Pigskin philosophy

Football is more than touchdown dances and big hits in Michael Lewis' "The Blind Side," a literary take on the gridiron game.

By Michael Scherer

Topics:Football, Peyton Manning, Books

Maybe there was once a time when football commentary was about more than Terry, Howie and Jimmy, T.O.’s mood swings, and the tailgate turducken. Maybe in the distant past, the experts, the ones who understood the glorious nuances of the most complicated American sport, didn’t have to shout, wave their hands and run out of breath to make their points. Maybe long ago, before the football broadcasts began resembling the beer ads, before John Madden became a video game, and before Hank Williams Jr. sang “Are you ready?” the sports world tried to imbue the gridiron with the same literary providence of baseball or boxing.

It would be nice to think that the message once survived the macho medium, but it is hard to imagine. Football is such a high-intensity behemoth, so imbued with cheese heads and hogettes that there is rarely time for a moment of grace between all the victory dances and highlight reels. But do not lose hope, football fans. Michael Lewis, one of the most compelling nonfiction writers in America, has decided to play with the pigskin.

Consider this passage, from the first chapter of “The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game,” his elegant new book on the sport. “There’s an instant before it collapses into some generally agreed-upon fact when a football play, like a traffic accident, is all conjecture and fragments and partial views. Everyone wants to know the whole truth but no one possesses it. Not the coach on the sidelines, not the coach in the press box, and certainly not the quarterback.”

This is not the lingo of the six-pack pre-game show. To assemble his profile of the sport, Lewis has decided to focus on the literal edge of the game, the left tackle position, home to little-known players of enormous gait and strength who are, on average, now the highest paid on an NFL team next to the quarterbacks. Without an overpowering left tackle, Lewis explains, quarterbacks get damaged by malicious pass rushers, sacked from behind, from their left side, their blind side. “When a star running back or wide receiver is injured, the coaches worry about their game plans,” he writes. “When a star quarterback gets hurt, the coaches worry about their jobs.”

So coaches have compensated over the last 20 years by rejiggering their offensive lines with giants, a necessary adjustment as they came to depend more and more on the passing game. Lewis credits Bill Walsh, the storied San Francisco 49er coach; Lawrence Taylor, the New York Giants’ quarterback killer; and revisions to the NFL rulebook in 1978 for the transformation. “The football field is usually a tightly strung ecosystem, an efficient economy: there is seldom a free lunch on it,” the author explains. “Yet Walsh had stumbled upon a systemic opportunity. The short, precisely timed passing game might not offer an entirely free lunch, but the discount to the retail price was steep.” In 1975, Lewis tells us, NFL teams were throwing the football 24 times each game, on average. By the early 1990s, however, quarterbacks were throwing about 34 times per game. With the passing game, the quarterback protection game blossomed. Before 1982, quarterback sacks were not even kept as a statistic in the NFL. By 2000, the Baltimore Ravens’ left tackle, Jonathan Ogden, was making $44 million over six years, eight times as much as the quarterback he was protecting.

Lewis is a chronicler of people, an immersive nonfiction writer, in the style of Gay Talese and Joan Didion. His dialogue is crisp, his scenes concisely rendered and his voice as fresh as the close-cropped turf of the Mississippi State University gridiron. In recent years, he has written about the mendacity of a Wall Street trader (“Liar’s Poker”), the buffoonery of a presidential campaign (“Trail Fever”) and the statistical insights of the Oakland Athletics (“Moneyball”). For “Blind Side,” he anchors the story in a single football player, Michael Oher, a young prodigy discovered in high school, who now plays for the University of Mississippi as he awaits the NFL draft.

Oher’s tale is by any measure extraordinary. “A poor black giant monosyllab of the Memphis ghetto comes to live with, and apparently be loved by, a rich white right-wing family on the other side of town,” Lewis explains. Unlike countless other talented but troubled prospects, Oher stumbles into good fortune, in the form of a wealthy white family with a spare bedroom and considerable free time. Most of the book chronicles Oher’s journey from homeless teenager to top-flight draft project. With any other writer, it might be a project too difficult to handle. For one thing, Oher doesn’t like to talk to people. He just doesn’t speak or reveal anything of himself. For another, his story has less to do with football than the tragedy of inner-city poverty in the South.

An affable giant, Oher moves through life as if in a daze. We are with him as he gets by without lunch money at his new private school, as he struggles to study 19th century British poetry, and as he learns that he can literally lift up opposing blockers on the football field. But for all the telling details, Lewis stumbles when he attempts to explain the social significance of Oher’s rise from the ghetto, never engaging the racial politics of a white family rescuing a black boy with enormous athletic gifts. As a high school junior, Oher was 6-foot-5, 350 pounds, and he could run a 40-yard dash in less than five seconds. For this reason, he was plucked into a white world of caring Christians, loved as a son, and sent off on the path of success. The same thing that allowed his escape from the ghetto lingers as an indictment of wealthy white America, which never bothers to give a chance to so many other disadvantaged children who lack athletic gifts. Almost by necessity, Lewis needs to glance over the most troubling questions of Oher’s success.

