attempting to answer? Is it just “the system I belong to?” And, even if accompanied by a bit of rotten capitalism and a little market conditioning is this “good” not worth salvaging?
(This all may be a little too cerebral for what some would call “just a game,” but we spend hours of our lives devoted to it… I think it deserves some thought.)
If the good underneath the slime has survived it is only by the will of millions of junkies like myself, hooked up to the NFL’s corner hustle, desperately rooting for something bigger than themselves. As long as that keeps going, I think I will too… anxiously awaiting the Broncos to beat the shit out of the Raiders.
Links:
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