#248： Why Football Matters
Episode Stats
Summary
In this episode, Brett McKay talks with Mark Edmondson, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, about his new book, "Why Football Matters: My Education in the Game." In the episode, Mark talks about his experience playing high school football and the lessons he learned about character, courage, loss, and manliness he picked up from the game.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. So football
00:00:18.980
is often used as a metaphor for life. What is it about football that makes it so adept
00:00:24.900
providing lessons on living? And what specific lessons can we glean from the sport? And are
00:00:29.800
those lessons worth the risk of physical injury that come with playing the game? Well, my
00:00:34.580
guest today takes a stab at answering these questions in his book, Why Football Matters,
00:00:38.520
My Education in the Game. His name is Mark Edmondson and he's a professor of English at the University
00:00:42.740
of Virginia. I had Mark on the show at the beginning of the year to talk about his fantastic
00:00:46.160
book, Self and Soul. If you haven't checked that out, listen to it. Today on the show,
00:00:50.360
Mark and I discuss his experience playing high school football and the lessons of character,
00:00:54.720
courage, loss, and manliness that he picked up from the game. And besides the upsides of
00:00:59.300
football, Mark also shares the negative lessons football can teach young men. If you played
00:01:04.540
football in high school like I did, you'll definitely resonate with this episode, but
00:01:07.880
it'll also be of interest to anyone who has a son who plays or simply enjoys watching the
00:01:11.980
game. After the show's over, make sure to check out the show notes at aom.is slash why football
00:01:17.180
matters for links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.
00:01:30.120
So we had you on the show back in January to talk about your book, Self and Soul, and
00:01:37.820
got a lot of great feedback on that episode. People loved it. And today I want to bring you
00:01:42.560
back to talk about the first book that I read of yours that really turned me on to your writing.
00:01:46.780
It's called Why Football Matters. As someone who played football in middle school and high
00:01:52.260
school, I just resonated with what you wrote resonated with me a lot. And I'm sure a lot
00:01:58.140
of people who played football in high school or middle school will probably resonate with
00:02:02.680
what we talk about today. So let's talk about this. It's about your lessons you've learned
00:02:08.620
from football when you played back in high school.
00:02:11.120
But let's talk about your experience of football. What was your first contact with the game?
00:02:17.960
My first contact with the game was watching the New York football giants on a Sunday afternoon
00:02:23.760
with my dad. And my dad was a rabid fan. And there was a preliminary before the game. He would get
00:02:32.700
himself all set up with his cigarettes and his chair and his hasick. And then there was his chocolate
00:02:37.920
bar that had to be in the right place. And then the music would come on and he would be absolutely
00:02:42.660
glued and wrapped, especially if the Giants were playing against the Cleveland Browns.
00:02:46.920
And he could see Jim Brown. And my father was a very agitated person. He was always on the go.
00:02:52.520
He worked two jobs, two jobs as a short order cook, 16 hours a day sometimes. And he had a tremendous
00:02:58.560
amount of energy. And I think the only time I ever really saw him stabilize was in front of the TV
00:03:03.720
watching football. And so that was a time for me to get next to him and listen to him talk and maybe
00:03:08.920
ask him a question or two and get a little closer to him than I've been.
00:03:12.820
Yeah. And did your dad probably impart some lessons about manliness or being a man while you're watching
00:03:19.460
football, while watching Jim Brown or watching the Giants?
00:03:24.180
Yes, yes. You know, Jim Brown was somebody who had been given spectacular gifts by the gods.
00:03:29.660
And he had nourished those gifts and developed them. And he had become just the greatest football
00:03:35.620
player and maybe the greatest athlete who ever lived. I think the case can still be made.
00:03:40.340
So it was the example of somebody who had extraordinary gifts. My father was a little more
00:03:43.740
interested in Y.A. Tittle, who I understand just celebrated maybe his 91st birthday, one of the
00:03:49.280
two oldest people alive in the Football Hall of Fame. My father loved Y.A. Tittle, partly because
00:03:56.780
Tittle looked like somebody who really didn't have much natural ability. And he probably didn't.
00:04:03.360
And yet he had taken what he had and developed every single thing that he had to make himself
00:04:08.020
not just a good, but really an extremely good football player. He was nothing like Jim Brown.
00:04:13.300
But he was very good indeed. And I think that was my father's main kind of drift, the undercurrent of
00:04:19.500
his talk there. He was very interested in people who had not perfect skills or perfect
00:04:25.360
capacities, but nonetheless took what they had and used every single ounce of it to achieve
00:04:31.620
Okay. I think we can take that. We'll talk about this later. I think that's a good segue
00:04:35.800
or connection to your Hector and Achilles dichotomy you set up later on when you talk about courage
00:04:43.260
and football. But before we get there, so you watched the game with your dad and it was a way
00:04:50.060
for you to connect with your father. But you were this fat, asthmatic kid, wore glasses, you know,
00:04:56.520
the stereotypical non-jock. Yet in high school, I think you were a junior, you decided to go out for
00:05:01.500
the football team. What drove you to do that? Were you just wanting to have some fun, hang out with
00:05:06.900
friends, or did you have some larger existential reasons why you wanted to play?
00:05:11.140
If I did have those reasons, and I think I did, they probably weren't available to me consciously.
00:05:17.580
You know, I knew that my life was kind of flying off in every direction. Our home life was tough.
