The American Dream and the National Game

Chapter V. Vince Lombardi’s World

v VINCE LOMBARDI'S WORLD THIS FINAL CHAPTER WILL FOCUS ON PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL, A SPORT which has passed professional baseball in popularity in the years since World War II and is thought to have established itself as a successor to baseball as America's national game. Baseball is now a sport which represents to many the "good old days," while professional football reveals the various stresses of contemporary society. We might turn to Marshall McLuhan for an expression of this attitude. In Understanding Media he argues that . . . baseball is a game of one-thing-at-a-time, fixed positions and visibly delegated specialist jobs such as belonged to the now passing mechanical age, with its fragmented tasks and its staff and line in management organization. TV, as the very image of the new corporate and participant ways of electric living, fosters habits of unified awareness and social interdependence that alienate us from the peculiar style of baseball, with its specialist and positional stress. When cultures change, so do games. Baseball, that had become the elegant abstract image of an industrial society living by split-second timing, has in the new TV decade lost its psychic and social relevance for our new way of life. The ball game has been dislodged from the social center and has been conveyed to the periphery of American life. In contrast, American football is nonpositional, and any or all of the players can switch to any role during play. It is, therefore, a game that at 209 210 present is supplanting baseball in general acceptance. It agrees very well with the new needs of decentralized team play in the electric age.1 Here baseball embodies all values now obsolete: football embodies the values of the new, electric age. It will be the purpose of this chapter to discover why football, at least in the minds of many people, is replacing baseball as America's national game. Though part of the reason for this may, as McLuhan maintains, be found in the new kind of role technology plays in it, my purpose is to show the extent to which values formerly associated with professional baseball are now associated with professional football. One important reason professional football is now thought to be our national game is that, like professional baseball, it has become associated with the anti-democratic, anti-individualistic, heart-andwill oriented ideals toward which we are trained to look in order to give our urban, industrial activities meaning. The chapter has two parts. In the first, the transition of the aforementioned values from baseball to football is traced through the writings of Eliot Asinof, a former minor league baseball player whose books include a baseball novel (Man on Spikes, 1955) and a work of non-fiction about the New York Giants football team (Seven Days to Sunday, 1968). In these two books, we see Asinof reject professional baseball as a profession in which virtue and talent triumph and an individual is able to find happiness and accept professional football as a profession in which this remains true. The second section returns first to Carlyle's Past and Present for analysis of the kind of society Abbot Samson creates at his medieval monastery. This society should show the same essential characteristics the world of professional baseball under Judge Landis and the world of professional football in Asinof's Seven Days to Sunday do. Secondly, the section will deal briefly with Herman Melville's Moby Dick, considered both as a fictional "trying out" of the kind of community instituted by Abbot Samson, and as a study of the type of leader the community demands. Finally, the actual contemporary world of professional football will be considered, as seen in various writings, both fictional and non-fictional. The emphasis in this section will be on the public image of Vince Lombardi during his tenure as coach of the Green Bay Packers football team. In considering Lombardi's public image we should find that the present world of professional 211 sports, as embodied in football, embodies values very much like those of the great nineteenth century critics of industrial democracy , and that in both cases these values are those which Huizinga associates with play, but not with sports. I Eliot Asinof grew up during the twenties and thirties in New York City and learned how to play baseball in the streets of that city. In spite of his...