But “Blind Side” is a football book first, and a social critique almost by accident. Though small in scope, Lewis has written a tome that directly challenges the dumbed-down delivery of the brute-force school of football commentary. “The fans, naturally more interested in effect than cause, follow the ball, and come away thinking they know perfectly well what just happened,” Lewis writes. “But what happened to the ball, and to the person holding the ball, was just the final link in a chain of events that began well before the ball was snapped.” The story of football, in other words, is much bigger than big hits and turduckens. There is much left to tell.

This story has been corrected since it was originally published.

: Michael Scherer is Salon's Washington correspondent. Read his other articles here. More Michael Scherer

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The Super Bowl is not a job creator

Despite what civic boosters say, hosting the big game provides few long-term benefits

By Alexander Heffner

(Credit: AP/Michael Conroy)

Topics:Super Bowl, Football

Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the National Football League, argued on “60 Minutes” last Sunday that the NFL is one professional organization designed to appeal to the economic interests of the little guy: Its revenue-sharing model, he said, gives a fighting chance to squads from Green Bay and Buffalo as well as to those from large media markets like New York, Los Angeles and Boston.

On the eve of the Super Bowl, Goodell was touting the familiar idea that the sport’s biggest game is a boon to economic development. But with the cost of a ticket now averaging $3,982 and 30-second television spots selling for $3.5 million, the Super Bowl can appear to be more an occasion for ostentatious excess than an engine of development.

This year’s Indianapolis Super Bowl Host Committee, which has a budget of $25 million, predicts the game will inject anywhere from $150 million to $400 million into the local economy, according to Dianne Boyce, communications director for the host committee.

Amid the continued economic uncertainty, this may sound like a lot of money. But for a major metropolitan city, the impact will likely be short-term only.

Consider last year’s game at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas. The North Texas Host Committee’s executive summary from April 7, 2011, summed up its belief that the game was an unprecedented economic catalyst for the region, declaring grandly:

“North Texas will forever celebrate Super Bowl XLV, the most impactful event in the region’s history and the most important sports event in the world in 2011.”

But the Dallas News reported last February that the “Super Bowl was not a rising tide that lifted all boats … Hotels and restaurants that were part of official NFL activities, or apt to attract A-listers, reported full rooms and brisk business. Other food sellers and hoteliers said great expectations faded as the week wore on and the hoped-for masses failed to materialize.”

According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data for Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, a small portion of steady job growth in the 10 months that followed could be attributed to the game. The Dallas Business Journal reported last week that unemployment in Dallas has dipped from 8.5 percent last January to 7.1 percent. But Bill Lively, the president and CEO of the 2011 North Texas Super Bowl, conceded in an interview the 2 million-plus population of Dallas made it unlikely that the game would be responsible for extended increases in employment.

To Lively, the game served an important community function: unifying three important regions of Texas. The cooperation between Fort Worth, Dallas and Arlington was a “real triumph” that catapulted a city to greatness. He hopes that the Super Bowl will return to the area soon.

Duane Dankesreiter, the vice president of the Dallas Regional Chamber of Commerce, also stressed the secondary benefits of hosting the big game. “The global exposure of an event of that size is tremendous. It gave us an opportunity to introduce North Texas to millions of people and to spread the word about what a great place DFW is to live and work,” he said.

But the Super Bowl did not figure in the city’s long-term economic planning, says Daniel Oney, who works in the Dallas Office of Economic Development. He told me that his office did not engage in broader strategic thinking about hosting it.

“I’m not aware of anything we did to support or hinder the Super Bowl,” he said.

Dennis Coates, a professor of economics at University of Maryland with a specialty in sports, said that all evidence from “benefits, employment, tax revenue generation and so on … indicates that proponents wildly exaggerate the impact of the Super Bowl.”

Mark Rosentraub, a professor of sports management at the University of Michigan, urges the public to “resist trying to make the argument that there are any meaningful or long-term economic effects” from hosting a Super Bowl.

The Dallas Host Committee did boast of a $7.15 million surplus from last year’s game. Texas journalist Scott Nishimura reported in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that the windfall was redirected toward charity and a new Super Bowl bid, rather than broader economic development. According to the committee, the funds supported:

the NFL Youth Education Town (YET) center for at-risk youths, which is being built in Arlington as the league’s “legacy” project for the area; the North Texas Food Bank; the Tarrant Area Food Bank; and the NFL’s Slant 45 service projects in North Texas. The YET center, scheduled to open early next year, will receive half the surplus beyond the $2 million reserve; the food banks will get 20 percent each; and Slant 45 will get 10 percent.

Like Dallas, Indianapolis is relying on the hope that the secondary perks of the game will translate into future business. Boyce has told me and other journalists that the “NFL estimates that over 60 percent of those people are corporate decision makers, so those are key people who, if they come to Indianapolis and have a positive experience, will come back.”

For Indianapolis restaurateurs and business owners, the hope is that the economic surge crosses class lines this year. That forecast is more plausible in Indianapolis, where the events are centralized in the city, whereas the commerce generated by last year’s game was spread across three localities of metropolitan Dallas. But in Indianapolis, Boyce said that there is no comprehensive economic strategy for channeling the short-term economic gains into the long-term development of the city.

The economic benefits of this year’s Super Bowl will not be tallied until after the Lombardi Trophy is awarded on Sunday. But don’t be surprised if they are modest.

