Written in 2009, prior to the Super Bowl, which involved Australian Ben Graham as Cardinals punter. Re-posting from the SB thread....
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http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24976805-7583,00.html
America's brutal, thinking man's sport
Jack Sexton | January 29, 2009
Article from: The Australian
IT has taken 41 years, but finally, on Monday morning our time, an Australian will play in the Super Bowl. How much do Australians know about this bizarre game which, along with Australians rules and Gaelic football, is one of the world's three truly national football codes?
The answer might be: more than Americans know about Aussie rules. When Ben Graham arrived to punt for the New York Jets in 2005, and Australian journalists asked fans where he had come from, most answered Europe.
Still, most Australians know nearly nothing about American football. The image - like most of our images of American life, picked up from cinema and television - is of a game that, despite being played mostly by huge meatheads, is also intricately dull.
As with most stereotypes, there is a great deal of truth: gridiron is complicated, and many of its players weigh nearly 140kg; they also, as suggested by the recent case of New York Giants player Plaxico Burress, who shot himself in the leg during a night out, often have meat in their heads.
But for people who know the game well, there can be little argument that American football, more than any other football code, deserves the title of the intellectual game.
Indeed, the complexity and rigidity of gridiron reflects an aspect of the American national character that is usually neglected: its intellectualism (which does not, necessarily, have anything to do with intelligence).
Americans have believed, from the Puritans to Dr Phil, that anything can be mastered by a method; that once you know the "code", the problems of the universe can be solved. This accounts for why American fans and commentators are loath to attribute to accident the result of any match; for them, structural factors are to be seen in every play and bounce of the ball.
Unlike in Aussie rules or even rugby league and union, the rigid, stop-start structure of gridiron gives coaches free scope for their imaginations. And so while in our codes coaches only think they control the game, in America's National Football League, they actually do. This allows for the construction of plays of dazzling complexity that, recorded in elaborate arrangements of noughts and crosses, resemble the indecipherable language of some lost and alien civilisation.
Thus the figure in the US of the genius coach, which, despite the occasional Sheedy, Gibson or Bennett, has no parallel in Australia. While the New England Patriots were winning everything, their coach, Bill Belichick, was the subject of countless profiles claiming he had the IQ of a nuclear physicist, and that his success could be traced to causes as diverse as his childhood or his study of economics.
Of course, this focus on coaches and their tactics is in part a way for normal-sized white Americans, who make up the majority of the sport's fans, to continue to claim as their own a game that is now played mostly by huge, black men. For while gridiron may be the intellectual game, a spectacle of science as well as (often barely controlled) violence, it is still, in the end, all about big hits. And when you weigh, as linebackers do, nearly 140kg and your sole job is to smash into an opposing player as hard as you can, then the hits are big indeed.
Australians, not used to seeing our own players in padding, tend to see the wearing of protection on a football field as a sign of weakness. But this is because they do not understand the nature of the contact in American football. Unlike in our games, where the contact is nearly always incidental - that is, is the result of someone going for the ball or being tackled in open play - in gridiron, contact is the whole point. You don't have to have the ball to be smashed, and, once the play has begun, you can be hit from a radius of 360 degrees (a feature shared only by Aussie rules among our own codes). Also, the use of padding and helmets has, ironically, made the game even more dangerous: players can now confidently throw themselves at each other, often head-first, with no sense of anyone's well-being.
American football is not for everyone. But for those who appreciate it, there is a poetry in the contrast between the delicacy of the game's structure - the elaborateness of the plays, and the fineness of the skills - and the brutality of the contact. There is carnage in gridiron, but it is choreographed; indeed, the players wear tights. If you don't know what's going on, it can look like dull chaos; if you do, it can be beautiful.
Gridiron has become a part of America's national mythology and bequeathed to the language many metaphors for life. It is arguable that in the past 20 years, it has replaced baseball as the nation's dominant sport, and its most accurate mirror.
Jack Sexton is a freelance writer.