Footbal Injustice - Bring it back

In the early days of football, H-shaped goalposts were planted at the front of the end zone, four fixed obstacles within the field of play. There they remained until 1927, when overseers of the National Football League had a notion – move the goalposts outside the end zone, where fewer players would slam into them.

In 1932, however, goalposts were for some mysterious reason moved back to the goal line, where they remained until 1974 as hazards to the players and an impediment to red zone scoring. To gauge how much human progress can be made in roughly that amount of time, consider that in 1926, Robert Goddard launched the first liquid fueled rocket. In 1969 – five years sooner than it took the NFL to return goalposts to the back of the end zone – human beings walked on the Moon.

Like their predecessors, the people who run the NFL today aren’t exactly rocket scientists, yet the league remains an invulnerable juggernaut of ratings and revenues. Somehow, everything turns out gold for the NFL brain trust, even their missteps, which usually end up having more entertainment value than their considered efforts to improve the game.

For years, I wondered why I was finding pro football progressively less enjoyable than I used to. As this season began, I found myself fondly remembering last season’s referees’ strike, and the hue and cry it caused. Say what you will about the strike (and it was a debacle caused by the NFL front office), it restored to prominence a historic element of the game that the league has tried hard to eliminate – injustice created by human shortcomings.

Let’s face facts about football. For starters, most games are uneventful contests between teams that are either mismatched or are both not very good. Moreover, the live action on field comprises just 14 minutes or so of a 3-hour broadcast. Now consider football as a purely visual experience. While the highlighted excerpts of long passes, big hits, and breakaway runs are as visually compelling as vibrant cinema, about 90 percent of the 14 minutes of live action consists of images of extremely large men running a few steps and falling to the ground. Put in cinematic terms, it would be as if The Godfather consisted of Sonny Corleone’s assassination at the toll booths and 2 hours and 50 minutes of Clemenza, Luca Brasi, and Captain McCluskey wrestling in shiny pajamas.

How to make this feast for the eyes more compelling? In 1999, the NFL’s mandarins implemented instant replay. Ever since, any time something the slightest bit compellingly contestable occurs, the momentum of the game comes to a standstill while the cameras focus in on a middle aged man watching television. We in the audience then spend several minutes watching the referee ascertain what only the dimmest among us have not already figured out from the replays we’ve been shown. And then we cheer or boo the referee’s TV watching prowess.

Why wouldn’t it be better to go back to the old ways and let the refs make a call that we all have to live with, right or wrong? Excitement is what football sells. Injustice is exciting. Watching referees watching TV is not.

I know how great football can be – I was in the Orange Bowl for the classic Dolphins/Chargers playoff contest in 1982, supreme exhilaration ending in heartbreak for the home crowd. Yet my second favorite football memory is of injustice, specifically of the 1978 playoff game between the Oakland Raiders and Denver Broncos. Its turning point was described succinctly by Bill Williamson:

In the AFC championship game on Jan. 1, 1978, [Rob] Lytle, a tough running back with a nose for the end zone, fumbled at the 2 and Denver scored on the drive, giving Denver a 14-3 lead in the third quarter.

The problem was that television replays (these were the days long before NFL challenges) showed that Oakland safety Jack Tatum forced a fumble in a mid-air collision before Lytle scored. Oakland nose tackle Mike McCoy scooped up the ball and was bringing the ball back for an easy score.

But it didn’t count. Lytle's touchdown did and Denver won 20-17, advancing to the Super Bowl against Dallas.

I was watching the game at my boyhood home in Miami Beach. It was winter, and all the neighbors’ windows were open. Behind us lived the Kaufmans. Patriarch Howard was a coarse, opinionated, and contrarian local political gadfly, whose bullheaded and palpably otiose efforts to mold his daughter into the next Chrissie Evert on the local public tennis courts constituted a prolonged public demonstration of child cruelty.

Kaufman was a passionate fan of the Oakland Raiders. Today’s Raiders home games seem like nothing so much as Halloween at the penitentiary, but back in the 70s, the team had more of a Brown Shirt appeal – a thin veneer of discipline, a thick threat of spontaneous thuggery.

Which evidently appealed to Kaufman. He lived in South Florida at the height of the Miami Dolphins’ Don Shula era successes and then in their bitter aftermath, when the Super Bowl teams’ core players jumped ship for the World Football League. We Floridians didn’t much care for the Silver and Black.

            When the football was jarred from Lytle’s grip during that championship game, I remember hearing a mounting cry from over the hedges. “Fumble! Yes! FUM-BLE!!,” Kaufman screamed. “FUMMMMMMMBL…wuhhhh? What? What? WHAAAAAAAAAT!” A few seconds of silence as Kaufman took in the momentousness of what had just happened to his Raiders, and then: “F%*^&*#@^*&^*^$#^%! F&(&(*#@$#$%! NO! YOU CAN’T! YOU CAN’T! You mnnn….gmm…fnnf…..nnnnnn….

            “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!”

            It was the most satisfying schadenfreude I have ever experienced, because Kaufman’s anguish added not a droplet of pain to the ocean of genuine human misery. Had I witnessed Kaufman getting popped in the face by one of his daughter’s forehand returns, sure I would have enjoyed it, but would also have felt a little small. Not so with the non-fumble. In a manner that did not violate my humanitarian principles, I was able to think: “[Expletive] you, Kaufman, you and your [expletiving] Oakland Raiders.”

            The supreme pleasure of such moments is precisely what has been lost in the effort to make everything fair. If there had been instant replay in 1978, the fumble call would have been reversed and I would remember nothing of the game or of that day. What I remember 35 years later is that I had fun. Personally, I don’t recall a thing about last year’s AFC championship, save that the Broncos won.

As do films, plays, and literature, sports offer an arena in which we can choose a hero and enjoy his successes, defeats, and even the injustices that befall him. Why? Because we are willing to suspend disbelief and immerse ourselves in the made up logic of an alternate world that can affect no genuine harm on any of the things that we hold dear. By trying to make sports fair by eliminating human error – at the cost of imposing boredom upon us – the powers that be have acted in the spirit of Nahum Tate, a 17^th Century writer whose claim to fame was rewriting Shakespeare’s King Lear so that it ends happily. We recognize Tate’s impulse as misguided – why not official review?

So try paying attention to some of the calls affected by official review. Maybe some of the few bad calls (the refs usually get it right) will go against your team. Maybe some will go in its favor. I’m guessing things will balance out, as historically they seem to. Old timers like me might remember, for example, the Pete Banaszak “fumble” that won the Raiders a game the season after the Lytle non-fumble.

Then consider the entertainment value of meaningless outrage – both your own and others’ – as opposed to the egalitarian bureaucratic soul suck of watching referees watching TV week after week.  I believe injustice, injustice shall you pursue.