: Alexander Heffner is a freelance journalist whose writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe. More Alexander Heffner

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Political lessons from this year’s Super Bowl

From jobs to health care, football's big game illustrates the factors that will dominate the 2012 election

By Robert Lipsyte

New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady (Credit: AP Photo/Elise Amendola)

Topics:Super Bowl, Football, 2012 Elections

This originally appeared on TomDispatch.

Most Americans won’t need a justification to watch Sunday’s game, but if you’re a Salon reader you might think, even in passing, that celebrating the holiest day of violence, consumerism and class warfare on your couch is a betrayal of your values or a waste of your time. You might even imagine that it would be better to take a hike, read a book or meditate.

Not this Sunday, buster. It’s an election season. You need to watch this game to fully understand how jobs, religion, leadership and healthcare dominate every American contest.

1. Joe Hill will be playing: Where else will be you be able to watch more than 100 young men, most of them African-American, working for high wages in a totally unionized shop? True, their jobs are dangerous (more on that later) and relatively short-term (typically three or four years), but they are also high profile. They can lead to TV gigs, even political office. Buffalo Bills quarterback Jack Kemp became a Republican congressman and vice-presidential candidate. The former New England Patriots running back and ESPN analyst Craig James is currently running for the Republican nomination for Senator from Texas, although to less than universal acclaim.

Fans tend to fixate on the money and glamour of the football job, so that when this past season was threatened by labor-management strife, it was easy for National Football League lackeys to frame the confrontation as “millionaires versus billionaires” so the rest of us thousandaires wouldn’t stand with the workers against the bosses.

Even with a progressive attitude, watching the Super Bowl, which seems to float on rivers of oil — think car ads — and beer, is not exactly like holding a OWS-style general assembly in the red zone. Nevertheless, it’s a terrific visual of the American class divide. In their skyboxes, usually in jacket and tie, eating, drinking and high-fiving — or scowling — are the one-percenters who own the team, which is usually not their only source of income.

Below them, on the field, are their employees (many of them temporary one-percenters, given the median league salary of at least $560,000), using up the capital of their bodies. If you want to root for the Patriots or the Giants, fine. I’ll be rooting for the working class.

2. Tim Tebow will not be playing: Thank God. The season’s most hyped player — the NFL published its first magazine last month with Tebow on the cover — has the looks, personality and backstory of the clean-living, principled, athletic role model we’ve been told we need to help raise our children. Born in the Philippines to Baptist missionaries who refused to abort him despite his mother’s illness, Tebow led the University of Florida to two national championships and became the first sophomore to win the Heisman Trophy, college football’s top individual prize. He also refused to be considered for Playboy’s annual all-American team because the magazine’s values conflicted with his Christian beliefs.

Tebow was a star attraction of the 2010 Super Bowl — in which he didn’t play. (He was still in college.) He appeared in a commercial for Focus on the Family in which he tackled his mother. The ad generated intense controversy because of the group’s stand against abortion and same sex marriage. Neither issue was explicitly mentioned in the commercial, which marked the first time CBS had broken its rule against ads from advocacy groups.

This past season, as a Denver Bronco rookie quarterback, Tebow carried his team to the division playoffs despite his shortcomings as a passer and field tactician. As the saying goes, all he could do was win. He was tough, determined, inspirational and a fine runner. Although he was careful to note that God did not care who won, he prayed publicly so incessantly it was celebrated and mocked as Tebowing.

While his aggressive evangelism turned off some people, no one could deny his confidence and fierce competitiveness on the field, and his humility and niceness off it. Also, he was white (as are most fans, coaches and team executives) in a predominately black sport, a declared virgin in a world where the macho, and sometimes felonious, “playas” get an inordinate amount of attention and criticism. So why was there so much gasbagging about his evangelical faith? Why was he called “polarizing”?

Tebow is too true to be good. His religious principles may eventually even get in the way of money-making. Playing for a higher team, he is a threat to owners who can’t buy him off (although he has plenty of commercial endorsements, thank you — and Republican presidential contenders are lining up).

He may also disrupt the fantasies of fans.

Dan Levy, writing in Bleacherrport.com, put it well: “Because his faith is so prevalent and because his beliefs have become so much of who he is on and off the field, it’s nearly impossible to separate the two. Can you blindly root for Tim Tebow on the football field without, in turn, tacitly rooting for him in life? And does rooting for him in life — even if that simply means rooting for the underdog to succeed — include implicit approval of his beliefs? Are Broncos fans able to parse the player from the man, the quarterback from the evangelist?”

If he were playing Sunday, it undoubtedly wouldn’t be the Super Bowl, but the Tebowl.

3. JoePa will be there: Once held up as the gold standard of college football coaching, now as the hero of a classical tragedy, the late Joe Paterno will be represented on Sunday by three players and his successor as head coach at Penn State. They will be reminders of what Paterno really represented beneath the iconic image.

The three players, almost a thousand pounds worth of them, are Jimmy Kennedy, a 302-pound defensive tackle, and Kareem McKenzie, a 330-pound tackle — both Giants — and Rich Ohrenberger, a 300-pound guard for the Patriots, who is on injured reserve. Boston College with six players in the Super Bowl and Rutgers with five lead this year’s honors list of colleges that serve as NFL minor league feeder teams, but Penn State has been a perennial supplier of meat on the hoof. No wonder the school has been dubbed Linebacker U.