00:05:23.660
My sister had been very sick and she had died at the age of seven. It was really dubious whether my
00:05:29.340
family was going to stay together or not. It was really because of my mother's amazing
00:05:34.320
resilience that we did. And I was looking for some form of stability. I couldn't find it in
00:05:40.840
school because I had some academic talent, but I hated the classes. So I couldn't find it there.
00:05:46.400
I decided I would give football a shot. I'd always liked it down the park and I was surprisingly not
00:05:51.300
too bad for a fat kid with glasses and asthma. And so I spent the summer before that junior year
00:05:58.120
trying to get in shape a little bit. And I got a little stronger and a little faster. And I ended up
00:06:03.180
going up, I ended up going out for the team and making it, not by much, but make it, I did. And
00:06:10.140
in a lot of ways it changed my life and for the most part made it better.
00:06:17.640
I played guard, the glamour position and linebacker, or as I was called, because I played without my
00:06:25.080
Blindbacker. All right. Okay. I was a center in my playing days.
00:06:31.540
That's the tough guy. Yeah. No, here's the thing. I couldn't long snap. I couldn't do shotgun snap.
00:06:41.520
Uh-huh. You also have to know what the count is when it actually gets hiked, which not everybody
00:06:46.460
I could do that. I could do that, but I couldn't do shotgun snap.
00:06:49.020
All right. Um, so yeah, your, your book is about these lessons that you learned from playing
00:06:54.360
football and how you just said, you know, it really did improve your life, but at the same
00:06:58.280
time there, you're sort of the way you write it on the book, you're, you're kind of ambivalent
00:07:02.280
about the lessons you, um, you got from football. Uh, why is that? Why, why were you sort of
00:07:08.880
hesitant to be, you know, gush completely about how amazing football was? What is it about the
00:07:13.020
sport or your experience with it? It made you sort of, well, yeah, it's good, but there's
00:07:19.600
Yeah, I did. I mean, uh, overall, especially high school football, I am a great defender
00:07:25.180
of and appreciator, uh, of, um, and I think that some of the coaches and some of the players
00:07:31.080
who are involved with that game are just terrific teachers and terrific comrades and you, you
00:07:35.180
can't beat it. Um, but, um, you know, just talking about a virtue like character and character
00:07:41.320
is a great virtue and there are a lot of ways to define character, but just in a shorthand
00:07:44.840
way, I said, you know, character is the ability to get up every day and do pretty much a sequence
00:07:50.780
of very positive things that are helping you very gradually to grow. Uh, and football was
00:07:55.260
very good at teaching you that, you know, you, you learned how to block, you learned how
00:07:59.400
to tackle. Every day you learned a little more technique. Every day you got a little stronger
00:08:03.280
and more determined and you learned more and eventually you became a really quite a, quite
00:08:07.700
a better player. But the downside of that, and you can transfer that over into all kinds
00:08:12.040
of activities, right? You know, if you're a businessman, a building a business, if you're
00:08:15.780
a writer, building a book, if you're, uh, somebody with a website building up its resonance in
00:08:20.660
the world, you know, one little step at a time is often the way that it works. That's
00:08:24.180
fantastic. But, um, there's also a kind of lockstep automaton like quality to a football
00:08:31.780
character. You know, the, you're always doing what the coach says. You're always filling
00:08:36.060
out, you're always doing your job as Bill Belichick says. It's not a lot of improvisation,
00:08:40.060
especially if you're the guard. And, uh, and so there was this kind of a sense of, you
00:08:45.360
know, character is great, but too much character annuls, and I like this little pairing here,
00:08:49.700
annuls personality sometimes and, and flair and individuality. Fortunately, we had some
00:08:54.080
real individualists on our team who couldn't be, um, uh, much daunted by the robotic quality
00:08:59.120
of football, but they were mostly defensive backs and they were much more, um, glamorous
00:09:02.620
guys than we linemen, uh, were. But, you know, character has its downside. Courage has its
00:09:07.920
downside. It's all kinds of, all kinds of things came up as I was thinking about the
00:09:11.620
game. Right. And it's going back to this idea of character, um, sort of stick-to-tiveness
00:09:16.200
and, um, how has it played out in your life? I mean, you're a college professor now, you
00:09:21.760
write books. How is the character that you developed while playing high school football
00:09:27.140
helped you and how has it hurt you? I mean, have you ever caught yourself thinking, boy,
00:09:34.840
It's been good. I, I've, you know, I had some really good educational chances after I
00:09:39.100
left, um, uh, after I left high school, I went to a very, uh, creatively oriented college,
00:09:45.500
Bennington College, and I went to a graduate school in English that was full of very imaginative
00:09:50.420
people, you know, Harold Bloom and Jeffrey Hartman. I went to Yale. And so that got, I got a chance
00:09:55.820
to stimulate the creative side of me, such, such that it is, it's not what, what other
00:10:00.200
people may, may have. Um, but I also spent a lot of time, uh, since I was an assistant
00:10:05.240
professor here at Virginia writing books. And there's something of book writing that is,
00:10:09.780
you know, it depends on character and it builds character. You just get out there and do the
00:10:13.680
same darn thing every day with a little bit of a difference. And you draft it again and
00:10:17.760
again and again, and you read your criticisms of it, uh, read criticisms of it to come to you
00:10:21.860
and you assimilate them and you move forward slowly. So there's a combination of
00:10:25.240
inspiration. You got to have a good idea that keeps you jazzed, but you also have to have the
00:10:29.180
everyday work a day virtues that football helped instill. And I think they, they, it came from
00:10:34.000
