Against Football (10 page)

It's easy for fans to dismiss a moment like this as reflective of some unfortunate “ghetto mentality.” It becomes much more depressing to admit that Roby is parroting the guiding ethos of the NFL, and the private sector.

The truth is, I have a lot
more
respect for Roby. If you grew up amid the kind of deprivation that a lot of NFL prospects did, and football represented your one best chance to lift yourself and your loved ones out of poverty, why the hell wouldn't you want to get money?

It's a lot tougher for me to sympathize with mercenary executives and team owners who were born into affluence. Why must they squeeze every penny from their position of cultural power? Do they feel no shame in snatching taxpayer money they don't really need from impoverished communities? Is the acquisition of capital the only way they know how to keep score? At what point do we admit that the NFL's true economic function is to channel our desire for athletic heroism into an engine of nihilistic greed?

I once made the mistake of watching a football game with an Italian woman who was studying medieval gender roles, and with whom, rather unimaginatively, I hoped to have sex. It was the sort of mistake one makes in one's twenties, before one has developed a proper appreciation for the virtues of compartmentalization.

“They are spending most times hugging,” Elena observed.

“Those are blocks,” I said.

“Then at the end, they make a big pile on the ground and grind each other.”

“There's no grinding.”

“Then they spank the others on the behind. It's a gay ritual!”

“I don't think so,” I said.

“But look. Before each time, the skinny one, the sex leader—”

“The
quarterback
—”

“He makes all the big boys bend over. Then he chooses his favorite and comes up behind the lucky one and makes a pantomime of sodomy.”

“No,” I said. “No no no. That's the snap. It's how the play starts. And the quarterback gets the ball from one guy, the center. It's not a choice. He can't just come up to, like, the tight end.”

Elena looked at me for several complicated European seconds. “The
what
?”

Earlier this year, a University of Missouri football player named Michael Sam announced that he was gay. He'd never worked hard to hide who he was. He dated a man throughout college. He frequented a gay club in Columbia. He came out to his college teammates before his last season. Many of them already knew.

As a kid growing up in Texas, Sam watched one of his older brothers die from a gunshot wound. Two more of his seven siblings died, and two others were imprisoned. He was once maced by police officers who had come to his house to arrest a relative. He also lived, briefly, in his mother's car. These events probably helped Michael Sam put the issue of his sexual orientation into perspective.

In May the St. Louis Rams drafted the highly touted defensive end in the seventh round. If Sam makes the team, he will be the first openly gay player in NFL history. And thus his decision not to hide his sexual orientation—what we heterosexuals think of as
living
—became a huge story.

The underlying premise of this story was that the NFL might not be “ready” for an openly gay player. Reporters
found sources to mouth the necessary misgivings. Anonymous team officials fretted that Sam's draft stock would drop because of the media distraction he might cause, to which they were naturally (and, again, anonymously) contributing.

It was one of those media narratives in which the alleged subject (
Michael Sam: Gay Guy in Shoulder Pads
) was much less interesting than the actual subject:
A Workplace Exists in America, Circa 2014, in Which the Prospect of Accommodating a Single Openly Gay Employee Is Enough to Induce Panic.

In what other setting would this sort of bigotry be tolerated? The Armed Forces used to be an acceptable standby. At this point, we're down to outfits run by fundamentalist religious groups.

The logic seems to be that football is a domain of hyper-masculinity, a physical and psychological space where alpha males do battle. And gay men can't be alphas because they are fragile and frightened and weak, which is to say feminine.

And everyone knows (and curiously consents to the fact) that the assigned roles of the feminine in football remain safely locked in the pre-suffrage era. The two archetypes seen most commonly on television are cheerleaders and players' wives. Got that, ladies? You can either dance around on the sidelines as a half-naked sex object or sit in the stands cheering on your man. It remains unclear to me why so many women watch football, given how dismissive the game is of them.

But I'm more interested, for now, in the way a figure like
Sam exposes the neurotic sexual conflicts at the heart of football.

Here, for instance, is how a linebacker named Jonathan Vilma explained his concerns about having Sam as a teammate: “Imagine if he's the guy next to me and, you know, I get dressed, naked, taking a shower, the whole nine, and it just so happens he looks at me. How am I supposed to respond?”

Vilma's point is that, unlike employees in other lines of work, he might have to be naked in front of Sam, which would make him feel uncomfortable. Fair enough.

But can I just ask: Why is Jonathan Vilma haunted by a fantasy
of his own devising
in which he is standing naked next to Michael Sam and being visually inspected by him, maybe even (gasp) admired? What is Vilma—a player so vicious that he was suspended for four games last season for attempting to injure opposing players—really afraid of here? That the simple act of a gay man looking at his naked body will call his own sexuality into question? That he'll catch gay cooties? That Sam will overpower him and force him to have gay sex? Why does Vilma imagine that he has to respond to Sam at all?

