Football starts tonight!
Writers generally try to keep their distance from sports, whether out of a natural bookish aversion or from a fear that showing any interest in sports will make their work seem less serious, less intellectual, of the grand crowd of riffraff that fill up the stadiums. Even the ones who admit to liking sports often keep it out of their fiction; Bolaño was by all accounts a big soccer fan and I can’t remember an instance of it in any of his fiction, and Knausgaard seems to have put all his love for soccer into a nonfiction book he cowrote about the World Cup back in 2014, with only brief flashes in his autobiographical fiction. Sportswriting and sports fiction are both seen as low environs, chock full of hacky inspirational stuff (nearly any sports biography) and heavy morality plays (The Natural). But some serious literary writers still decide to take the plunge into sports and succeed, though the pickings can be slim; I’ve already written about Exley’s Fan’s Notes, which is still the best piece of fiction about watching sports, and then there’s the poetry of Natalie Diaz and Hanif Abdurraqib, who write wonderfully about basketball, and John Ames, the preacher in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, loves to catch a good Yankees game on the radio. John Updike’s Rabbit books sometimes seem as if they’ve been written from another planet with different human tendencies, though the basketball scene at the beginning of Rabbit, Run is pretty good. I’ve heard good things about Christopher Beha’s The Index of Self Destructive Acts and Lincoln Michel’s The Body Scout, too.1
And then there’s Don DeLillo, perhaps America’s greatest living author2, and an inveterate sports fan. Even outside the famed opening to Underworld, with its massive accounting of the Shot Heard Round the World, seemingly narrated from every seat in the house, DeLillo has written a football book, 1972s End Zone3, and his newest novel, 2020’s The Silence, takes place at a Super Bowl party. These two books, coming at opposite ends of DeLillo’s career, trace out a very literary vision of America’s true game. Reading them together also gives one a curious shape of DeLillo’s career, the young writer in End Zone approaching greatness and the older writer in The Silence wearily resting on his laurels. They’re bookends to one of the great sustained stretches of American writing ever - find a better five book stretch than The Names, White Noise, Libra, Mao II, and Underworld all in a row - and each of these books contain glimmers of DeLillo’s talent, premonitory flashes of heat lightning in End Zone and aftershocks in The Silence.
Football is one of the less literary sports out there; baseball has the old-timey American charm, and its individual matchups can take on the form of the epic. Basketball is balletic, the motions often filled with such grace that it can inspire odes or ten thousand word paeans. Hockey has the same problem as football, in that it is too brutal, and too fast moving, to hew to any literary convention. (Ken Dryden, a Hall of Fame goalie who left the sport to practice law, is the only writer I’ve encountered who can make hockey even legible on the page, let alone beautiful.) It is perhaps DeLillo’s avant-garde tendencies that draw him toward football, a game so atavistic in its language and its processes that it seems to destroy thought itself. The quarterback is supposed to think; everyone else is supposed to run to a spot and hit something. Then you line up and do it again.
DeLillo is always obsessed with language, and football, in its seeming simplemindedness and tautology, offers him a rich jargon to play around with. Football’s atavism is America’s atavism, and DeLillo is nothing if not interested in how Americans think and speak to one another, their rituals, their mantras, their signs and symbols. What better sport, then, than the one with playcalls like “Spider 2 Y Banana” or “Jet Chip Wasp” in which the seemingly simple sign signifies a whole set of carefully planned instructions for eleven different people. Then the defense has their own code, as well, something like “Cover 3 Cloud,” or “Engage Eight” and suddenly you can see football as a DeLillo conversation, the absolute minimum of information being passed back and forth and flowering into many divergent possibilities.