there. Um, also there's the fact that, um, that, um, I wasn't very good at football. The coaches
00:10:39.200
didn't care that much whether I got better or not. I just did. Um, so I learned how to work without
00:10:44.240
an audience or appreciation or without, you know, getting into the game very much on Saturday and
00:10:48.400
starring. I just learned how to work ahead, um, with nobody particularly looking on or cheering,
00:10:53.260
which is really good for a writer. Well, let's talk about this. I mean, so yeah,
00:10:56.860
you learned about character, but let's get back to a little, go a little meta here. I mean,
00:11:00.240
what is it about football, the game of football that makes it so adept at providing life lessons,
00:11:06.320
right? Like it's what, it's like the go-to sports analogy for just life. And it's hard to do that
00:11:11.580
with baseball. It's hard to do that. You know, you can do with basketball sometimes, uh, maybe
00:11:16.100
sprinting is a good one. Like, you know, Olympic spring, but like football just seems like it's
00:11:20.820
perfect for life lessons. What is it about the sport you think? Well, as you probably know,
00:11:26.900
as a fellow offensive lineman, um, at least in the high school level and the small college level,
00:11:31.900
it's not all about talent, right? It's about effort. And it, I think it's a sport where
00:11:36.840
you can make yourself a whole lot better, um, uh, by effort than almost any other sport I could
00:11:42.660
think of. It's real hard to, to hit a major league curve ball. If you don't have the eyes and
00:11:48.100
the hands fart, right? It's real hard to, to drop your time by a second in the a hundred meter dash
00:11:54.080
no matter what, right? But you can get to be a pretty darn good lineman, um, just through desire
00:12:00.400
and through commitment. And, um, you, uh, you, so that's a template that's available to lots and
00:12:05.820
lots of guys. Whereas some other sports, they exclude you just because of your relative lack
00:12:11.020
of talent. If you don't have the talent to be the wide receiver or the quarterback, there's still
00:12:14.320
probably room for you somewhere in the interior line, even if it's on the third string. And so
00:12:19.400
you get this chance to, to, uh, to educate yourself. And it's also a sport where effort
00:12:24.220
really does pay off. I mean, I played tennis before I could play tennis day after day, year
00:12:29.060
after year, and I would get no better. Um, because my, the fundamental talent isn't there, but football,
00:12:34.000
I could get better even if the coaches didn't see it. Right. And I think another aspect of football
00:12:38.840
is there's a lot of luck involved. Like there's things that just like a fumble happens,
00:12:42.520
you get a bad call and like, that's like life. Things just happen that you have no control over
00:12:47.220
and you have to, you have to deal with it. You're right. There's that beautiful tension
00:12:52.660
in football between the absolutely outrageously unexpected thing that just sort of happens,
00:12:58.040
the tip or the interception or the fumble. And then the fact that in order to succeed,
00:13:02.940
you also have to grind it out. Right. So the grinding out is part of the game, but the exuberant
00:13:07.620
moment is part of the game too. It makes it really exciting to watch. And it also, as you say,
00:13:11.160
as you suggest, it teaches you that like bad stuff happens. Right. And you just got to kind
00:13:16.320
of walk away from it and see if you can't recoup the next play. Right. Uh, so you talked about,
00:13:21.020
um, how you learn about character, developing character, but you also talk about how football
00:13:25.000
can teach courage. Um, so what kind of courage are we talking about here? Because this is a,
00:13:30.660
you know, there's all sorts of courage. There's moral courage, martial courage, uh, intellectual
00:13:37.020
courage. Right. I'm thinking about physical courage and, uh, I'm thinking about the ability,
00:13:42.760
uh, which I didn't have when I started, uh, to stick my head and shoulder in and make a tackle.
00:13:47.500
Um, it's just a very, it's counterintuitive. As they say, you don't really want to do that. If
00:13:52.300
you're somebody who is as kind of self-protective and somewhat timid as, uh, as I was. And I figured
00:13:58.640
out how to do that. I figured out how to do that, but it wasn't easy. The way I figured out how to do
00:14:02.800
it was that I would work myself up into a rage by thinking about different things that had made
00:14:07.280
me really angry or humiliated me a lot. Uh, and then I was kind of a beast out there and I was
00:14:11.660
really throwing myself here and there. Um, and that's, you know, that's one form of courage.
00:14:16.340
I don't know if that's what, um, Lawrence Taylor was doing when he was, uh, you know, running around
00:14:20.520
the line for the giants. I don't know if that's what Jim Brown was doing. I think maybe it was in
00:14:24.580
some measure, but that's what I was doing. And it's great. All right. But the problem with that
00:14:30.080
is that you have, as it were, let the beast out of the cage and the beast may come out
00:14:34.520
of the cage some other time when you don't really need it to. And when you're not in
00:14:37.280
the confines of the football field or in a football field, you may do something that
00:14:40.100
you eventually come to regret. So as I said in the book, you know, even though I feel
00:14:45.980
that I have a pretty good, um, uh, pretty good rap on my, um, uh, the aggressive side
00:14:51.480
that football stimulated in me, I'm still for, you know, a middle-aged or now early old
00:14:57.020
stage bourgeois guy, um, might be more likely than the others to get really too mad at somebody
00:15:02.740
and lose it. Um, I don't think I'm going to pop anybody in the nose anymore, but that's
00:15:06.520
partly because my shoulder hurts from playing basketball. So there is, there is that ambivalence
00:15:10.880
about football. There's a good thing, but then there's that also that dark side you have to
00:15:15.360
kind of keep your eye on. Yeah. But I think, you know, almost all constructive activities
00:15:18.800
have that, right? I mean, I did a PhD. It was great. I loved it. Learned a lot. Delightful.
