More book commentary, while I'm completely blocked on an Ash Wednesday message...for tomorrow.
Have you ever had the experience of hearing a speaker with whose argument you agree, and whose basic points you readily acknowledge as valid and factual, and yet all you can think as they continue to speak is "oh, good LORD, get ON with it already!!"? That's roughly the experience of reading Diane Roberts's Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America.
Roberts is a darling of the NPR crowd and contributor to the likes of Oxford American (vouching for her Southernness cred with a particular crowd) and the Guardian (international credibility). She's a faculty member at FSU (where she also studied, along with a degree from Oxford), after some years at the University of Alabama. And she's a college football addict, the type who tosses around phrases like "these are my people" when talking about college football and its fans. This after conducting a thorough and thoroughly snarky dissection of everything those fans love and represent.
The book is, cleverly, divided into four quarters with a pregame, halftime, and postgame. Each quarter has five chapters organized around a general theme, with the exception of the third quarter, on gender and college football, which inexplicably has only two. The other three quarters touch on the tribal hatreds of college football, religion (read: Christianity) and college football, and race and "Southernness", respectively, although the last chapter of the fourth quarter diverges somewhat into the saga of Bobby Bowden's fall at FSU. (The "halftime" chapter mostly focuses on the hazing/murder of the drum major of Florida A & M University's Marching 100 in 2011, with a few mentions of other band misbehaviors.)
Clearly all of these subjects provide ample fodder for one who wants to take college football apart, and Roberts pulls out all the stops in doing so. She doesn't spare her beloved FSU by any means (the Jameis Winston debacle gets a major airing-out) but plenty of schools get skewered.
For those who know Roberts's NPR commentary or other writing projects, the voice will be familiar. It may come off a bit more strident than in some cases. Possibly this comes, one might suspect, with taking a hatchet to a phenomenon to which one has already declared one's loyalty and unwillingness to give up. The whole tone of going on and on and on gets more than a little annoying.
There are parts of the book that are actually indispensible. It is particularly touching and harrowing when Roberts returns to her experiences tutoring athletes at FSU lo, those many years ago, young boy-men given to arrogance on the field, not always able to live up to that bravado when confronted with things like classes that are beyond their capacity. When the humans who are both at the center of and decidedly at the bottom of the pecking order in college football come into focus, the book is actually compelling.
Of course, there is one issue that Roberts somehow manages to dance around for most of the book's longer-than-it-looks length, one which this blog doesn't allow you to overlook, of course -- the issue which is largely unavoidable in football these days. And yet largely, it is avoided here, or made mostly an object of snark.
It seems that Roberts mostly regards the "concussion crisis" as (a) the ultimate bogeyman that will finally undo the NCAA (possibly, I guess), or (b) the ultimate bogeyman that will take away her beloved college football. Of course Roberts would never be so gauche as to say that directly, but that's about the only thing one can draw from her few comments on the subject. You would think that an academic thinker like Roberts might do more with the brain-trauma issue -- connect it to the racial issue, as more affluent (and frequently more white) players might have the luxury to pull a Chris Borland, while poorer (and frequently blacker) athletes will see themselves with fewer options. But really, Roberts just doesn't seem up to the task of confronting that issue squarely.
But I suppose when one of the key phrases of her "pregame" is "I accept and embrace my Inner Barbarian," and she waxes poetic about being unable to quit the game the way one can't quit a bad boyfriend, that was probably too much to hope for.
[An aside: stepping back from Roberts's tome, this seems like a place to point out a basic ethical principle at play here. For her being a college football addict is an identity, one bred into her over pretty much her whole life. For any Christian, though, this is an excuse, not a reason. From the point of view of this blog (seeking to understand and act on football and its damage to children of God from a Christian-ethical viewpoint), we have to do better than retreating to talk of identity. After all, people who are actually following Christ, or even trying to do so, have a higher identity, do we not? And when that identity (for which the word "Christian" used to be useful before becoming overly politicized) comes into conflict with any of our other human identities, or when those human identities demand of us compromises that cannot be squared with our allegiance to Christ, then which allegiance is supposed to win?]
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