Paterno became head coach in 1966, the year before the first Super Bowl. At least one player he coached has been in every one of the 46 Super Bowls. He produced several hundred pro players. At the start of this past season, there were 36 Nittany Lions on NFL rosters.

In other words, Penn State was a football factory as well as a research university, which made Paterno the Geppetto of those over-sized puppets, even while he was touted as a classics scholar (he identified with Aeneas) and a philanthropist — he donated $4 million to Penn State. (How does a coach get that kind of dough?)

His successor will be Bill O’Brien, the current Patriots offensive coordinator. Though he graduated from Brown, as did Paterno, O’Brien has no connection to the Penn State program, which has angered some people, reassured others. A number of former players have threatened to sever their ties with the university because the school went “outside the family” for a new coach, an act seen as a total repudiation of the Paterno era. Others felt that a rigorous cleansing was necessary. After all, Paterno had apparently known for almost 10 years that Jerry Sandusky, once his main assistant and presumed heir, was an alleged child molester. Paterno tossed the matter upstairs and continued to devote his attention to Aeneas and linebackers, while Sandusky allegedly raped more little boys.

Paterno’s powers of concentration or expedience or denial were extraordinary enough, it seems, to qualify for presidential nomination. In his last interview, he implied that he probably couldn’t fully process the tale he was told about Sandusky sexually assaulting a young boy in the football team’s shower-room because he knew nothing about male-on-male rape.

4. You can occupy the Super Bowl: One of the Penn State trustees who voted to fire Paterno, Kenneth C. Frazier, said this: “[E]very adult has a responsibility for every other child in our community. We have a responsibility for ensuring that we can take every effort that’s within our power not only to prevent further harm to that child but to every other child.”

Frazier, of course, was referring to the lack of leadership — the lack of humanity — at Penn State that allowed fealty to an institution and the power it offers to trump individual responsibility. It was an it-takes-a-village-to-raise-a-child sort of statement. It’s worth keeping in mind as you watch the Super Bowl, because the subject Frazier raised goes far beyond the charges against Sandusky or the lack of leadership Paterno and others exhibited in the case. It includes our neglect, denial and often encouragement of all the blows to the head that every football player — from peewee to pro — routinely suffers.

Watching those hits, hearing them lauded, feeling them vicariously is the guilty pleasure of football, as marketed by the NFL. Players who can deliver such hits and those who can absorb them, shake them off and play on are extolled as true warriors, as gladiators, as real men. More and more of those “real men” are now being diagnosed with dementia and other conditions caused by the traumas first suffered by Peewee brains.

The “concussion discussion” started with retired NFL players pleading with the league and the players’ union for financial help with their medical bills. It has since trickled down to college, high school and youth football as it becomes ever clearer that all those little insults to the brain that begin so early add up to catastrophe in middle age.

So if you believe in taking responsibility for “every other kid,” go organize in your community against helmet-wearing tackle football — at the very least until high-school age. (If you let your own kid play peewee football, you should be charged with child abuse.) It’s hard to go up against Jock Culture, which you’ll be watching in its full power and glory on Sunday. Then again, it’s hard to go up against the banks and the war machine, too. It’s time, in other words, to occupy football.

And if you need a pep talk before you get started, here’s one from Tim Tebow, who marked his eye-black with the numbers of biblical quotations until it was banned by the NCAA last year. (The NFL also bans unapproved logos.) I approve one of Tebow’s – Hebrews 12:1-2. “Let us run with patience the race that is set before us.”

To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.

: Robert Lipsyte is a former New York Times sports columnist. His new memoir, "An Accidental Sportswriter," has just been published. More Robert Lipsyte

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Enjoy the game? For the true fan, it’s all about agony

The New York Giants are in the Super Bowl. But for one obsessive, the question is what time to take the Ativan

By Ted Heller

Ohio State football fans (Credit: AP)

Topics:Football, Editor's Picks, Super Bowl

“The truth is,” Nick Hornby wrote in “Fever Pitch,” his book about his obsession with Arsenal and British football, “for alarmingly large chunks of an average day, I am a moron.”

That’s a wonderful sentence by one of my favorite writers, but if Hornby is only a moron for only large chunks of the average day, he is doing a lot better than I am. I can honestly report that for the last few months I have been an absolute idiot for all but very small portions of the day.

Some football (American football) fans mistakenly assume that the season goes in a straight line, starting in August with pre-season games (wherein five of your team’s 10 best players will suffer season-ending injuries) and ending in February with the Super Bowl. But the true fan, the addicted and obsessive, the kind friends and spouses ought to be worried sick about, knows that the season doesn’t end. There is no start, there is no finish. It just is, and, like life, it ends when you do. This is why, when the New York Giants beat the Green Bay Packers in the divisional playoff a few weeks ago in the Frozen Tundra of Lambeau Field (it was colder in my Manhattan apartment that day than it was in Green Bay, Wis.) and qualified for the NFC Championship game (which they won … no, let me put that a better way: WHICH THEY WON!!!) my wife looked at me and said, “Hey, you can relax now. They won the game.”

