Michael MacCambridge's 2004 America's Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation:
Pro football succeeded ultimately because it struck a resonant chord in the American psyche. In a time of increasing alienation and urban flight, when a sense of community was dissipating, it unified cities in ways that other civic enterprises could not.
What no one could have counted on, though, was the sheer degree with which sports fans began to care about, and build their lives around, their respective pro football teams. The NFL became a reality unto itself, one that far transcended its domain of Sunday afternoons and, later, Monday nights. From Dallas to Los Angeles, Cleveland to Baltimore, New York City to Kansas City, modern American men found a truth and beauty in pro football that was more reliable, more sharply defined, than almost any other aspect of their lives.
Like the best of the arts, pro football worked on multiple levels. For the loyalists, there was the fortune of the home team. For neutral or casual fans, there was action, skill, suspense, and violence. For gamblers, the wagering proposition. For those with a deeper interest, the game could exist on a canvas -- as a morality play; a cultural metaphor; a crucible of values in which teamwork, sacrifice, and dedication were rewarded, while selfishness, cowardice, and sloth were harshly punished. What those who were contemptuous of sports misunderstood was not merely that a middle-class sports fan might revere football to the same degree that an inveterate theatergoer revered Shaekspeare, but that he might do so for many of the same reasons.
Tags: Michael MacCambridge, America's Game
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