They Love a Man in Uniform

I have never been any good at spotting trends, at recognizing ideas whose time has come.

I thought the idea of fried-chicken franchises was dumb and they would soon go broke.

When Frank McCarthy came to me once with the idea to make a movie on the life of Gen. George Patton, I told him I thought that was the worst idea for a film I’d ever heard in my life--a story on the life of a discredited Army general.

I almost had to be horsewhipped into seeing “The Sound of Music.” I couldn’t conceive of a story about a governess coming out of a convent as popular entertainment.

Who was it, you think, who told Disney’s man Joe Reddy that Walt would go broke with his idea of an amusement park in Anaheim? Amusement parks went out with open trolleys and state fairs, I said. Nobody went to them anymore.

A Barnum, I’m not. I would probably have touted the Wright brothers to stick to their bicycle business.

And if there is one thing I have always been sure of, it was that spring football was a worse idea than the life of Patton. I never could get used to the notion of playing a sport in pads, helmet and miles of wrapping in June in Arizona--or even Chicago.

With this in mind, I now have to tell you I am in love with the idea of the World League of American Football, which kicked off a couple of weeks ago to pretty good TV ratings and better-than-average news clippings.

Sure, it’s spring football, and I still take a dim view of that.

The difference here is in the franchises. Eight of them are in the United States, and I still don’t want to be in Birmingham in July for any playoff games. But four of them are outside the United States and three of them are in Europe and this is what intrigues your humble correspondent.

I don’t know about you, but I always had the notion that Europe, with its long-standing military tradition, would love American football.

I particularly thought the Germans, with their parade-ground mentality and their standing-army traditions, would take to our sport like the French to love or the Italians to opera.

Von Clausewitz couldn’t have devised a sport more attuned to the Prussian tradition than American professional football.

It’s as militaristic in character as the Kaiser, a paramilitary exercise on a playing field. In its infancy, and on the college level, it was more an amalgam of rugby and soccer. But the pros have made it into a set-piece, chess-board example of complicated stratagems that would delight a high command anywhere.

Just as war is a general’s medium and movies a director’s, football is a coach’s. If you’ve got the equivalent of Norman Schwarzkopf--or Georgie Patton or Erwin Rommel--calling the shots, directing your attack, you will have a victorious team. Put a George McClellan--or a George Custer--in charge and no matter how good your troops (i.e., your players) are, you will, so to speak, die on the five-yard line.

Like war, it is a team effort. It is probably the only true team game in all of pro sport. As chronicled here before, baseball is not a team sport, it’s a series of solo performances by the artists. The pitcher does his solo. The spotlight switches to the batter, who does his. If he hits it, the spotlight switches to the fielder who does his.

Basketball requires some coaching, I guess, but if you have an agile, active 7-foot Kareem-Abdul Jabbar in the pivot and Magic Johnson to bring the ball up for him, you don’t need a coach, you just need a calculator.

Golf and tennis are, pure and simple, individual sports. So is bowling. So, I have to think, is ice hockey. There may be some form and reason to all that frantic scrambling after the puck, but it looks anarchic or ad lib to me.

But pro football is a metaphor for war. It even borrows its language from the battlefield. The bomb is the long-range, long-distance strike. A pass rush is the application of the shock-troop theory of blunting offenses.

A game is hardly spontaneous. An offense is deployed as calculatingly as Napoleon’s with a view to outflanking the enemy. A defense spreads out to avoid being surrounded, i.e., letting wide receivers get behind you.

It’s as military as the battle of Waterloo. Any country where Caesar ruled or Napoleon marched, it would seem to me, would identify with pro football. A football game is a series of military campaigns as carefully crafted as Hannibal’s. They used to say that Bill Walsh, the nearest thing to a field marshal in a headset, used to send in the first 25 plays, as painstakingly mapped out as Desert Storm.

Sport is no different from any other capitalistic venture. “Expand or Die,” should be its motto, too.

Baseball loves to call its championship the “World Series.” A Kansas City-St. Louis finale, which we had a few years ago, or even a Dodgers vs. Oakland give the lie to this gaudy contention.

I would have high hopes for global football. It will depend, as these things so often do, on their developing a local hero or two. It’s well to remember that soccer never caught on in this country for a lot of reasons, but one of them was its stars were European or South American. Tennis almost foundered in this country when all its best players were Aussies.

The game itself will be a star. It should appeal to the armchair chiefs of staff. It is the ultimate war game that should hold fascination for everyone who ever studied Caesar, Napoleon, Ludendorff, the Kaiser, Wellington or Montgomery. Churchill would surely have been a fan.

Americans love it because of its controversy--”Why didn’t they kick a field goal?” “Why didn’t they give the ball to Marcus Allen?” “Why didn’t they pass?”--but also because it’s in the tradition of Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee or U.S. Grant.

Maybe it won’t last any longer than hula hoops or discotheques. But I can see it expanding to Tokyo, Rome, Moscow--Ivan the Terrible would have loved it, particularly the knee and neck injuries--and maybe even Scandinavia and Paris. Maybe it’ll even grow to be played in the fall.

If not, though, it won’t be the first time I’ve been wrong.