The 'Quaint' Beauty of College Football

When you look in the dictionary under "sports fan" you'll never find a photograph of me, despite my stint many moons ago impersonating a sports editor for a newspaper at a time when I needed a job and it was the only one they had open.

That said, there's a certain spot in my heart that nothing else can touch but college football. And if there's a more sublime use for a sunny, springlike half-day of January than watching Alabama squeak past Texas Tech in the last four seconds of the Cotton Bowl, it's a pastime I'll have to learn about in paradise.

Why, then, this lingering core of sorrow, deep in my gut? What's happened to the sense of total joy I could feel 20 years ago...or even 10...for at least a few hours of a perfect day after a hard-fought glowing victory? I suspect it all comes down to the word "sportsmanship."

Call me naive, but when I see a strapping young kid lay a bone-jarring tackle on an opposing team's lineman, then watch the tackler linger for a few seconds to be sure the downed man is okay, even reach out an arm to help him back to his feet, I'm not immune from shedding a few tears. I guess it's the idealistic notion that even a sport with violence at its very heart can be played within gentlemanly rules--played for the love of a fair contest, rather than just for spite of an opponent.

In that sense, college football hasn't changed. No matter how physically imposing you are as a player, if you try to cheat--or even if you just act like a doofus, by doing a cheap end-zone dance to symbolically rub the other side's nose in the dirt after you've scored on them--a whistle immediately blows and there's a penalty to be paid for your behavior. Identical and unchanging rules, enforced by the referees on David and Goliath alike. Character does count.

It's a wonderful fantasy, and (speaking of naive) we once could believe that such a system was not limited to a dozen or so Saturdays of the year on isolated swatches of green grass but actually represented what our country, above all other countries, stood for. No longer. If the people who now have control of the United States government can unilaterally decide that the Geneva Conventions of Armed Conflict are "quaint" and "outdated," then they surely must hold the elaborate code of sportsmanship in college football beneath contempt.

This in itself would be disturbing enough, but roughly half of American adults who vote in elections apparently consider this brave new no-rules world to be a big improvement over the old-fashioned laws of enlightened civilizaton. Remember the outcry on radio talk shows, a while back, when an Olympics committee decided it was bad sportsmanship for spectators at the events to wave the flag theatrically and chant "USA" in a taunting manner when our side is winning? Communists! Traitors! the talk-show blusterers said. What's the use of winning if you can't strut like a rooster and symbolically rub the losers' noses in the dirt until they're bloody? God bless America, and devil take the hindmost.

That's the core of sorrow that I feel, every waking minute of every day and in my dreams besides. If there's any silver lining, it's that while this spirit of darkness holds sway in the halls of our government, a template still exists for hope and civilized behavior in a violent and threatening world--even if that fantasy is now limited to a dozen or so Saturdays a year on isolated swatches of grass across a nation that once held such great promise.