But I could not relax. I never can. There is never any respite.

The second the game ended and the Giants won, I had to begin worrying about the NEXT game. (I bet even the team’s offensive and defensive coordinators gave themselves a few hours before they started contemplating schemes for the following Sunday.) And, as soon as the Giants finished off the 49ers in San Francisco the following week, I began worrying about the next game, Super Bowl MLCCDIXXIV or whatever number it is, next Sunday against the New England Patriots.

I don’t know what it is like for most football fans, but for me a season isn’t about exultation or grief — it’s about anxiety. The anxiety soars right before kickoff, lasts throughout the game, subsides a bit after the game, but then begins to climb the following morning. It’s like an airplane taking off, experiencing hours of gut-churning turbulence, and never quite landing.

The Giants-49ers game went into overtime. The game had a 6:30 p.m. time (well, that’s a Network TV 6:30 p.m. — you have to tack on an additional 15 minutes for the National Anthem and plane flyover and Bud Lite commercials). I almost always take half an Ambien on Sundays, especially winter/football Sundays, but with my favorite team fighting for their lives, I knew I would need a whole one. Not knowing the game was going into overtime, I mistimed the whole drug-dropping and wound up doing dishes at 1 in the morning. And already I was worrying. There was no time to celebrate. I worried about Bill Belichick, football’s own Dr. Strangelove, and Tom Brady and how to stop both Bob Gronkowski and Wes Welker; I worried about Gisele Bundchen and the fact that, since the Giants had experienced a spectacular season that was completely unforeseen, they were going to end up with an abysmally low first-round draft pick. Yes, they had won but there was more work to be done.

And that’s what I mean about the season never ending. A team plays its first games in September and, if they’re good and if they’re lucky, is still playing in January and February. But it doesn’t stop there. Just when you think you can exhale and knock off for a few months, you have to worry about the draft, about players being re-signed or getting traded or quitting or shooting themselves in the leg at 5 in the morning at some disco that’s less than a mile away from your house that you never even knew existed. You worry about your quarterback going skiing and tearing his Achilles’ tendon or about Victor Cruz, the Giants exciting new wide receiver, destroying his ACL salsa-ing on “Dancing With the Stars.” Being a fan means nonstop, all-year, around-the-clock worrying — it means worrying when you’re watching baseball in July. ESPN, even in the off-season (ha! Like there is an off-season), airs a show about the NFL every weekday and somehow, when nothing is happening, when there is no news to report, somehow manages to fill an hour. In February comes the NFL Scouting Combine, where fresh-out-of-college football players gather to get weighed, measured, taped, have their intelligence tested, get grilled about their dreams, hopes, fears and drug use and sexual preferences. In April comes the NFL Draft — I will watch a lot it — where teams pick their stars, pleasant surprises and disappointments of the future. Then come the mini-camps and pre-season, and then the teams make their cuts, whittle themselves of their veterans who can no longer do it and of their kids who never would. And then the real season begins. And on and on and on.

It brings to mind Joni Mitchell singing that we’re captive on the carousel of time. But Joni Mitchell is Canadian and probably likes hockey. Football is a roller-coaster ride that never ends, the kind that you think will fly off the rails and land you into the face of a mountain.

The day after the Giants beat the 49ers, I woke up and my very first thoughts were about the Giants, about the game they’d played in rain-soaked San Francisco, and about how they’d beaten the Packers in Green Bay the week before and the Falcons in Atlanta the week before that. As the day wore on, the Giants weren’t off my mind for a minute. As a matter of fact I think I can say that lately the average minute of mine can be broken down this way:

15 seconds: being happy the Giants won and are in the Super Bowl

40 seconds: worrying about the Super Bowl, about the 2012/2013 season and beyond

5 seconds: other shit

The last time the Giants were in the Super Bowl was in 2008. My wife was very pregnant at the time but she and I had a deal, a deal we’d worked out in advance of even conceiving: She could not go into labor during the Super Bowl. If she did so, she would have to go to the hospital with one of her sisters … or maybe the taxi driver could help her along. Well, she and the fetus agreed to this and the Giants won. Even then, right after the game, she asked me what was wrong. I believe I said something like, “I don’t think they’re going to be able to repeat next year and I’m still not a Tom Coughlin fan.” (Our baby came along a few weeks later — my wife was late and had to be induced — and I somehow resisted the impulse to name our daughter Eli or Plaxico.)

So there is little joy in the Mudville of the true football fan. For every minute of exultation, if you are lucky enough to be able to exult, there comes about two hours of dread.

If you, the reader, do not believe me then I ask you to do this: Go to a sports bar in Pittsburgh when the Steelers are playing, or to one in Boston when the Patriots are playing, or in Philly when the Iggles are playing. If the home team loses, look at the players on the field congratulating the winning team, patting their helmets and shaking hands. Quite often, players on the losing team will be … smiling. That’s right. Smiling. They just lost a game and they’re already over it. Now look at the fans in the bar and tell me how many smiles you see.

I’m convinced that fans take the game more seriously than the players do, and it might be because of this: The players are paid with money but the wages of fandom is fear. Money you save or squander, but anxiety is forever.

At my Super Bowl party this year, the choice of wings will be: mild, spicy, five-alarm and Ativan. Guess which ones I’m going for.

