Latimer on Law

A Thanksgiving Day Reflection on Football and Futbol

A Thanksgiving Day Reflection on Football and Futbol

"Nobody in football should be called a genius. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein."   - Joe Thiesmann           

Futbol . . . The beautiful game.  -Pele

I love football.  Just ask my wife how much time I spend watching it on tv.  So I won't argue if you want to extol the virtues of American style football on its own merits but, still, soccer is clearly a better game.  Football, to me, is like a crochety old friend who you love despite his obvious faults.  I say this as someone who knows both games as a fan and a participant, as a varsity football player in high school, and as a licensed soccer coach and certified referee in my middle age.

Carrying the ball for LHS vs. D.Y., 1961.

           I've been a football fan ever since the seventh grade when I discovered I was faster than most other kids, outrunning them to avoid getting beat up, and I could play the game as a running back.  I played a lot of pick-up games in junior high school, and first played organized football on the freshman team at the old Lawrence High School in Falmouth.

         My family moved to Falmouth from Rockland in August 1958.  Rockland then, like all the other towns in the South Shore area between Quincy and Brockton, was a place where soccer was the game they played back in Ireland or Italy.  My, how things have changed over the past forty years or so. 

         Back then, however,  in Falmouth and most other towns on the Cape and along the South Coast, from Fall River to P'town, high school soccer was alive and kicking.  So my first introduction to the game of soccer came in 9^th grade gym class in my first week at LHS.

        Coach Earl Mills, had us playing free-for-all soccer in what must have been a 20 on 20 game, and a few of us, Air Force kids from the South relocated to Otis as well as me, had never kicked a soccer ball before in our lives.  One of the Air Force kids and I went for a loose ball ball and I whiffed, getting him squarely in the family jewels.  He came up swinging and Coach Mills let us go at it for a minute or so, barely concealing his amusement, and then broke us up.  He made us run a lap around the field and then shake hands.  That's how they used to handle "boys being boys" back in those days.

        After class, someone told me that freshman football tryouts were that afternoon, and that's when my official football career began.  I played all four years, starting at fullback my senior year, at age 16, during the 1961 season.  We were undefeated that year going into the Turkey Day game with Barnstable, which we lost 20-6.  I really can't recall the score of any other game we played that year. 

            I loved playing football, more than most of my friends did.   I liked the hitting especially, and I got to play a lot in high school, primarily on offense as a blocking back.  Occasionally, I got to carry the ball as in the photo above, but usually I led the play for running backs Buddy Ferreira and Jack DeMello who started as a sophomore. 

            To get an idea how long ago that was in football time, consider the fact that we wore leather helmets on the LHS freshman team  A single nylon bar was bolted  across the front to keep your face from being smashed too badly into the turf.

            Back then, the New York Football Giants were the only NFL team in the entire North East, so my buddies and I would all sit around on fall Sunday afternoons watching Charlie Connerly, and then Y.A. Tittle, lead the Giants against the Browns, the Lions, the 49'ers, the Rams, the Bears, the St. Louis Cardinals and the upstart Colts.  To this day, I still refer to the Colts sometimes as Baltimore.

          As for soccer, I never played it again after that gym class.  As a two sport athlete in high school, football and track, I didn't have to take gym again, and I didn't.  LHS had a good soccer team, but I didn't know a thing about the game, and I really wasn't interested. It's too bad, because when you know the game of soccer, you can't help but appreciate it for its athleticism, for its competitiveness, for its intelligence and, above all, for its individualism.   As Pele remarked, it's truly "the beautiful game."

          Individualism is a big part of the difference between soccer and American football.  Soccer is a players' game, with all major game decisions being made by the players on the fly, while American football is a coaches' game, with coaches increasingly micromanaging every aspect of the game, especially as you go up into elite college programs and the NFL.

          Both soccer and American football have star players, but only American football has legendary coaches on the order of Knute Rockne, Woody Hayes, Bill Walsh or Bill Belichick. Coaches can achieve such prominence because the game of football is hierarchical and highly structured as opposed to the more egalitarian and very fluid game of soccer.  Some of them even get called "genius," but Joe Montana knew that really wasn't so.

           It is this aspect of American football that makes it a perfect expression of American corporate culture, especially NFL football, far more so today than when I began following the Giants in 1958.  A football game is much more of a production than a soccer game, which is what makes it so costly at higher levels.  I was saddened recently to read that Northeastern is cancelling its football program, as B.U. did several years ago.  I was also saddened to read that the traditional Thanksgiving Day game between Nantucket and the Vineyard for the Island Cup was also cancelled this year.

           I remain a loyal fan of the New England Patriots as well as the Falmouth High School football team.  I watch the Pats on television, and I get to several Falmouth home games every fall, but I've missed the Turkey Day game for the past several years because we travel to Maryland to spend the holiday with my wife's sister and her family.  I need that kind of fan interest to really enjoy watching football today.  Without it, I'd much rather watch a soccer a game between two teams I don't follow than between two football teams I don't follow. 

          Soccer is just a better game to watch, unless you've got a tiny little attention span and need to have the play stopped for 30 seconds or so after every 10 second play, and then have professional analysts explain what you just saw, in order to follow the game.  Try timing the  plays in an NFL football game while the clock is running, and you'll get maybe 20 minutes of an hour with the ball actually in play.  This contrasts markedly with soccer where the ball is always in play while the clock is running for an hour and a half, except for injury timeouts, and then the time lost is added at the end as stoppage time.