00:15:24.700
Um, but, um, there are occupational hazards to that. You know, you, uh, you, you might tend to
00:15:31.500
dominate the dinner table with your own boring disquisitions on and on and on, or you might think
00:15:35.780
you know it all and know it all isn't what you really are. So I think every virtue you acquire
00:15:40.140
has an underside. It's just a matter of kind of looking into them and seeing what they might be.
00:15:43.940
I think the football virtues are pretty dramatic and the football risks are pretty dramatic too,
00:15:48.360
especially as you move forward in the game into big time college or big time pro.
00:15:52.020
Yeah. Well, in your chapter about courage, you, you talk about two models of courage. Um,
00:15:58.320
Homer or Hector, not Homer, Hector and Achilles. Um, Hector and Achilles, right? Yeah. What's the
00:16:03.820
difference between the two? Well, Achilles is the greatest of the Greek warriors and he is a natural
00:16:09.840
warrior, right? Um, he is unbeatable, uh, on the field. And, uh, the story about Achilles is that if he,
00:16:17.240
um, uh, if you stand to fight him, he'll cut you down. If you run from him, he will catch you.
00:16:22.800
There's just, there's simply nothing that you can do. When he has this dispute at the beginning
00:16:27.320
with Lord Agamemnon, who's the marshal of the armies about the slave girl. Um, there's this sense
00:16:32.440
that in a moment, in a moment, Achilles could destroy Agamemnon, formidable as he is, and the
00:16:37.660
gods intervene. They don't want that to, uh, to happen. So he's a natural warrior and everything
00:16:42.880
comes easily, uh, to him. Hector, on the other hand, it says at one point, I had to learn in order
00:16:49.320
to be a soldier. I had to learn to be a fighter. He's much more of a politician, I think, and a kind
00:16:54.240
and judicious one at that. He's the only one aside from Priam and Troy who's kindly to Helen, who's
00:17:00.320
in terrible stress, distress when she's there. And so, uh, Hector is the gentleman fighter and he's the
00:17:07.200
one who knows how to turn it on and turn it off. When Achilles is enraged at Hector for Hector's
00:17:12.520
murder of Patroclus, Achilles simply goes mad, right? Achilles simply goes mad. Um, you know,
00:17:18.420
you can go mad out there on the football field, but you're taking risks, not only on the football
00:17:22.080
field, but then later on in life. Um, maybe it's not an accident that Jim Brown, uh, got into
00:17:29.000
plenty of trouble and also got, got plenty of, uh, plenty of positive notice after he left football,
00:17:34.940
chiefly for spousal abuse, right? Um, Lawrence Taylor perennially in trouble, one of the greatest
00:17:40.220
linebackers, one of my favorite football players, but perennially in trouble for one thing. And
00:17:44.380
another, a Hector like player, I don't know, Steve Young, maybe. I don't think Steve Young
00:17:48.940
is going to get into a whole lot of trouble tomorrow. Um, he's a competitive guy and a tough
00:17:52.620
guy, but he knew how to turn it on and turn it off. And he's got quite a sense of humor about
00:17:56.080
himself and about what he achieved. Jim Brown has many magnificent qualities, but sense of humor,
00:18:00.260
I don't think is salient among, uh, them. Uh, but of course the moral of the story
00:18:04.860
in part is that when Hector and Achilles fight in, uh, in Homer, uh, uh, Hector loses. And in fact,
00:18:10.220
he's humiliated by Achilles and chases him around the walls of Troy and then butchers him and drags
00:18:14.580
him around behind his, uh, his chariot. So maybe the, uh, the, the wild man has the advantage over
00:18:20.220
the more civilized warrior. And that makes things pretty problematic. It seems to me.
00:18:24.380
Right. And you, you talk about Hector and Achilles in Self and Soul as well.
00:18:33.460
Right. No, it was, it's a great analogy. I love it. And particularly, I think it's a good
00:18:36.720
analogy for manliness too. Um, some, some people are just born with those, like they're born virile.
00:18:46.660
Yeah. And I think the learners are probably more admirable people and the sorts of people you want
00:18:51.380
around, except that, I don't know when it's time to go, uh, take care of Osama bin Laden. I don't
00:18:57.520
know if you want Hector going, I think you might want Achilles and a few more guys like him.
00:19:03.060
Natural talent has the rage that he can't turn off. Um, so, okay, there's courage. Football
00:19:10.020
teaches us about loss. You have that in there. So this was very pertinent to you because at
00:19:16.640
the time you, as you said earlier, you lost a sister. Um, she was only seven to a sickness.
00:19:20.780
How did football and like losing in football, how did that help you deal with the loss of
00:19:26.160
your sister? Um, it, it gave me a sense of, um, uh, you know, like football is a theater.
00:19:34.120
And one of the lines in the book that I actually kind of like is that one of the reasons football
00:19:37.960
matters a lot is because it doesn't matter much at all, but it's just a game. And yet you
00:19:42.760
get to work out really strong kinds of emotional dramas on a football field. And I remember
00:19:50.100
vividly the first time, uh, we lost when I was a, uh, a junior, uh, we had a 12 game
00:19:55.220
winning streak and we lost to Somerville. They beat us up horribly. And, uh, the whole bus
00:20:00.680
is full of people crying and weeping and bemoaning themselves. And they were just a disaster area.