Apropos of all this semiotic talk, End Zone takes place at Logos College in West Texas, where our man Gary Harkness has transferred after bombing out at Syracuse, and then Penn State, and then Miami, and then even at his father’s alma mater at Michigan State, his talent on the field giving him second second chances wherever he goes. Gary is one of those classic DeLillo characters who’s not only impossibly cool but also impossibly smart at the same time, so the price of admission is just accepting that the starting hallfback on the football team is also the guy who will riff on Joyce and say stuff like “Of all the aspects of exile, silence pleased me least.” The football program has been taken over by the disgraced Coach Emmett Creed, who’s gone from big time college programs to Logos, and who watches over practice from a secluded tower, “using his assistants to temper and bend us, coming down from the tower only to correct a correction, living alone in a small room off the isometrics area – a landlocked Ahab who paced and raged, who was unfolding his life toward a single moment. Coach wanted our obedience and that was all.” Gary, like I said before, is a talented running back but also very smart and cool, and so considers himself an “exile” on the team, compared to those teammates that are “more simple than others” or are, “as on every football team… crazy.” But even Gary’s special status doesn’t exclude him from the reality of football, the summer practices in “the undulating heat with nothing to sustain us but the conviction that things here were simple. Hit and get hit; key the pulling guard; run over people; suck some ice and reassume the three-point stance.”
It’s this simplicity that draws Gary back to football, even given his misgivings with the game and his trail of failures: “I found comfort in West Texas. There was even pleasure in the daily punishment on the field. I felt that I was better for it, reduced in complexity, a warrior.” But it’s within this seeming simplicity that Gary begins his descent into a kind of madness, spurred on by the class he’s auditing with the ROTC wing at Logos on modern warfare. Gary is obsessed with nuclear war, with mutually assured destruction between two sides, his studies and simulated war games coming into an uneasy parallel with his playbook and games on the field. Gary spends long afternoons just picking his professor’s brain about the future of warfare, his professor expounding on his theory of a “humane war” where “they hit our military and and industrial targets with any number of bombs and missies totaling one thousand megatons and we do the same to them. There’d be all sorts of controls. You’d practically have a referee and a timekeeper.” It’s the essential rhythm of football: run and hit someone, march down the field, and then kick it to the other team for their shot, mutually agreed upon destruction, all within the lines drawn by the referee.
And yet DeLillo keeps bristling against this comparison between war and football, even as he indulges in it. In the bravura second section of the book, we get the action of a whole game against a bitter rival. After a short introductory paragraph, we get a very ‘second-novel’ kind of parenthetical:
“The spectator, at this point, is certain to wonder whether he must now endure a football game in print – the author’s way of adding his own neat quarter-notch to the scarred bluesteel of combat writing. The game, after all, is known for its assault-technology motif, and numerous commentators have been willing to risk death by analogy in their public discussions of the resemblance between football and war. But this sort of thing is of little interest to the exemplary spectator… The exemplary spectator is the person who understands that sport is a benign illusion, the illusion that order is possible… The exemplary spectator has his occasional lusts, but not for warfare, hardly at all for that. No, it’s details he needs – impressions, colors, statistics, patterns, mysteries, numbers, idioms, symbols. Football, more than other sports, fulfills this need. It is the one sport guided by language… So maybe what follows is a form of sustenance, a game on paper to be scanned when there are stale days between events… The author, always somewhat corrupt in his inventions and vanities, has tried to reduce the contest to basic units of language and action… the nomenclature that follows is often indecipherable… this is not the pity it may seem. Much of the appeal of sport derives from its dependence on elegant gibberish.”
It’s a guide to reading the section, and also a guide to watching sports, to appreciating the game for itself rather than to impose any metaphor on top of it besides the basic application of order than all organized sports contain. Are you the good reader - the “exemplary spectator” - or are you lost in the mire of cliche, the “scarred bluesteel of combat writing”?
What proceeds in the rest of the chapter is a literal play by play, DeLillo indulging in his habit of short paragraphs of discrete language units:
“Monsoon sweep, string-in left, ready right
Cradle-out, drill-9-shiver, ends chuff.
Broadside option, flow-and-go”
And then Gary matter-of-factly describing the action on the field resultant from these strange commands:
“Hobbs hit Chuck Deering on pony-out for nine. He worked the other sideline and Spurgeon Cole was forced out after picking up thirteen. The bench was shouting encouragement. Hobbs came back with an opp-flux draw to Taft that picked up only two… I swung behind Deering, who was running a Q-route to clear out the area, and then I fanned toward the sideline and turned. The ball looked beautiful. It seemed overly large and bright. I could see it with perfect clarity.”
