The University is the center of American religious life
And, football is the University's biggest ritual celebration
I was at a dinner last night for a friend’s birthday, and someone had just gotten back from Ann Arbor for Thanksgiving, where their sister was in graduate school. They hadn’t a clue that the weekend after Thanksgiving was The Game and that this year it was in Ann Arbor.
They hadn’t a clue that there’d be a hundred thousand folks drunk by mid-morning ready for noon kickoff or that in that same stadium in Ann Arbor in 1935, an Ohio State student named Jesse Owens set three world records in track and field and tied another, all in less than an hour. Some call it "the greatest 45 minutes ever in sport.”
No one at the dinner party knows that this year Gus and Joel would be in the booth calling the game, or that on broadcasts Gus calls Ohio State “the world-famous Ohio State Buckeyes” because after leaving Ohio State in 1936, Jesse Owens went to the Olympics in Berlin right when Hitler was coming to power, and some say in just a few moments “single-handedly crushed Hitler's myth of Aryan supremacy.” The photo of Jesse on the Olympic podium surrounded by “Heil Hitler” salutes after winning gold in the 100-meter dash still haunts me—slightly hunched, gazing forward, saluting the American flag as it is raised in the distance, saluting the complicated earthy greatness of his home nation.
He took a bite of a taco and said he couldn’t believe how many people were there, going into, “What’s it called, the big house?” Over 100,000, I said. I wondered if I was going to have to do the thing tonight, like, defend college football at a dinner party. Someone said, “I mean, what an indictment of American culture, right?”
What is the indictment exactly—that American culture worships higher education and that…that is bad? Here we are, sitting around a table, everyone with Ivy League degrees in one form or another. Which part are we indicting, the “college” or the “football?” Or are we indicting our inability to read sports?
In the mysterious privilege called life, the world unfolds in front of us in many forms. To someone who’s never studied plants, the forest appears as a wall of indecipherable greenness. To someone who’s never studied Renaissance art, museums are boring as fuck. To someone who knows nothing about jazz music, Coltrane is meaningless babbling. To someone who’s never learned to watch sports, and especially has never been a participant in creating sports, everything appears like an action movie.
Phenomenology is the study of experience. We have to learn to experience. Often times, we think that, like, experience is just innate, but, to state the obvious, it is not. Inflections appear as we learn to read the world’s many contours of meaning and drama. Learning how to see and feel, to set expectations and have them broken, to hear the nostalgia of one-six-four-five chord progression, or to see the hive-mind brilliance of Barcelona’s tiki taka style or the jazz-like improvisation of Argentina’s La Nuestra.
Earlier this year, my partner, who’s from Spain, and I went across the water to take in the festivities surrounding the early-season Washington-Oregon game. She doesn’t like American football much, but we walked around and, wading through the mass of humanity, started rating the best “gameday (out)fits.” She liked the clean purple sweater tops with jeans—no UW insignia. We also talked about how if you commit to colorful pants (purple), then you can do a classy top. There was a man shouting into a megaphone with a sign about “Jesus died for your sins” or whatever. People were cooking food, drinking, and laughing. It wasn’t yet noon.
There’s an old YouTube video of Stephen Fry going to the Iron Bowl (Alabama v. Auburn). Being British, he’s never been to a college football game, and there’s this wonderful quote where he says, “I’m not sure if there’s anything that sums up America better. It’s simultaneously preposterous, incredibly laughable, impressive, charming, ridiculous, expensive, overpopulated, wonderful…American.” He gets his hand painted with the Auburn crest by some drunk undergraduates. It’s sort of funny, and then the 100,000 Alabamans sing “God Bless America” together, and by the end of the video, he’s crying, overwhelmed by the religiousness of it all. Then two fighter jets fly just over the stadium, ripping the atmosphere to shreds at the peak of violent technology.
Another European traveling in America 180 years prior, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote that “they brought with them into the New World a form of Christianity which I cannot better describe than by styling it a democratic republican religion.” What Stephen Fry is experiencing is the culmination of the “deism” that founded the United States—that is, a fundamental ambivalence about God and total religious commitment to a kind of Spartan scientific materialism. Here we can think of Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia, Benjamin Franklin’s University of Pennsylvania, and Benjamin Rush’s Franklin and Marshall College.
The university is the center of American religious life, and college football is its biggest advertising institution. The event we call a college football game is much more than the football itself. During downtime, professors are congratulated for their accomplishments, new discoveries are made public, and fundraisers happen for charity—mostly for dying children and for cancer—two admirable but unsolvable realities. We Americans love unsolvable problems.
To focus on the football is to miss the bigger picture of what’s going on, which is a sabbath-like event that involves all the best earthly things like food, drink, and sport. This is all meant to turn American higher education into a kind of cult-like organism. College football is about reproducing the founding American worldview, which Jefferson illustrated by saying “that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living: that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.” Indeed, this is true now of Jefferson himself, whose beliefs about racial superiority we shall dispose of. But this tradition is about the real stuff, here and now: science, sport, and imbibe. This American tradition follows the Epicurean one of ancient Greece in its commitment to hedonism, materialism (specifically, atomism), and simple living.
And so, if we are to indict American culture on the grounds of college football, we must reject these deeper threads. Perhaps they are worth an indictment. The earth is burning in part because of the imperial export of this culture worldwide. Indeed, today we live on a kind of epicurean globe. But nonetheless, we must learn to read sport for the real cultural vortex that it is. On the field and off, college football is not Premier League soccer. This is true for, say, music. We might say I like _this_ genre or _that_ genre (I like the experience of listening to this genre or that), but to look at the phenomenon alone does not account for the fact that musics differ in their production too.
From a sociological perspective, people meeting up to play jazz in a basement in South Seattle twice a week is not the same thing as Lil Nas X making a beat on his computer. It is not the same thing as the millions of dollars and thousands of people implicated by the production process of a Taylor Swift album. I say this only to point out that there is a very unique way in which college football in America is tangled in our country’s most cherished, lasting, and powerful institutions—indeed, the sport started as a collegiate sport. To the extent that we might include sport in some list of cultural production alongside music, art, and dance, none are as entangled with the university.
For people that didn’t grow up in, or near, or of college towns, it is unimaginable that hundreds of thousands would pour into town, dressed in clothing celebrating an institution of higher education, and share food and drink together every single Saturday in autumn. It would be even more surprising to know that a large chunk of those people do not have tickets but will watch the game on a TV outside the stadium together, in community.
In some aristocratic cultures, they carry their sacred objects on thrones through the town, and everyone cheers. For us, those are the football players. The point is not really whether it’s fun to look at the royals, but instead all the peripheral and incidental celebrations we call society, all of the sociality that the royals will into existence.
But of course, here we were at a dinner party, Yale graduates, an institution that has moved past the plebeian thing called football. Let us then continue the birthday dinner by talking about more noble Germanic and Anglo-Saxon pursuits, like climbing a mountain alone.