00:20:05.380
And, um, I was one of them. And, uh, then we sort of continued on in that vein and the coach
00:20:11.720
at a certain point said, enough, stop it. Here's what you did wrong last week. Now get to work on
00:20:17.280
these things. Now learn how to develop. So what he, he basically showed us was that, you know,
00:20:22.720
mourning for a game and then also mourning in life. So it's different in many ways, um, requires a
00:20:29.040
certain amount of, uh, giving into the thing. I mean, we really were sad. It was a little bit
00:20:33.980
theatrical. Um, and then also holding up and, uh, going back to work and doing what you, uh,
00:20:39.840
doing what you can. My sister had been deceased for quite a while then, but I did see how, um,
00:20:45.800
it did help me appreciate my mother who had, um, mourned very fiercely for Barbara. And, but then
00:20:51.560
after that was done, after that was done, she pulled herself back up because she would have been,
00:20:56.960
and as part of her was ready to mourn forever, just as we were on a smaller, uh, scale after we lost
00:21:02.260
to some of them, she pulled herself back up again. She put herself together and she began
00:21:06.280
serving dinners and lunches and breakfasts and washing the clothes and doing the things that a
00:21:11.040
fifties and sixties mom was, uh, was needing to do. And that we, my brother and I, and my father
00:21:15.920
desperately needed for her to do during those, uh, uh, during those days. So she kind of,
00:21:21.160
she brought her mourning to a certain point. She's wild with grief and then she stopped it.
00:21:25.260
Um, and, uh, that was a more profound lesson than the one I found in the football field.
00:21:29.220
But, you know, kids don't always learn from the parents immediately. Sometimes it takes,
00:21:33.900
you know, five, 10, 20 years. Well, that's a good question. I mean,
00:21:36.840
are these lessons you've gotten from football? I mean, were you aware of them when you were a kid
00:21:41.040
or is this you looking back as an older man? There's a, uh, there's a great, uh, word that
00:21:48.400
Freud has, noctraglokite. Noctraglokite means reasoning with a later reason. Uh, and I ask my
00:21:54.200
students all the time to look back into their lives and what they've done and to create the,
00:21:59.260
uh, reprise of that experience with words, uh, so that they can see who they are and how they got
00:22:05.200
there. Um, so a lot of it was, um, looking back with, um, uh, on, uh, you know, with an adult's
00:22:12.400
kind of insight, if insight it was, and, uh, seeing what it was that I'd actually learned there.
00:22:17.420
But for instance, I may have learned a certain amount of character in football. I may have applied
00:22:22.500
that to the writing of my dissertation and the writing of, uh, of books and maybe some other
00:22:26.360
things too. Um, and I wasn't able to articulate it at the time. I wouldn't have been able to
00:22:31.200
articulate at the time, but I was glad to, uh, afterwards. And I don't think the process is
00:22:35.300
ever quite done until you've tried to say what it is you have learned and try to evaluate it and
00:22:40.920
also try to evaluate its downside as we were just talking about. Um, so you, you mentioned earlier
00:22:45.000
before you went out for the team, you, uh, try to get in shape, you started working out and then,
00:22:49.320
uh, between your junior and senior year, you got really in to physical training. You said you,
00:22:53.700
you, you became the supplements guy. Like you got all the supplements to gain weight, to get,
00:22:57.880
you know, the whey protein. I did. Um, I did. Yeah. And I think I, I did that too. Uh, when I was,
00:23:04.040
I got really, I got really into it cause I wanted to be the best I could be. Um, yeah, but I'm curious,
00:23:10.100
what did that, your football training going back to your book, you know, like the self and soul,
00:23:17.400
what did football training teach you about training the mind and the soul, the sort of
00:23:21.960
physical visceral training teach you about this more abstract ethereal, ethereal aspect of our
00:23:26.640
lives? Well, it, it, it taught me that the development of the mind, for instance, is whole
00:23:33.100
lot like the development of the body, though people don't say so. Um, and when I talk to athletes about
00:23:37.900
becoming a better students, I say, you, you, you're much further alone than you think you are.
00:23:43.300
Everything you did as a swimmer or a hockey player, a football player, if you practiced a lot and if
00:23:48.280
you played hard, you already have the template in place for learning. It's just that people have
00:23:52.780
probably told you that you're not as good at learning as you are at sports, but it doesn't
00:23:57.220
matter in a certain way. You are who you are and you need to make gains in the intellectual field,
00:24:02.540
just as somebody like me who doesn't have much by way of athletic aptitude needed to make gains in
00:24:06.560
the physical field. So those two things I think are very close together and they're probably a little
00:24:11.560
bit underappreciated, the symbiosis between them. If you've done one, you can probably go off and do
00:24:16.120
the other. Right. I mean, there's no, there's a reason why, you know, Aristotle, I feel like the
00:24:19.320
Greeks and the Romans understood this, you know, they make references like, you know, Aristotle,
00:24:23.700
you know, this, you're training the soul just like a wrestler is training the body.