: Ted Heller's latest novel, "Pocket Kings," will be published in March. He is also the author of the novels "Slab Rat" and "Funnymen." More Ted Heller

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Small blunders kill Super Bowl dreams

For fans of the 49ers and Ravens, the road to the big game is paved with pain

By Gary Kamiya

Kyle Williams loses it

Topics:Football

Just when it looked like the NFC and AFC championship games were going to last until the Super Bowl, two fatal blunders brought them to an abrupt close. The stunning conclusions to two of the most tense, evenly matched conference championship games in recent memory were a painful reminder that although football is a team game, one miscue by a single player can wipe out thousands of hours of collective blood, sweat and tears.

It will be a sad and lonely night for Baltimore Ravens’ kicker Billy Cundiff, whose shanked chip-shot 32-yarder gave the AFC championship to the New England Patriots. Kickers must have strong mental constitutions: in a sport where bonds between teammates are cemented in blood and pain, they are not always regarded as full-fledged comrades to begin with, and so when they screw up, it’s even harder for them to deal with. The mantra “short memory,” which defensive backs are constantly shouting at each other, applies in spades to kickers. Cundiff could use a tall glass of Milk of Amnesia.

It must have been an especially bitter defeat for the Ravens because they had played the Patriots to a standstill. In fact, they would have won the game had receiver Lee Evans been able to hold onto a pass in the end zone for another split-second, before New England backup defensive back Sterling Moore poked it out. On a night when Tom Brady had a subpar game – “I sucked pretty bad today,” he said – Baltimore had a golden opportunity to make it to the Super Bowl. The opportunity, for aging legends like Ray Lewis and Ed Reed, may never come again.

But the biggest goat horns belonged to San Francisco 49er return man Kyle Williams, who made not one but two critical mistakes that basically cost the 49ers the game. His first miscue took place midway through the fourth quarter, with the 49ers leading the New York Giants 14-10 and about to get the ball back. It was not only a game-changing play, it was one of the weirder instant replays I’ve ever seen.

As a Steve Weatherford punt landed in front of him and began bouncing toward him, Williams was torn between trying to field it, saving valuable yards of field position, and playing it safe by getting away from it. His indecision only lasted half a second, but it cost him and his team dearly. The ball ticked almost imperceptibly off his knee, and the Giants recovered it as he froze, desperately trying to look like he just happened to be walking by the bank when the vault exploded and a large wad of banknotes flew into his unwilling hands. The officiating crew on the field ruled that it was 49ers ball; the Giants challenged the call. The slow-motion replays were inconclusive, leading 49er fans like me to briefly hope that a saving cloud of epistemological murk had descended, a Nietzschean universe in which there were no facts, only interpretations. But then perspectivism was refuted: A regular-speed replay from a different angle clearly showed the ball touching his knee.

That was odd enough – normally the full-speed shots are more ambiguous, not less — but the really odd thing was Williams’ reaction. If he knew that the ball had touched him – which he may not have – did he really think he could get away with feigning innocence? The all-seeing eye of Sauron was going to find him out and shoot him down. His nothing-to-see-here, keep-moving reaction was understandable, but it somehow seemed like trying to hide under the bed when a drone has launched a missile at you.

That mishandled punt led to a Giants touchdown. And then, in overtime, Williams fumbled while returning another punt. The Giants recovered and kicked the winning field goal.

Williams’ 49er teammates all told him to keep his head up, that he hadn’t lost the game. Quarterback Alex Smith said that the real reason the 49ers lost was that they couldn’t convert on thirddown: They were an abysmal one for 13, and that one was a meaningless quasi-Hail Mary at the end of the first half that the Giants conceded. The solidarity Williams’ teammates showed was admirable, and in the great scheme of things they’re right that one player doesn’t lose a game. If the 49ers’ mediocre wide receivers had ever gotten open, if the 49ers’ coaches had stayed with what had been an effective rushing attack toward the end of the game instead of inexplicably deciding to pass on every down, if they had overcome their aversion to calling screens and swing passes, Williams’ boo-boos might not have mattered.

But those flaws are integral to the 49ers. All year long, they struggled to convert thirddowns and score in the red zone. Alex Smith has taken most of the blame for these failings, and he deserves some of it. But so do his receivers. And so do the 49er coaches, who have devised a highly creative running game but whose passing schemes are strikingly ineffective.

The 49ers lived all year on great defense – this year’s version is right up there with the great defenses in the glory years led by Ronnie Lott – and above all by not making mistakes. They tied an all-time NFL record for the lowest number of turnovers, with 10. But this means they have no margin for error. Until they put some electricity in their passing game, they have to play flawless football to beat a first-rate, well-rounded team like the Giants. And that isn’t going to happen every time.

I was bummed that Alex Smith’s redemption story did not have a Hollywood ending. Although he didn’t have a great game – the fact that his 97.6 quarterback rating was higher than Eli Manning’s 82.3 shows how little those ratings can mean – he played well enough this year to have convinced all but the most obdurate that he is not the 49ers’ problem.

Still, even taking into account how bad the 49ers’ receivers are compared to the Giants’ lethal trio of wideouts, the contrast between Manning and Smith in this game was striking.

