From Football to the GOP Part I: Origins

By Paul M. Banks

Baseball may be nicknamed “America’s pastime,” but football is its true national game and passion. The National Football League is first in television ratings and revenue generation among professional sports. The best evidence of football’s cultural dominance is the Super Bowl, our unofficial national holiday. The Super Bowl our biggest stage for performers, the ratings champion of television, and the most coveted spot for advertisers. It’s where the best marketers showcase their talents, because it’s everything that’s American: epitomizing consumption and consumerism. The American holiday celebrates a game that’s also synonymous with war.

This sport of warrior-poets has produced many prominent politicians: Steve Largent, J.C. Watts, Jack Kemp, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, and Lynn Swann. All played college or professional football and are Republicans (traditionally the more war hawkish party) Socially conservative Heath Shuler was elected representative of North Carolina’s 11th district. He is the first football player turned elected Democrat since Senator John Glenn. There is more at work here than just coincidence. The underlying ethos of football, Republicans and the military is a concept called “strict father morality,” explained clearly in George Lakoff’s book “Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate: the Essential Guide for Progressives.”

War Games

“We’re soldiers. Any time somebody invades our home it’s going to be a battle.” University of Illinois starting quarterback Tim Brasic told me at 2005 Illinois Media Day. Two days later at Chicago Bears (who play their home games in SOLDIER Field) training camp I brought up the “trench warfare” football linemen engage in to Bears defensive tackle Darrel Campbell. “The key word used there is warfare. Seriously, it’s definitely warfare, and Coach Johnson is helping us a lot with the warfare,” he said. Football is a game, but it is also a metaphor for war; its roots and history show it originated as a stand-in for military service. There are jingoistic and militaristic traditions football has that other sports lack; the specific offensive and defensive-minded lingo, manipulation of lines and forces with supplemental strategic reinforcements that mirror the planning generals do for battle.

Red Grange was football’s first collegiate and professional superstar. I’m from the same area and attended the same school as Grange, so learning his story helped me develop this hypothesis. Hear are some choice quotes from John M. Carroll’s tome Red Grange and the rise of Modern Football.

“Between 1915 and 1917, educators engaged in a vigorous debate over how to prepare American youth for war if the United States entered the European conflict…Football was one of many sports that would benefit from the wartime and postwar emphasis on physical education in public schools.” (Carroll, p34)

“It was a violent and virile sport for gentlemen who were concerned about their manhood in an increasingly sedentary society and questioned their ability to measure up to the past generation that had been tested in combat.” (page 25)

“Two forces, public realization of how exciting the ‘new football’ produced by the earlier rules changes had become and the stimulus that war gave to the game, were converging to generate one of the greatest growth periods in the history of football.” (page 34)

War Eagle

I’ve played the game in high school and covered it on both the college and professional level, so I’ve experienced the true essence of the game.  I’ve marched in formation from the locker room to the stadium, (Going off to war), and I’ve run out through the tunnel screaming and yelling to take the (battle) field with my teammates (or platoon if you will). There’s nothing quite like the eerie quiet seriousness that surrounds an army company or a football team in the waning moments before battle is to ensue. Football contains a Draconian chain of command that requires unwavering and unquestioning adherence to your commanding officer. College football fight songs (notice they are called FIGHT songs not SPIRIT songs) sound exactly like military marching music. College football rivals NASCAR as the predominant “red-state” sport. It’s more popular in the traditionally most hawkish states which are overwhelmingly rural in population. Just seven of the 25 schools in the current AP college football poll are located in traditionally “blue states.” And of those seven, three are in “purple states” or “swing states.”

In Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” he describes the cultural stereotype, the somewhat inaccurate, yet still widely held narrative of the region on page 25. “A red-stater is loyal. This is the part of the country that fills the army’s ranks and defends the flag against all comers. Red America is never redder than on our bloodiest battlefields” and a grievance—you know, the usual one, the one you saw in Rambo, the one where all the cowards of the coasts stab the men of red land in the back during the Vietnam War.”

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