As mentioned above, I’m sure we’ve all noticed how a town, and indeed a region’s psychological (and sometimes economic) fortunes can rise and fall with the performances of its local football teams. The athletic transcends the social with the excellence and team effort of our local heroes. They show off the brains and imagination that their families and their schooling has imbued them with, and they represent their locality and its values.
As well as astounding feats of power, strength, and outrageous talent, football succeeds when its players show off both finesse and, most importantly perhaps, intelligence. Finely sculpted plays, drives, and entire game strategies are put together by coaches and delivered by players. Games will not be won by physicality alone, so combatants need to be wise (often beyond their years), and justify their inclusion in the game by more than their size and ability. Culture crafts football players to be mentally, as well as physically, strong.
There is also more to the game than the game itself. As a spectacle, a football game offers many delights for the non-participant to relate to. Somehow less social than baseball, but perhaps more so than basketball, the football game is often times a family day out, with the aforementioned victular aspects, the camaraderie of the fellow fans, and the friendly rivalry of opposing supporters.
As we discussed above, teams from small markets (whatever the level of completion they play in) are often overlooked, until they start winning, that is. Sports, and especially football, often operate to allow teams from outside the major metropolitan cities to compete on national stages. A major television audience saw Louisville’s 2013 Sugar Bowl victory over Florida, which took place in New Orleans. We look forward to seeing what impact the return of Coach Petrino will have on future success.
Sports also impact what you are reading now, sportswriting, and there are untold other ways in which football interacts and influences you and your life, sometimes with you as active participant, other times as a facet of the unseen life of a city, region or state.
Photo: Flickr/kyngpao