There’s no sentimentality in these drive reports, no reaching towards a tidy narrative of the game, just repetition, just reporting, but look how DeLillo peppers in those football words, stuff you might only hear on the dorkiest of podcasts nowadays - “pony-out,” “opp-flux draw,” “Q-route.” I listen to those podcasts and some of these don’t make sense to me! It’s this official language that DeLillo contrasts with the language of the players, who hype each other up with a brutal simplicity. The halftime speech by one of the players is anti-heroic, no Friday Night Lights sermons from Coach Eric Taylor, no, it’s just a guy softly saying “Cree-unch… Cree-unch. Creech. Crunch.” From there, “We started to make noises… We were all making the private sounds. We were all getting ready. We were getting high. The noise increased in volume.” Here’s the rousing conclusion: “‘Footbawl,’ George Owen shouted. ‘This is footbawl. You throw it, you ketch it, you kick it. Footbawl. Footbawl. Footbawl.’”
That is all ye know, and all ye need to know. Football. The game proceeds, the game ends, the Logos College Screaming Eagles4 lose. In a later game, Gary gets convinced by his girlfriend5 and her hippie-ish friends to smoke pot before a game, and he just walks off the field, with a head “made of Aztec stone” and “exceedingly hungry.” The season winds down and Gary falls into more of a mania, a Dostoevsky-like brain fever, and that’s the end point of End Zone, as Gary’s obsession with the world’s destruction leading to his body’s own downfall. DeLillo, in the voice of another character, provides a little sendoff to his football book, and a projection of his own future interests:
“Great big game… I’m after small things. Tiny little things… I crave the languid smoky dream… That’s living close to yourself too. You talk about bringing the inside close to the outside. I’m talking about taking the whole big outside and dragging it in behind me.”
That’s that five novel stretch I was talking about before in miniature, the whole big outside dragged in, the languid smoky dreams of prime DeLillo. After Underworld’s grand encapsulation of a century, the novels started thinning out, stripped down to dialogue, ping-pong novels of ideas. And thus we get to The Silence, a little withery thing, the paperback just over 100 pages with fourteen point typewriter style font. I’m crossing sports metaphors here, but by this point DeLillo’s lost the fastball, yet he’s still hanging around the league by painting the corners. The Silence is not really a football book, more a spectator-event book, but he has some fun with the spectacle that is The Super Bowl, with some of the brutal language of End Zone seeping through to the antiseptic watch party.6 The Silence follows five people gathered to watch the game; however, just after kickoff, there’s a mass electrical outage that effects all communication devices - phones, TVs, computers, everything a blank screen, mute and unresponsive. Because it’s a DeLillo book, one of the attendees is a young physics teacher obsessed with Einstein’s journals, another is a poet who might be interested in the game “in another life,” and everyone speaks cryptically about high-minded topics, except for Max Stenner, the host of the party, who “had a history of big bets on sporting events.” He has the gambler’s manic focused intensity in watching a game,
“attached to a surface, his armchair, sitting, watching, cursing silently when the field goal fails or the fumble occurs. The curse was visible in his slit eyes, right eye nearly shut, but depending on the game situation and the size of the wager, it might become a full-face profanity, a life regret, lips tight, chin quivering slightly, the wrinkle near the nose tending to lengthen. Not a single word, just this tension…”
It is a different kind of order overlaid on the game, the gambler’s dream that they can predict the outcome of the system, that beforehand they can see what will come out of the mysterious black box that is the game. “The money is always there, the point spread, the bet itself. But consciously I recognize a split. Whatever happens on the field I have the point spread secured in mind but not the bet itself.” Anyone who’s gambled on a game knows this kind of spectatorship – far from the exemplary spectator of End Zone – that is almost paranoid, a layer removed from the game, not just that a team will win but in this particular way, by four points or more, the nervous monitoring of all the potentialities of the score. DeLillo grinds his axe with all the non-exemplary spectators of the modern game through Max, who “liked to complain about the way in which pro football has been reduced to [the two quarterbacks], easier to deal with than the ever-shuffling units.” When the screens go off, the world plunged into the titular silence, Max’s first words are “What is happening to my bet?”