Manning simply played at a higher level. Under heavy pressure in the second half, he managed to find open receivers time and again, whether on outlet patterns or downfield. His accuracy was remarkable for a game played in terrible weather. And even when he was being smashed to the ground, he kept his poise. No quarterback in the league is playing better than he is right now.

All four teams were remarkably closely matched; both games could have gone either way. But in the end the two best teams from each conference are going to the Super Bowl. And just as the matchup between the Giants and the 49ers became more intriguing after Alex Smith won last week’s legendary shoot-out with Drew Brees, so the matchup between the Patriots and the Giants has become a lot more interesting after the Patriots showed they could actually play defense against the Ravens. Defensive tackle Vince Wilfork had a monster game, and the Patriots’ secondary managed to hang in there against Anquan Boldin and Torrey Smith. Also, Brady is not going to lay an egg two games in a row.

It’s a case of the team with the mojo going against the team with the maestro. With considerable hesitation, I’m going with the maestro. Patriots 24, Giants 21.

A personal postmortem, now that my team has been eliminated. Defeat is bitter wormwood. I’d forgotten how bitter.

It has been many years since I’d really felt anything, good or bad, about the 49ers. The team sucked and I got used to being disappointed. The glory days felt like they took place in another lifetime – and in a way they did. I shut my expectations down. And my emotions.

Then this amazing season reawakened something. And when the 49ers pulled off that victory for the ages last week against the Saints, it all came back. I felt the delirious joy I, and the city, felt the first time, and every time, the 49ers won the Super Bowl. I remembered the shouts of joy echoing across rooftops on Nob Hill, and the old black man on the corner of Broadway and Columbus doing a funny little dance and saying to everyone who went by, “Who said Joe ain’t bad?” Like a woman who can only remember the joy of giving birth and has blocked out the excruciating pangs of labor, I conveniently forgot the agony of all the losses – Billy “White Shoes” Johnson’s last-second catch in Atlanta, the Don Beebe dagger, Roger Craig’s fumble against the Giants, the phantom pass-interference call against Eric Wright against the Redskins.

But when the 49ers walked off the field Sunday with their heads down, in front of a sad, silent crowd, 30 years’ worth of bad old memories came rushing back. As I drove through the empty streets, the city’s collective sorrow seemed almost tangible, like the weeping sky. It, and I, had gone from ecstasy to misery in one week. I wondered for a moment if it was worth it.

But I only wondered that for a moment. This had been a wondrous season, a gift. Yes, it ended in heartbreak. But I would rather feel heartbreak than nothing. In sports, as in life, it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

: Gary Kamiya is a Salon contributing writer. More Gary Kamiya

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Reviled no more

The end of Tebow! The resurrection of Alex Smith! And more amazing-yet-true tales from the NFL division playoffs

By Gary Kamiya

Character gaining

Topics:Football

Like campaigning as a right-wing loon in Iowa or taking hallucinatory drugs in preparation for the Bar exam, playoff football is all about peaking at the right time. And after this weekend’s division-round games, all four of the remaining teams in the NFL playoffs can legitimately feel that they have the best shot at winning Super Bowl 46. (Not “XLVI”: I refuse to honor the NFL’s grandiose insistence on using Roman numerals to denote its championship game for the same reason that I refuse to call a small Starbucks coffee a “tall.”)

My team, the San Francisco 49ers, are channeling the ghosts of Joe Montana and Dwight Clark after coming back not once but twice in the last four minutes to beat the unstoppable New Orleans Saints in one of the most thrilling playoff games ever played. (Gloating and hubristic reminder: in my previous piece I called the 49ers to win 30-28. The final score: 49ers 36, Saints 32.)

The New England Patriots have the confident glow of an omnipotent serial killer with a medical degree after they surgically carved up the corpse of the 1958 Nebraska Cornhuskers, aka the Denver Broncos. The contrast between Tom Brady’s laser-like passes and Tim Tebow’s wishful heaves was excruciating, but there could be an upside to Tebow’s abysmal showing: It might switch Tebowmania from Christian triumphalism to Christian humility. (Slightly less gloating but still disturbingly hubristic reminder: I called it 31-17 for New England. The final score: Patriots 45, Broncos10.)

The Baltimore Ravens are feeling like the guy who went to Vegas with a $10 stake and came back with a million bucks after Houston Texans’ punt returner Jacoby Jones suffered the biggest brain-freeze since Jim Marshall’s wrong-way run in 1964, snatching clumsily at an erratically bouncing ball as two large, malevolent, and heavily muscled men approached him at full speed. Jones’ brain fart heard ‘round the world was the difference in the Nevermores’ triumph over the most balanced and dangerous team in the AFC. (Most gloating and hubristic reminder yet: I called it 24-14 Baltimore. The final score: Ravens 20, Texans 13.)

And the New York Giants can light up the most expensive Cohiba in the playoff humidor. Continuing their month-long hot streak, the boys in blue rolled up the defending champion Green Bay Packers as if they were an old, moth-eaten rug and placed them thoughtfully in cold storage for the winter. The Giants were helped by the fact that the Green Bay receivers appeared to mistake the football for an incoming hand grenade, but they would have whupped on the flat, stale and unprofitable Pack anyway. Besides, any team that cannot knock down a Hail Mary pass does not deserve to repeat as champions. (Spoiler alert: Do not read the next sentence unless you want this column’s shocking and dramatic ending, namely that I have no idea what I’m talking about, prematurely revealed. I called Packers 28-21. Final score: 37-20, Giants. Hey, that’s why they call it hubris!)