00:24:28.640
Yeah, absolutely. That's a good point. That's a good point. The Greeks had this concept,
00:24:32.460
I probably will pronounce it wrong, kalokogathia, the good mind and the good body feeding each other
00:24:36.560
and strengthening each other. Yeah. Do you have a chapter about,
00:24:40.500
do you discuss the connection between faith and football? And it is, because I remember when I
00:24:45.720
played high school, I'm in Oklahoma and football is religion. Christianity is big here. You know,
00:24:50.900
before every game we said the Lord's prayer, even the Muslim guy on our team like joined in and said
00:24:56.540
the Lord's prayer with us. Yeah. What do you make of that connection between faith and football? I mean,
00:25:03.100
what does it say about individuals who worship a Jesus who's meek and mild? Yeah. We'll go out
00:25:07.780
and harness their Achilles like rage to physically pummel their opponent on the football field.
00:25:13.300
Well, as you're pointing out, as the book moves forward, it becomes a little bit more a reflection
00:25:18.900
on America through football. And that's kind of the turning point where I start thinking about
00:25:23.060
American religion in relationship to, uh, uh, to the game. And, you know, it's simply a puzzle to me.
00:25:28.880
It's simply as a puzzle, um, that, uh, we have, um, uh, football so much associated with the
00:25:35.220
religion football association with the military makes a hundred percent sense from my point of
00:25:38.540
view. They, they do feed off each other in certain ways, but football association of religion,
00:25:43.320
incredibly strange. I mean, if somebody said, as Camille Paglia, my teacher at Bennington for
00:25:47.700
about an hour, um, said football is my religion. And I know exactly what she means by that.
00:25:52.440
She means that she's a pagan. She likes competition. She's not averse to physical struggle.
00:25:57.100
Um, she looks at things in terms of opposition. She's kind of gladiatorial. That all makes sense.
00:26:03.120
Um, but when somebody says, um, you know, I play football and, um, Jesus is my religion. I say,
00:26:09.100
whoa, that's a little strange. Jesus playing football is like the least violent person imaginable.
00:26:15.420
Um, so it's just very puzzling, but it points to the fact that Judeo-Christianity from some
00:26:20.900
perspectives is based on a little bit of tension to say the least. And that's the tension between the
00:26:25.260
relatively mild and relatively sweet natured, with some exceptions, Jesus, and the, uh, figure that's
00:26:31.660
claimed as his father, who is capable of getting rid of Sodom and Gomorrah in a flash and flooding
00:26:36.840
the whole world and drowning everybody. And so it's a very strange religion. You know, it's got these
00:26:40.900
two sides, the vengeful God on the one side and the forgiving God on the other side. And, uh, we,
00:26:47.740
we live in the midst of this, I'll just call it a tension, not a contradiction. And by looking at
00:26:53.060
football, you see it. I don't know what you do with it after you've seen it, but you see it.
00:26:56.920
Right. And it's kind of interesting about football. So when I, my experience with football were some
00:27:00.220
of my most, I had some of my most like touching kind of compassionate moments in football. Um,
00:27:06.540
yes, which is bizarre. Like, you know, where you really like when you mourn for a team member,
00:27:12.360
or that there's a player on the opposing team that goes down, like you all take a knee and,
00:27:16.560
you know, you feel for the guy and you want to help them out. Um, and also like, you know,
00:27:21.540
there's like a guy in my football team when we were playing that he was, he was, you know,
00:27:25.420
he was slow. Like he was in the special ed classes, but he came out for the team. Um,
00:27:30.080
and he got picked on by everyone else, but like on our football team, like you did not mess with him.
00:27:35.360
Like if we found out someone was messing with this guy, like you would have to deal with,
00:27:39.340
you know, 10, 250 pound linemen. And we like, we protected that guy. Um, which I think
00:27:46.240
is interesting. Like it actually, I was able to tap into sort of my nurturing side because of
00:27:51.400
football. Yeah, no, that's a very good point. There is something a little bit Christian about
00:27:55.140
that, isn't it? I hadn't thought of that. No, it's a band of brothers. There's no doubt about
00:27:58.760
that. And once you are accepted, uh, and have gone through the work and the pain and the strain
00:28:03.420
and the sorrow and the grief together, uh, you are, you are one, you're a family. When I went to my,
00:28:09.400
um, high school reunion must've been my, uh, Oh man, 45th high school reunion. Um, and a lot of
00:28:18.080
people I was delighted to see. It was great. I had a wonderful time, but there's a special place in
00:28:21.920
my heart for the guys I had played football with. And there are at least 10 or 12 of them there.
00:28:25.920
And, um, our pleasure in seeing each other, no matter how different we were now, no matter how
00:28:30.480
little or how much we had sets we had in common was overwhelming. It was overwhelming. It was great.
00:28:34.440
Yeah. Yeah. I haven't, I haven't been able to replicate that experience. Um, well,
00:28:39.100
bide your time, bide your time. Okay. I got a while. I'm only 30. You got a while. I got a while.
00:28:44.340
That's good to know. Um, yeah, well, it's great. Yeah. Um, so we mentioned earlier, uh, you know,
00:28:50.060
your dad kind of taught you about manliness with football. Um, sort of the life of Jim Brown and,
00:28:56.120
uh, Tisdale, Tidal. Uh, yeah. Uh, Tittle. Tittle. Tittle. Excuse me. Why a Tittle. Yeah. Yeah.
00:29:02.720
Uh, but it seems like, you know, we associate football with masculinity, obviously it's very
00:29:06.940
martial, but there's, um, there's a risk to it. That's kind of what makes football appealing.
