Sports Saturday
Here’s a Howard Nemerov poem for those who are trying to settle into the football season while remaining uncomfortable with all that is wrong with the NFL. Written in 1975, the poem articulates Nemerov’s own ambivalence about football.
At one point Nemerov compares the players to totemic scarabs, pointing out their resemblance to hard-shelled beetles. In ancient Egypt, scarab totems were used to ward off evil, and Nemerov theorizes that we watch football in the hope that we can arise above the chaos of life. Fans long for those moments when clarity will arise out of “the spaghetti of arms and legs/Waving above a clump of trunks and rumps”:
The runner breaks into the clear and goes,
The calm parabola of a pass completes
Itself like destiny, giving delight
Not only at skill but also at the sight
Of men who imitate necessity
By more than meeting its immense demands.
Nemerov applies the word “grace” to when we step beyond the realm of necessity, beyond grim fate, beyond gravity and fly. We wish for times when the football, despite its shape, doesn’t wobble but soars with a tight spiral to the “patterning receiver on the hands/The instant he looks back.” Such moments, the poet tells us,
move the viewers in their living rooms
To lost nostalgic visions of themselves
As in an earlier, other world where grim
Fate in the form of gravity may be
Not merely overcome, but overcome
Casually and with style, and that is grace.
But the moments of grace are offset by other aspects of football. While the agon or struggle of football may seem like the heroic Battle of Troy where men struggled for “power and preeminence,” Nemervov reminds us that ultimately it is about money, especially for the owners who “own, are and carry a club”:
Money is the name of the game
From the board room to the beers and souvenirs.
The players are mean and always want more money.
The owners are mean and always have more money
And mean to keep it while the players go
Out there to make them more; they call themselves
Sportsmen, they own, are and carry a club.
In a line that may draw on Freud’s equation of money and feces, Nemerov adds, “Remember this when watching the quarterback’s/Suppliant hands under the center’s butt.” (After reading that, I’ll never see the center-quarterback exchange quite the same again.)
Furthermore, no matter how wonderful the moments and how heroic the traditions, eventually everything just starts blending together so that nothing any longer surprises or delights us:
[A]ll the games
Are blended in one vast remembered game
Of similar images simultaneous
And superposed; nothing surprises us
Nor can delight, though we see the tight end
Stagger into the end zone again again.
Here’s the poem:
Watching Football on TV
By Howard Nemerov
I
It used to be only Sunday afternoons,
But people have got more devoted now
And maybe three four times a week retire
To their gloomy living room to sit before
The polished box alive with silver light
And moving shadows, that incessantly
Gives voice, even when pausing for messages.
The colored shadows made of moving light,
The voice that ritually recites the sense
Of what they do, enter a myriad minds.
Down on the field, massed bands perform the anthem
Sung by a soprano invisible elsewhere;
Sometimes a somewhat neutral public prayer
For in the locker rooms already both
Sides have prayed God to give them victory.
II
Totemic scarabs, exoskeletal,
Nipped in at the thorax, bulky above and below,
With turreted hard heads and jutting masks
And emblems of the lightning or the beast;
About the size of beetles in our sight,
Save for the closeup and the distant view,
Yet these are men, our representatives
More formidable than ourselves in speed and strength
And preparation, and more injured too;
Bandage and cast exhibit breakages
Incurred in wars before us played before;
Hard plaster makes a weapon of an arm,
A calf becomes a club. Now solemnly
They take up their positions in the light,
And soon their agon will begin again.
III
To all this there are rules. The players must
Remember that in the good society
Grabbing at anybody’s mask will be
A personal foul and incur a penalty.
So too will pushing, tripping, interfering
In any manner with someone else’s pass.
Fighting is looked on with particular
Severity; though little harm can come
To people so plated at shoulder, head and thigh,
The most conspicuous offenders are
Ejected from the game and even fined.
That’s one side of the coin, the other one
Will bear the picture of a charging bull
Or some such image imprecating fear,
And for its legend have the one word: Kill.
IV
Priam on one side sending forth eleven
Of many sons, and Agamemnon on
The other doing much the same; is it
The Game of Troy again? the noble youth
Fiery with emulation, maneuvering
Toward power and preeminence? Well no,
It’s not. Money is the name of the game
From the board room to the beers and souvenirs.
The players are mean and always want more money.
The owners are mean and always have more money
And mean to keep it while the players go
Out there to make them more; they call themselves
Sportsmen, they own, are and carry a club.
Remember this when watching the quarterback’s
Suppliant hands under the center’s butt.
V
We watch all afternoon, we are enthralled
To what? some drama of the body and
The intellectual soul? of strategy
In its rare triumphs and frequent pratfalls?
The lucid playbook in the memory
Wound up in a spaghetti of arms and legs
Waving above a clump of trunks and rumps
That slowly sorts itself out into men?
That happens many times. But now and then
The runner breaks into the clear and goes,
The calm parabola of a pass completes
Itself like destiny, giving delight
Not only at skill but also at the sight
Of men who imitate necessity
By more than meeting its immense demands.
VI
Passing and catching overcome the world,
The hard condition of the world, they do
Human intention honor in the world.
A football wants to wobble, that’s its shape
And nature, and to make it spiral true
‘s a triumph in itself, to make it hit
The patterning receiver on the hands
The instant he looks back, well, that’s to be
For the time being in a state of grace,
And move the viewers in their living rooms
To lost nostalgic visions of themselves
As in an earlier, other world where grim
Fate in the form of gravity may be
Not merely overcome, but overcome
Casually and with style, and that is grace.
VII
Each year brings rookies and makes veterans,
They have their dead by now, their wounded as well,
They have Immortals in a Hall of Fame,
They have the stories of the tribe, the plays
And instant replays many times replayed.
But even fame will tire of its fame,
And immortality itself will fall asleep.
It’s taken many years, but yet in time,
To old men crouched before the ikon’s changes,
Changes become reminders, all the games
Are blended in one vast remembered game
Of similar images simultaneous
And superposed; nothing surprises us
Nor can delight, though we see the tight end
Stagger into the end zone again again.
Does Nemerov see football fans as tight ends–too much Bud Light?–staggering across the finish line of life? Is this the poet looking back at all the hours he has spent watching football on TV and coming to the conclusion, reached also by poet James Wright while “Lying on a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,” that “I have wasted my life”? But Wright has his revelation while relaxing from work and gazing at butterflies and chicken hawks and listening to the lowing of cattle. Nemerov arrives at his insights while gazing at colored shadows in a polished box in a gloomy living room. We watch replays of replays. Again again.