Marc Carvajal 3 February 2010 One Million Watts 565 views One Comment Print This Post  Email This Post

On a recent snowboarding trip, I discovered that yuppie ski kids say the doggonnest things while high on their own endorphins. One twelve-year-old boy yelled “It is time to ski down this mofo!” as he used his poles to draw a circle in the sky. A little girl screamed “Hallelujah jalapeño!” as she snowplowed her way down a nearly-flat beginner cat-track. But I can’t blame those kids. I remember how great it felt at that prison-of-an-age to get out to exercise and play.

A similar exhilaration happens when we simply watch sports on TV. We project our own hopes and motivations into an athlete’s competitive situation. Though we tend to bodily inherit the infectious action of movies (after seeing Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” I karate-kicked the trashcan outside the theater), watching movies generates a fictional tension, whereas watching athletes face their consequential fate in real time makes us nervous at a time when the athletes are most likely nervous too.

When I watch sports, I have come to terms the fact that I am wasting time. Though fun and entertaining, it’s clear that nothing really constructive is going on. In fact, the very reason I watch sports on TV is to feel more active as I sit, to justify my own inactivity. One might even say that the whole goal of television is to get its viewers to feel justified in lying on the couch, watching, and eating.

Come to think of it, this is the reason I eat only oysters while watching TV. Pouring those things down my throat involves little energy; I don’t even have to chew. If I ate something laborious and complicated, like lobster, the value of television, regardless of its content, would suffer; why be so active when I can watch others be active for me? If I’m going to get my heart-rate up trying to crack open a dead lobster, I might as well go outside and play football. I wonder what would happen if one TV channel was reserved for a continuous shot of a family sitting on a sofa, staring straight ahead at the viewer. Would it become a game of who can be more passive?

Though I’m a big fan of NFL football and excited for the upcoming Super Bowl — kind of — I want to suggest one serious revision to ensure the game remains action-packed right through to the end. Hundreds of advertisers are spending millions of dollars to get their ads seen, so if there isn’t enough action to see the game right through to its conclusion, viewers will tune out. Obviously, we can’t change how the game is scored, but just because one team might be shutting out its opponent, that doesn’t mean the ending cannot at least be interesting.

I propose that we implement a rule forbidding a winning offense to simply kneel the ball as time is running out. “Taking a knee” strikes me as a very wimpy and anti-climactic way to end the game. I understand that a winning team just wants to win the game without taking undue chances, like risking turnovers or injuries. But for the purposes of TV entertainment, a game shouldn’t end on that note. It’s like a guitar player at a rock concert omitting an encore because he wants to keep his guitar in tune.

People may say that the difference is that a risk in football could kill you, but I say that once you put something on TV, we have the right to expect a narrative arc, which includes an exciting ending. Novelist Milan Kundera once hinted that a good ending should have “architectonic clarity,” a semblance of the beginning toward which we are now nostalgic. In this case, the game’s conclusion should reflect the infinite possibility of a football game that’s just beginning. Watching a winning offense kneeling on the ball is like watching a pancake in water.

I propose these three alternatives to taking a knee that the NFL should consider for next year.

1. If the quarterback takes a knee, the defense can treat it as a normal play and attack the quarterback, but they have to do it via kneel-walking in place of running. The offensive line has to stay kneeling. The game would essentially become football on your knees.

2. The other team’s defense can still blitz while the offense tries to take a knee, but if they injure any offensive player, the defensive unit automatically loses.

3. Have two possible endings: The winning team can take a knee, but the TV station invents a final play just for the viewers. Perhaps the two teams could agree to get together before the game to choreograph it.

A lot of NFL players have their stories about playing football in their backyards when they were young. (They’re intended to be “see, I’m just like you” stories, to remind people that they didn’t just grow up in a house made of gold-plated marble swimming pools.) When I was little, I often refused to leave my house unless it was to ride my bike to the store to buy Fun Dip. However, I had a friend who forced me to play football with him outside — or rather, he punted the ball to me in order to practice his punishing tackling skills on my stick legs. Since I was a bit afraid of the world at that age, I avoided his tackles by throwing the ball out of bounds just before he tackled me during one of my punt returns. If I didn’t have the ball, he couldn’t tackle me. But after the game, we both felt a bit dejected. I could have at least tried a couple moves before giving up the ball in order to make things more challenging for him.

Thus, when a team kneels down in final seconds of a game, I’m reminded of my childhood. By taking a knee, the winning offense is saying you can’t hit us, we’ve already won. If I was on the losing team, I’d know I’d try to tackle some of the players on the way off the field. Screw fines and suspensions. I’d do it to make the game worth the price of admission.

- Marc Carvajal

PHOTO BY JOHN-MORGAN