00:29:12.360
Is that risk connection with football? Is that what makes football so appealing to men that
00:29:16.620
there's this risk factor to it? I think it varies over time. I was watching some clips of
00:29:22.940
high school football near me here in central Virginia the other night on Friday night.
00:29:26.820
And there's some really good football players out there, but they're not hitting each other so
00:29:30.520
hard that they're going to hurt each other very much at all. I mean, they just, you know,
00:29:33.920
they're not strong enough. They're not fast enough. And probably God knows they're not
00:29:37.000
mean enough. Every now and then you'll see a kid in the game who's bound for, um, uh, bound
00:29:41.720
for a college career, maybe even a pro career. And the other players are kind of, whoa, what's
00:29:46.420
coming my way? Um, so there's a kind of, in my favorite game, high school football, this,
00:29:52.460
this hard contact, but the violence is not as emphatic as it becomes when you start
00:29:58.780
to watch high power college football as I do. I live around the corner this, uh, this
00:30:02.440
fall from, uh, the UVA football stadium and especially the pros. I mean, the, the amazing
00:30:07.940
it's, it's, it's, you know, savage beauty, tragic beauty. You see out there, they just
00:30:13.620
whale each other. If you're down on the sidelines and you listen to them hit, it's like the
00:30:17.640
thunder going off. It's some kind of Jovian, uh, experience. Um, and I think people are really
00:30:23.660
having to deal with that in lots and lots of ways culturally. And it's not going to, it's not
00:30:28.240
going to be easy. I don't know how much football is going to be played or how football is going
00:30:31.740
to be played 20 years from now. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's, that brings it, we're having
00:30:35.300
that conversation, um, in our culture right now, whether football should even have a role. I mean,
00:30:39.860
so what are your thoughts? I mean, does football have a role or do the, the risk, the benefits
00:30:44.900
of football outweigh the risk of the sport? Um, well, you know, I'm, uh, as long as the coach
00:30:51.780
isn't crazy and some of them are, um, high school football is fantastic. Love it. Okay.
00:30:55.880
Small college football. Fantastic. Love it. Those guys are good. They play hard, but they're
00:31:00.640
not going to knock each other's spleens off or knock each other's heads off or break each
00:31:03.820
other's spines or anything like that. That's probably just not going to happen. As you move
00:31:08.360
up into big time college and big time pro, you're looking at a level of violence that is really
00:31:15.580
distressing. It seems to me, I still watch it. I feel a certain amount of anxiety about
00:31:19.460
watching it, a certain amount of guilt about watching it. My argument for it happening is the
00:31:23.260
libertarian argument basically, which is that, you know, you get some young guys and they
00:31:28.940
look out into the world and they see that they will trade the prospect of bodily harm
00:31:33.400
or even mental harm for the amazing excitement and camaraderie of the game and the money that's
00:31:39.100
involved and the perks that are involved, the privileges that are involved. And they're
00:31:44.000
willing to make that trade. Are they old enough to make that trade? Well, they're 21 and they
00:31:48.180
could also go off to Iraq or Afghanistan or could have while we were, while we were there.
00:31:52.280
So yes, they're old enough to make that trade. Um, but it still doesn't make me feel completely
00:31:57.740
happy about it. If we only had a small college and, um, uh, you know, uh, high school football
00:32:04.220
in America, I'd be a happier person. I'd go watch those games and all would be well.
00:32:07.860
Right. Again, there's that ambivalence, um, about the sport.
00:32:11.720
Yeah. Well, you know, but then you start really looking into sports and you find out that there
00:32:16.340
is many straight out concussions in soccer as there are in football, people banging into the goalposts.
00:32:22.020
And the hardest I ever got hit in the head in my life was when I tried to head a soccer ball. I
00:32:25.600
decided I'd never do that again. Um, but there are those sub concussive events in football that are
00:32:31.340
really, they build up and they can't be too good for you. They can't be too good for you in the long
00:32:36.240
run. Right. Right. Well, Mark, it's been decades since you played football. Do you miss playing the game?
00:32:44.180
Oh yeah. I mean, if, uh, if there's some way I could get back in there and take a shot, I would,
00:32:50.480
I would be thrilled, but my body would last about one play. Even if the guy across the line was being
00:32:55.560
especially kind to me, the closest I get is pick up basketball, which I'm sort of rehabbing my way
00:33:00.940
back into for what I hope will be one last long run. And that, that has some of the satisfactions of
00:33:06.360
football, but it's different. It is different. Cause I mean, like I remember before the last
00:33:11.320
game football career of my game during our playoffs, a coach told us seniors, like, you know,
00:33:16.280
this could be the last time you step on a field with ads. So play like it. And you know what? He
00:33:22.020
was right. I've, I've never, I've played flag football. I've played touch football. I've done
00:33:26.820
pickup basketball, you know, but flag and touch football aren't really football.
00:33:31.960
Not the same. No, they're not the same. No, that's a big day.
00:33:36.460
Yeah. I mean, what does the finitude, you know, the finitude of football teach us about
00:33:43.960
Well, you know, they say athletes die twice and that you die the last day that you play the
00:33:51.360
game and then you die of course, corporeally sometime later down the line. Um, and yeah,
00:33:58.160
I mean, it does teach you about finitude in a certain way, though. I guess I think that
00:34:03.800
it's always possible to take what you learned in football. And as long as you're not named
00:34:08.160
by the game to bring it over to pickup basketball or to other games that might serve you in middle
00:34:13.020
age, as well as football served you as a young guy, I played pickup basketball with the same
00:34:17.160
guys for 20 years. And, uh, that did more for me, uh, in terms of, you know, social life and
00:34:24.060
friends and mutual understanding between guys continuing on playing football in some
00:34:28.560
semi-pro league could ever possibly have done. So, you know, to everything, there's a season
00:34:32.820
and I was pleased to make that, uh, make that jump in terms of the intensities of football.