           Most Americans who feel compelled to disparage soccer, are either ignorant of the game, bigoted and xenophobic against anything not "American," or both.  I don't mean average football fans who just don't care about soccer, but those "real American" types like WEEI's Fred Smerlas who feel compelled to put soccer down by saying stupid things like there's no scoring in soccer, or soccer is for sissies, et cetera, proving only their own ignorance and insecurity.

           Yes, most soccer games are low scoring, often ending at 1-0, 2-1 or the like.  Does that mean the game is "boring" as the yahoos claim?  Perhaps so, for people who can't comprehend what's going on in the game, the offensive buildups and the defensive shutdowns.   I wonder how many of those same guys are NHL fans and get all worked up about what a great game the Bruins played last night, winning 2-1.  A 2-1 win is low scoring whether you're watching soccer or hockey. Duh!  Then, they'll talk about their favorite football team playing a great game when they beat someone 14-0, never mind that in terms of real scoring that's only 2-0 -basically a soccer score. 

         As for being "sissies," I'd just love to see a typical aged out football player try to stay on the field with some good older soccer players.  A former lineman like Smerlas wouldn't have a chance, because soccer players are better all-around athletes, and they have developed a set of skills that the average football player just doesn't have, foot skills, head skills and body skills.  How many times have you seen a 300 lb. NFL lineman have to leave the field for a breather after making two or three plays in a game? When have you ever seen a soccer player do that?

          I've had the pleasure of coaching several youth soccer players who later played high school and college football, and I'm proud of them, but I'm not aware of any Pop Warner football players in my town who have managed to play competitive organized soccer as they got older.  The basic truth about football is you need to be big or fast, or both, and if you are, the coach will be able to teach you all the skills you need in a very short time compared to the time it takes to develop soccer skills.  If you're not big or fast, you won't get to play competitive football, no matter how good a skill set you have unless you can pass accurately, or can punt or kick field goals, as many former soccer players have done in the NFL.

         There's lots of contact in soccer, too, and the players don't have ten pounds of pads to protect them like football players do.  Sure, some soccer players exaggerate injury in order to draw a foul, but so do wide receivers in the NFL who exaggerate wildly when a defensive back breathes on them too closely.  So do basketball players when they get touched while shooting.  The reality is, as in football, basketball and hockey, you can't play soccer if you're afraid of contact -like Tony Eason was, for example.

          American football is orchestral music, while soccer is jazz.  Every player on a football team has a specific, limited role on each individual play, and is directed what to do by the coach as maestro, while soccer players have general areas of responsibility but much greater freedom to riff as individuals, with the coach only setting the tempo.  Only a few players on a football team get to score usually, because of limiting rules that define eligible receivers and positional requirements. Most players on an American football team never even get to handle the ball, but every player on a soccer team gets to play the ball and any player can score, even the goal keeper.

           Like I said, the "real Americans" who disparage soccer are basically ignorant. Maybe they don't understand the game because it's too fluid and they've got ADD or something. Still, that's not a reason to disparage the game, and I'm sure that many who do so act out of pure xenophobia.  Hispanics play soccer, the French play soccer, the Portuguese play soccer, the Italians play soccer, but Americans have only recently begun to be competitive on the international level.

          Meanwhile, the NFL has been trying to open "markets" in Europe, and there is a European football league.  Still, it won't catch on there even as much as soccer has caught on here. That's not because of European xenophobia, but simply because soccer is, objectively, a better game to watch than American football

          So, it was with regret that I had to miss the annual showdown between Falmouth and Barnstable again this year.  I really enjoy going to those games to see football in its purest amateur expression, no matter who wins.  Instead, I was planted in front of the television set Thursday afternoon, and if the tryptophan in the turkey didn't put me to sleep, Detroit vs. Green Bay surely did.  I was looking forward to the Giants at Denver in the evening, my old team against one of my NFL bêtes noir, so I at least had a rooting interest for one of the Thanksgiving Day games -that, plus a Giant's win would have helped the Patriots' home field advantage in the playoffs if Denver were to win its division.

            I was disappointed in the outcome of the game, but even more by the fact that it wasn't even a good game, with the Big Blue just mailing it in.  It was a relatively high scoring game, 26-6, with Denver winning big at home.  That's really something like 3.5 to 1 when you count the actual scores, counting the Giants' two field goals as half a score each.  Still, despite the Broncos scoring a lot of points, the game itself was boring due to the Giants ineptitude. 

           A close, competitive 2-1 soccer game would have been far more interesting to watch, even if it came down to a shootout to break a 1-1 tie.  In the NFL, a tie game is often decided in sudden death overtime on a field goal.  Whoopie!  That's really scintillating to see a former soccer player put the ball through two stationary uprights from 40 or 50 yards out, isn't it?  Meanwhile, a tie soccer game is decided by having good shooters go one-on-one with the goal keeper who, unlike the uprights in football, can move left or right and up or down to stop the shot.

          Like I said, objectively, soccer is a better game to watch than American style football.   Still, there's a lot to be said for subjectivity in sports, unlike politics in service of the common good, which is why I'll be glued to the tv set tonight watching the Patriots play the Saints in New Orleans.  I love football, but I like watching soccer even more.