Against Football by Steve Almond Page A

spent years wandering from one city to the next, searching, it seems to me now, mostly for a TV upon which I could watch the Raiders.
    In Greensboro, North Carolina, where I arrived in the mid-nineties to become a writer and alienate everyone on earth, I hiked up to campus every Sunday looking for an empty student lounge. The Raiders themselves were never on. Still, I’d stand there for three hours watching teams I didn’t even like, games that meant nothing in my grid of devotion, refusing to sit because I needed to believe I was going to be there for just a few minutes.
    What kept me hooked was the limbic tingle familiar to any football fan, the sense that I was watching an event that
mattered.
The speed and scale of the game, the noise of the crowd, the grandiloquent narration and caffeinated camera angles—all these signaled a heightened quality of attention.The players dashed about, their bodies lit in a kind of bright funnel of consequence.
    A few years later I moved to Somerville, Mass, where I located a vast bacterial sports bar called the Good Times Emporium that catered to sickos like me. Imagine the wish complex of a thirteen-year-old boy detonated inside an airplane hanger: batting cages, bumper cars, paintball. They broadcast games at full-volume on giant washed-out screens, under which labored beautiful sullen barmaids with stretch marks and tattoos.
    Every Sunday in autumn, I drove there to watch my team and to curse softly into my chicken wings. Because Good Times showed every NFL game, guys would show up in team jerseys and share pitchers of beer and roar together at the big plays and bellow at the injustices. We all understood the brazen con to which we were a party, that our primitive loyalties defined us as marks, that our favorite player might be gone by next year, or next week, that some gilded owner, if so inclined by market forces, would happily ship our entire team to a new city, that we were, objectively speaking, cheering for bright laundry.
    Sometimes, during commercials, I would gaze around that bar, at the other men gazing upon their teams, the abject gleam in their eyes. In those moments I could see the tender truth nestled within each of us. We weren’t rooting for our teams. We were rooting for ourselves.

    Eventually, I got to recognize my fellow Raiders lifers. There were only four of us. We’d sit at separate tables and howl complaints, exchange looks of misery or the rare awkward high five. When the game was over, or we’d given up on the Raiders coming back, we’d leave without saying goodbye. The whole interaction felt illicit, intimate then shockingly hollow, like anonymous sex.
    I told no one—not even close friends—about these excursions. They seemed unworthy of the literary artist I was striving, and failing, to become. But those afternoons were the central emotional events of my life. How else can I explain the way my hands would tremble in the parking lot? How my heart hammered the moment I saw the lovely silver and black of the Raiders’ uniforms? After a tough loss, I would sit in my car and replay the fatal moments in my head until my fool heart ached.
    There are all sorts of laudable reasons people watch sports, and football in particular. We wish to reconnect to the unscripted physical pleasures of childhood. We wish for moral structure in a world that feels chaotic, a chance to scratch the inborn itch for tribal affiliation. Sports allow men, in particular, a common language by which to converse.
    When we root for a team, the conscious desire is to see them win, to bask in reflected glory. But the unconscious function of fandom is, I think, just the opposite. It’s a form of surrender to our essential helplessness in the universal order.In an age of scientific assurance, people still yearn for spiritual struggle. Fandom allows us to fire our faith in the forge of loss. Because our teams inevitably do lose. And this experience forms