Pigskin Nation: How the NFL Remade American Politics by Jesse Berrett

It's not Jesse Berrett's fault that I didn't like Pigskin Nation. First of all, I had to go through a process to get the book. It wasn't available through our local public library system, but I had reason to believe it might be useful for a class I teach, so I went ahead and looked for it through the university library service I have access to. It was available at our library (yay!), but only in an online format (boo!). I emailed my librarian friend (yeah, that's right, I'm friends with not one, not two, but THREE research librarians at the university - I'm cool) and asked what I could do to get a hard copy and had to go through an interlibrary loan , which isn't actually hard, but uses scarce library resources and I felt guilty because I only sort of thought I might use it in my class.

Anyway.

I used to watch professional football games. Not too long ago, my entire autumn was spent trying to figure out how to clear my schedule on Sunday to watch all day long. I had a fierce loyalty to my hometown team. I loved being able to talk to people about a popular culture phenomenon in an era when our pop culture consumption is so fractured that it's sometimes hard to find common topics to talk about at a cocktail party.  But a couple of years ago, it became clear to me that the NFL was doing a serious disservice to the cities that took on tremendous debt to build over the top stadiums that would be used eight times a year, to the players who it lied to repeatedly about the risks of concussions and the ability of the league to help out with medical costs after players retired, and to the fans who don't agree with a certain political ideology that agrees with the owners of the teams. So I sort of went into this with a jaundiced mind.

I thought this book was going to be about how the modern NFL influences American politics and led to the election of Donald Trump. What it's actually about is how the NFL and professional football went from a backwoods sport that was less popular in the United States than baseball, boxing, and horse-racing to the behemoth that it is today, focusing mostly on the 60s - 80s.  Let me save you some time and summarize. Early on, NFL had NFL Films and the NFL was essentially able to control the narrative about the game. 

The early films emphasized the similarity between war and the game of football, particularly the parallels of violence and strategy.  If you wave your hands around, you'll find that the NFL can align itself as a patriotic past-time (let's distract you, Good Citizen, from the Cold War!) and now it's somehow enmeshed with the idea of patriotism. And that's how the NFL began to back itself into the corner that it is now, with flyovers from military jets and suppressing the right to free speech of its players.  I mean, the NFL was always about treating the players like crap, suppressing speech of players and paying them crap and union busting, but this is when a lot of that started.

I have saved you endless hours of looking up obscure references that Berrett makes to football from a period in which I was only sort of a sentient being.  This is well-researched (the footnotes literally take up a quarter of the pages in the book!), but very few things are actually well explained. Berrett assumes his readers are football knowledgeable and, frankly, I'm not. He'd make a passing reference to, let's hypothetically say, Larry Csonka flipping the bird on a 1972 Sports Illustrated cover and I'd have to look up who Csonka was AND what the cover was like.

Photo by Walter Iooss, Jr. Larry Csonka was a fullback for the Miami Dolphins in that team's legendary "perfect season." He won the Super Bowl with the Dolphins in 1972 and 1973.

I didn't care for this style of writing. It was published University of Illinois Press, so it is an academic work, but I read a lot of academic work and I think most of the time, academics at least make gestures to trying to make sure someone who isn't an expert in their field could understand their writing.  Berrett maybe didn't try that hard.

So if there's an academic who already has a base knowledge of football history, this might be the book for you. But otherwise, you might skip this one and wait for its parallel to come out in a popular press form.