SHOCK AND AWE!

John Schulian, ed., Football: Great Writing About the National Sport (New York: Library of America, 2014) (From Mark Kram "No Pain, No GAIN": "Admittedly, it is not easy to control a game that is inherently destructive to the body. Tip the rules to the defense, and you have nothing more than gang war; move them toward the offense, and you have mostly conflict without resistance. Part of the NFL dilemma is in its struggle between illusion and reality; it wants to stir the blood without you really absorbing that it is blood. It also luxuriates in its image of the American war game, strives to be the perfect metaphor for Clausewitz's ponderings about real war tactics (circa 1819, i.e., stint on blood and you lose). The warrior ethic is central to the game, and no coach or player can succeed without astute attention to the precise fashioning of a warrior mentality (loss of self), defined by Ernie Barnes, formerly of the Colts and Chargers, as 'the aggressive nature that know no safety zones'." "Whatever normal is, sustaining that degree of pure aggression for sixteen, seventeen Sundays each season (military officers will tell you it's not attainable regularly in real combat) can't be part of it. 'It's a war in every sense of the word,' wrote Jack Tatem of the Raiders in They call Me Assassin. Tatem, maybe the preeminent hitter of all times, broke the neck of receiver Darryl Stingley, putting him in a wheelchair for life; by most opinions, it was a legal hit. He elaborated: 'Those hours before a game are lonely and tough. I think about, even fear, what can happen.' If a merciless intimidator like Tatum could have fear about himself and others, it becomes plain that before each game players must find a room down a dark and distant hall not reachable by ordinary minds." Id. at 272, 279-280. Shock and awe. Perhaps there is a psychological connection between the rise in football as the national sport and America's finding itself in constant conflict and endless war.).