00:34:37.160
Well, you know, you're probably not going to find that other places, but I found intensity
00:34:40.920
plus camaraderie plus good intellectual exchange. This particular group was full of, you know,
00:34:45.660
book writers and, um, all kinds and doctors and therapists and all kinds of tremendously
00:34:51.920
interesting people that I never would have gotten to meet had it not been for the basketball
00:34:55.880
game. Okay. So you can look, still look for those opportunities elsewhere. You can, you can,
00:35:00.380
they're, they're different intensities, but they exist. They exist. Well, switch, let's switch gears
00:35:04.640
a bit. Um, you've got a new book out about writing, uh, can you tell us, which I read again, like your
00:35:10.360
other books, fantastic. Um, thank you so much. Can you tell us about what this, what this book is about
00:35:15.680
and like what you're hoping to convey through it? I'm hoping to convey the joy of writing. Uh,
00:35:21.920
why write is about, um, what you can gain by way of intellectual development, uh, rather than just
00:35:27.300
physical, physical or physical intellectual development by way of writing. You know, it teaches
00:35:31.320
you how to, um, uh, argue. It teaches you how to perceive things. It teaches you how to, as it were,
00:35:36.740
make sense. And, uh, it also, it discloses to you aspects of yourself that you never would have
00:35:42.640
known were there, you know? I mean, the third book I wrote was a book about Gothic, right?
00:35:47.000
About scary movies, scary books, stuff that had fascinated me when I was a boy. Did I know I was
00:35:51.660
ever going to write a book about that? No. But once I started writing it, I was obsessed by it.
00:35:56.480
And so a new part of myself grew and a new set of interests grew and it was incredibly exhilarating,
00:36:01.600
uh, to do that. Um, and I think the mind, as I said before, the mind strengthens the way the body
00:36:06.100
does and you can strengthen it through reading. And sometimes reading is, you know, kind of like
00:36:10.740
can be a little bland. Um, you're not really plunging in there or you can strengthen it
00:36:16.100
through writing where you try to get your ideas down on paper and show them to other people and
00:36:20.260
talk them over. And I think that's an incredibly enriching and enlarging experience. The best
00:36:24.400
education I know of really is the education by writing though. It's hard to do.
00:36:27.920
Yeah. Writing it. I find whenever I don't really know what I have to say until I actually sit down
00:36:32.980
and write it because it actually, nothing wrong with that.
00:36:36.940
Right. I mean, what do you, what do you tell for someone who's listening? I mean,
00:36:39.460
yeah, I love this analogy that writing is sort of exercise for the mind. Um, how does a guy who
00:36:44.820
gets started, who doesn't really write cause I'm not a writer, but I want to get that benefit from
00:36:48.500
how do you get, you just start writing and then, or is there sort of a regimen you can follow like
00:36:54.160
you would with your football training to get better at writing?
00:36:57.120
Yeah. Well, um, you know, you got to try. The thing I advise people to try, uh, first is to write
00:37:03.400
about their childhood a little bit. You know, what was it? Where'd you live? Who were your friends? What was it
00:37:06.760
like? Any stories you have from back then? Um, they're your stories, it's your life. And so you
00:37:11.760
have every right to them. And that's a place that people often can be very successful in, uh, in
00:37:17.120
writing. And then the other thing I say is don't expect too much. You know, I know people say, you
00:37:20.780
know, I've had this novel I've always wanted to write and I'm going away to New Hampshire for seven
00:37:24.500
days and I think I'm going to get it written then. Don't, I mean, maybe, maybe, but that's probably
00:37:29.120
not going to happen. You know, a little bit every day and a little bit more the next week and a
00:37:33.660
little bit more the next week, if you have the time, um, can help you a lot. And the other thing
00:37:38.100
is, you know, writing every day, if you can do it right every day, Stephen King writes every day,
00:37:42.780
but his birthday and Christmas, I think. And he's written some books. I don't love them all,
00:37:47.000
but he's written some books. Right. Well, Mark, this has been a great conversation. Thank you so much
00:37:51.320
for your time. It's been a pleasure. Thanks. Those are just wonderful questions. I'm very grateful.
00:37:55.620
My guest today was Mark Edmondson. He's the author of the book, Why Football Matters. It's available
00:37:59.860
on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. And also while you're there, check out his new book, Why
00:38:03.580
Write. Great book. If you are a writer or want to become a writer, a lot of great insights there.
00:38:09.140
Also check out the show notes at aom.is slash why football matters for links to resources where you
00:38:25.620
Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. For more manly tips and advice,
00:38:30.580
make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com. Our show is
00:38:34.100
edited by Creative Audio Lab here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. If you have any audio editing needs or music
00:38:38.120
production needs, check them out at creativeaudiolab.com. If you got a moment too, I'd appreciate it if you
00:38:43.020
give us a review on iTunes or Stitcher. It really helps us out. As always, I appreciate the continued
00:38:46.880
support. And until next time, this is Brett McKay telling you to stay manly.