Dave Barry - Bad Habits

I was not one of the ten longest jumpers. In fact, they could have pulled people out of the crowd, old people with arthritis, and they probably would have jumped farther than I did.

So that was the end of my involvement with organized sports. Fortunately, there was one other avenue to popularity in my high school, which was to drink several quarts of beer, go to a dance, and behave in such an extremely antisocial manner that you got thrown out by the assistant principal in full view of hundreds of admiring kids. So in the end I achieved social acceptance.

After I got out of high school, varsity letters seemed less important, and academic achievement started to seem more important. I mean, if you go to a cocktail party and subtly contrive to flash your varsity letter, people will think you are a jerk; whereas if you subtly contrive to flash your Phi Beta Kappa key, people will still think you are a jerk, but an educated jerk.

I often wonder what my former classmates do with their varsity letters, now that they’re out of high school. Maybe they wear them in the privacy of their homes. Why not? I still drink beer.

Once again it is time for Americans of all races and religions to set aside their petty differences and spend half a day drinking beer and watching large persons injure each other’s knees. You guessed it: it’s Super Bowl time.

The Super Bowl is an American tradition, like heart disease. You need not know anything about football to enjoy it. I know very little about football, and I intend to write a whole column about it and get paid for it.

First, let’s talk about the word “football.” In most nations, when people say “football,” they mean “soccer,” which is a completely different game in which smallish persons whiz about on a field while the spectators beat each other up and eventually overthrow the government. I don’t know why the other nations call soccer “football,” but I suspect it has something to do with the metric system and I say the hell with it.

Modern American football was invented by college students. This should surprise nobody. There are no depths of idiocy to which college students will not sink. You’re always reading about them in the newspapers:

FORT STUCCO, TEXAS—Members of Beta Beta Zoot Fraternity here at Dunderson State Cultural Astronomical and Aeronautical Technical College are attempting to raise money for charity and get their names in the Guinness Book of World Records by setting a record for squatting around in the dirt drinking beer. They have been at it for eight days now, or possibly longer; a spokesbrother for the group said the Beta Betas spend a fair amount of time squatting in the dirt drinking beer anyway, so nobody knows for sure when they started doing it for charity. “We just thought, you know, we do something, you know, to make the world a better place and whatnot,” he said. “We’re gonna give the money to charity if we get any money and can find a charity or something to give the money to, if we get any money.” The spokesbrother said the rest of the student body has supported the effort by not driving cars over any of the brothers.

Anyway, the first modern intercollegiate American football game was played in 1869 between Rutgers and Princeton, two schools which are located in New Jersey, which should also surprise nobody. Rutgers won that game, and Princeton won the rematch a week later, but both schools were barred from postseason bowl competition because of recruiting violations.

Over the next hundred years or so football saw a great many major innovations and refinements that are too boring to even think about. Along the way professional football came into being so the largest and most violent college players would have a way to earn money other than simply demanding it from innocent civilians.

Today the National Football League has several dozen teams, which play games starting in about August and running right through to January. This presents many scheduling problems, because some of the teams are in warm places where everybody wants to play, and some are in cold places where nobody wants to play. Along about December you’ll have four or five teams showing up to play the Miami Dolphins and none showing up to play the Minnesota Vikings. So what happens is Dolphins end up fielding eleven men who get the stuffing knocked out of them by fifty-five opponents, while the Vikings win by scores of 12,324 to nothing. This is called the “home field advantage.”

At the end of the season, the teams with the fewest major injuries meet in the Super Bowl. By this time, of course, the players can barely walk, let alone run around and knock each other down, so the Super Bowl is usually pretty awful. To get people to watch, league officials try to turn it in to a Major Spectacle, along the lines of the fall of the Roman Empire. I remember one year, during the Nixon administration, when they had Air Force jet fighters fly over the stadium during the national anthem. I believe that was also the year that George Allen, one of the coaches, actually had his players run a play suggested by Nixon. In Nixon’s play, the quarterback gets the ball, then, when the other team’s linemen are about to jump on him, claims that he doesn’t have the ball, in fact has never had the ball, and implies that several of his teammates may have the ball, but because of National Security they can’t talk about it.

But back to the jets. The trouble with having jets fly over the stadium during the national anthem is that next year people expect something even more spectacular, like having the jets shoot down the Goodyear Blimp. I am not endorsing this idea, you understand. I’m just explaining football.

You need a way to defend yourself, because there is a lot of violence these days. For example, recently a motorist drove into one of the bushes on my property in a violent manner. if I had had a gun, I could have gone out and defended the bush, but as it was I had to stand there helplessly, unarmed, while the motorist offered to replace it. I turned down the offer because I hate my bushes, which spend their days lunging out and scratching at me when I mow the lawn. I periodically go out with my chain saw and tame them down to the size of poinsettias, but that just angers them, and within days they are back, bigger and more hostile than before. To be honest, I wouldn’t be bothered in the least if motorists lobbed grenades at them as they drove by. But that is not the point. The point is that we all need some way to defend ourselves.

The main reason violence is increasing, of course, is television. At one time, all the violence was on television and the streets were safe, because everybody was home watching it. You had shows like

“Starsky and Hutch,” where you didn’t dare go to the bathroom for fear you would miss some violence. Starsky and Hutch were police officers who believed that the only way to stop a crime—robbery, jaywalking, tax evasion—was to drive their car very fast through a populated area while shooting their guns out the window. They were very effective, largely because people refused to go out on the street for fear of being run over and shot.

But these days they’re not allowed to show violence on television except on Saturday-morning cartoon shows for children aged five and under. The rest of us are stuck with shows like “Donahue” and “Dallas,” in which people drone on endlessly about sex but never actually do anything on the screen. After watching these shows for a few hours, viewers tend to get bored and go out on the street and commit acts of violence.

Another reason violence is increasing is electronic arcade games. Arcade games cause violence because they encourage teenagers to shoot at alien beings who are trying to destroy the Earth. The teenagers are getting very good at this. A skilled teenager can defend the entire planet for a quarter; in contrast, the United States government spends roughly $100 billion just to defend the Western Europeans, all of whom hate us. The problem is that the government can get all the dollars it wants merely by threatening to throw taxpayers in jail, whereas the teenagers must get their quarters by badgering their parents. Eventually the parents get irritated, especially if they have been watching television, and this leads to violence.