The NFC championship game looks more compelling than the AFC game. The Ravens-Patriots game is another one of those irresistible force vs. immovable object matchups that the NBA, I mean the NFL, is filled with this year, now that thanks to insanely great quarterback play, superb receivers and the best crop of tight ends in league history, playing D is no longer necessary to win. The Patriots’ defense is so bad that the Ravens have a chance, but Baltimore’s offense looked so constipated against Houston – although to be fair, Houston’s tough defense had a lot to do with that – and Brady and gang looked so sharp, that it is hard to imagine Baltimore going into Foxboro and coming away with a win.

No team in the league can match up with the Patriots’ tight ends, Gronkowski and Hernandez, and there’s no reason to think the Ravens can. To win, the Ravens are going to have to put a lot more pressure on Brady than they did on Houston rookie QB T.J. Yates — who would actually have played quite well if someone had told him that there is a position in football called “free safety.” Ferocious Baltimore linebacker Terrell Suggs, who was mostly invisible during the game, will have to materialize against the Patriots. The Ravens’ less-than-dynamic offense should be able to put up points against the feeble New England defense, but not enough.

Prediction: 24-17, Patriots.

The NFC championship game should be a classic. The Giants are on top of their game right now. They had a great defensive scheme against Green Bay; even though they didn’t generate much pressure from their defensive line, their coverage downfield was so good that Aaron Rodgers couldn’t get into one of his insane rhythms. In that way, the Giants resemble the 49ers, who make opposing teams earn every yard, although the 49ers have a better run defense and a slightly better defense overall.

On offense, the edge goes to the Giants, with Eli Manning playing like his big brother and the scary wide receiver trio of Manningham, Hicks and Cruz. By contrast, the 49ers are thin at wideouts. But as the Saints found out, blazingly-fast tight end Vernon Davis poses a severe matchup problem, and running back Frank Gore, even though he seems to be playing hurt, is a bigger threat than Ahmad Bradshaw or Brandon Jacobs. And although it may seem like a ridiculous thing to say after they gave up 462 yards to Drew Brees, the 49ers secondary is playing lights out.

Prediction: 24-20, 49ers.

Part of the reason I like the 49ers is their defense and their kicking game, and of course home-field advantage. But the real reason is Alex Smith.

I know, that’s weird, verging on commitable. Taking Smith over Manning? No one could seriously argue that Smith has achieved even a fraction of what Manning has. But Smith is an X-factor. He is poised to confound his doubters and shock the world. Like he just did.

Saturday’s game, which I attended, etched itself into 49ers lore for a whole bunch of reasons. There was the performance of the defense, holding the potent Saints at bay for those agonizingly long stretches when the 49ers offense struggled. There was Vernon Davis, weeping without shame in the arms of coach Jim Harbaugh after catching the winning pass, a strong man reduced by relief and gratitude and utter emotional exhaustion to his naked human essence, his dissolving face one of the most moving things I’ve ever seen in sports. But what made this game the stuff of legends was the performance of Alex Smith.

Smith has been reviled ever since he put on a 49er uniform. Virtually no one in the Bay Area, including the fans and the so-called “experts,” ever believed in him. The fans have come around some now, but the bandwagon is still not exactly crowded. I saw thousands of Montana and Willis and Young and Lott jerseys in the stadium Saturday. If there were any Alex Smith jerseys, I missed them. As for the rest of the country, fuggedaboutit. New York Post football writer Mark Cannizzaro’s appraisal of Smith (issued just before Smith and the 49ers beat the Giants this year) is typical: “Alex Smith cannot beat you…Here’s the reality about Smith: He is who he has always been since he came into the league as the 49ers’ first-round draft pick in 2005 — a mediocre quarterback.” My own friends derided me for standing up for the guy.

Finally given a real coach and a consistent system, Smith had a remarkable renaissance this year. And then, on Saturday, at the biggest moment in his career, with everything on the line, he came through – and he did it not once but twice. To hang in there for six years, working hard every day, tuning out the doubters, with no one except the guys in the locker room believing you can succeed, takes more than talent. It takes character.

When Smith threw that last perfect pass and Davis caught it just before Roman Harper leveled him just over the goal line, and he held on to the football and got to his feet, Candlestick Park went crazy. Amid all the shouting and screaming, I looked over to a young woman sitting to my left. She was weeping, her head bent, tears running down her face. At that moment I realized that she, like many of the fans in the stadium, like my 23-year-old son who called me up in breathless, disbelieving joy after the game, had not even been alive when Joe Montana and Dwight Clark launched the 49er dynasty 30 years ago.

For her, the memories I had of The Catch, of Young and Lott and Craig and all the rest of the great players and teams of the past, of five Super Bowls and years of happiness, were only legends, replays on TV. Alex Smith and Vernon Davis had given her a priceless gift: her own memories. I think that’s why she was crying. And whether the 49ers win next week or not, they can’t take that away from her.