That’s typical of DeLillo, who knows that humanity’s first response to crisis is the personal, the quotidian, rather than the screaming despair of the disaster movie. No one even knows how to respond to the crisis, given that they’ve lost all their forms of wide-ranging communication. All that’s left is people talking in rooms without the aid of their devices.
Max’s wife Diane and the young Einstein-freak, Martin, pass the time talking, while Max still holds onto football, save a brief sojourn out into the street to see what’s going on. The two other guests survive a plane crash caused by the outage, and then sort of casually make their way to the party, acting out normalcy amid catastrophe. The party at least has food, if not a game. Max keeps watching the blank screen. He repeats End Zone’s rejection of football and warfare, with war now further away and more impersonal than it was in End Zone’s Vietnam-era milieu: “We’ve gone beyond all comparisons between football and war. World Wars in Roman numerals, Super Bowls in Roman numerals. War is something else, happening somewhere else.” He keeps his attention on the screen of nothingness, “trying to induce an image to appear on the screen through force of will.”7 He begins to narrate the imagined game himself, ventriloquizing the announcers and their narratives, aping some of the language of End Zone - “Ground game, ground game, crowd chanting, stadium rocking. Half sentences, bare words, repetitions.”
DeLillo writes the contemporary football viewer as immersed in a ritual, knowing all its cadences even in its absence. Max even knows the commercials, knows, as Diane says, “this flourish of football dialect and commercial jargon,” and is forced to iterate it himself now that the game is off.
After the initial shock of the outage, the book loses some steam, the long night of non-connectivity stretching out into the next day. At one point Martin just says “Football.” Football. It doesn’t get much more profound than that, and the crashing together of consumerism and disaster as seen in White Noise doesn’t work quite as well here. “E-mail-less. Try to imagine it. Say it. Hear how it sounds. E-mail-less.” intones one particularly chatty clinician. At one point Martin and Diane keep repeating the word “cryptocurrencies” back to one another. You just gotta laugh. We finish with Max yet again in thrall to the blank screen, still waiting for the clarifying word to come on from high. This expectancy, this want of affirmation, brings to mind something Gary says near the end of End Zone:
“I paused in his doorway, realizing suddenly that I spent a good deal of time in doorways, that I had always spent a lot of time in doorways, that much of my life had been passed this way. I was forever finding myself pausing in a doorway or standing before a window, looking into rooms and out of them, waiting to be tapped on the shoulder by an impeccably dressed gentleman whose flesh has grown over his mouth.”
When the radio headset’s gone down, when the season is over, when the game can’t be played anymore, well, what call comes next, to where will the player run, to where will the spectator – exemplary or not – fix their attention in that next grasping towards certainty, order, a sense of where you are. If that gets too vexing, well, another kickoff is right around the corner, and I think DeLillo will be watching along with all the rest of us.
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Maybe an enterprising paid subscriber wants to get me to read one of those!!
My vote is for Joy Williams, but I can see the argument
Hey! Fifty years! It’s a time peg!
Coincidentally also the name of a delicious sandwich perfect for watching football!
The less said about this relationship the better, as it is one of DeLillo’s stupidest conceits - what if the football player was such an exile that he dated a… fat chick???
For the record, Don DeLillo’s Super Bowl prediction for 2022, peering out three years or so in the future, was the Titans against the Seahawks. The Titans did actually finish with the top seed in the AFC last year, and even someone as clearsighted as DeLillo could not have foreseen Russell Wilson breaking his finger last year and dooming the Seahawks’ season, so it’s a pretty good guess all in all.
I’m guessing the bet would be a Push given nationwide crisis, but the books are often tricky.