Before I go any further with this disquisition, let me confess that I get what Vilma was saying. And if you stripped away all my sensitivo politesse—or just plunked me in front of an NFL game with a bunch of soused buddies—I would cop to the same worry. That's why I feel comfortable speculating about Vilma's motives. We've got the same issues. Almost
all straight men do. We're afraid of being gay, and that fear (whether we like it or not) contains an unconscious wish. Freud himself believed that we begin life with unfocused libidinal drives and that, though most of us settle into an orientation, we retain an attraction to both sexes.

For the record, if this isn't already clear, I grew up in a male-dominated home where insecurity and bullying and homoeroticism ran rampant. I dealt with my confusion by throwing myself into sports, as a player and fan. Like a lot of guys, I believed that being a jock, albeit an inept one, would vouchsafe my heterosexuality.

And yet it's also true that I found in the world of sports a way to sublimate my feelings of affection and desire for men. I did look at other guys in the locker room and I thought a lot about their bodies. I didn't fantasize about having sex with them, but I did envy the power and confidence they possessed and I wanted to be close to them. It got sloppy. I can remember my mother walking into my room one night only to discover, to her obvious distress, that I was giving a back massage to a shirtless friend. Another time, behind a locked door, two soccer buddies and I measured our erect cocks in anguished silence. That's a decent executive summary of my adolescence: endless dick measuring.

After his first year in college, my twin brother Mike told me he was gay. I was absolutely floored. I'd been harboring the suspicion that he was sleeping with my girlfriend. He had dated women in high school and been a standout on the swim and water polo teams. But I wonder now if my obsession
with sports was in some ways a response to whatever part of me recognized Mike as gay. Later on, it would become clear that Mike tended to date African-American men. Was my fandom in some ways a coded expression of the same attraction?

My own view of sexuality at this point lines up with Kinsey. Our desires are a lot more fluid than we like to admit—a spectrum, not a duality. I like to joke that my friend Billy (who hates sports and dresses like the New Jersey equivalent of a peacock) is 23 percent gay. What I'm really saying is that I'm 23 percent gay. That's how it works with homophobia. It's just one big projection racket. Anybody who says he hates gay people is really saying he hates the secret gay parts of himself.

I believe there have always been people who are more sexually attracted to their own gender than the opposite gender, and the ones with the courage to admit to these impulses and act upon them get labeled gay. In the end, if you look at things objectively, it should make very little difference how people find sexual happiness. It's their business, just like your sex life is your business. Parts is parts.

Our sexual morality is almost entirely culturally determined. In the world of the Old Testament—a world defined by the patrilineal inheritance of land and the expansion of power by marriage—homosexuality mucked up the given order. So God told a story about how it was deviant. In ancient
Greece, grown men wooed and bedded teenage boys. The mightiest Greek soldier of all time, Achilles, loved his friend Patroklus more than any concubine. Nobody freaked.

Here in America, at the dawn of the third millennium AD, 60 percent of us support same-sex marriage. But there's still this huge undertow of masculinity anxiety. And the preserve where this anxiety finds its purest and most obvious expression is in the Athletic Industrial Complex, especially in the game of football.

No other major sport defines masculinity in such radical terms, as both violent and physically intimate. It is my own belief that the brutality of the game is what allows for such intimacy. Men purchase the right, through their valor, to love other men without experiencing shame. Football is a form of camouflage, a display of manliness so overt that the viewer never questions the game's subtle oddities.

And I suppose this brings us right to the main event, a document called
The Wells Report,
which was compiled, at the NFL's direction, after the starting left tackle for the Miami Dolphins, Jonathan Martin, left the team last October and checked into a nearby hospital for psychological treatment. He quit due to “persistent bullying.”
The Wells Report
offers a rare peek inside the sanctum of an NFL locker room. It also presents a riveting and unintended saga of homoerotic turmoil.

The dramatis personae are mostly members of the
offensive line, a close-knit unit led by a charismatic veteran named Richie Incognito. The authors affirm that Incognito, along with fellow vets Mike Pouncey and John Jerry, engaged in “a pattern of harassment” toward Martin that went beyond the standard rookie hazing. Press reports focused on the racial epithets that Incognito, who is white, directed at Martin, who is African-American. Among the more poetic sobriquets: “half-nigger piece of shit,” “shine box,” “stinky Pakistani” and “darkness.”

Incognito also makes vulgar comments about Martin's mother and, in particular, his sister, a medical student whom he has never met. (“I'm going to bang the shit out of her and spit on her and treat her like shit” is one of his milder offerings.)

Like a lot of dudes who traffic in this sort of casual misogyny, Incognito and his pals also spout a lot of homophobic trash talk. In addition to hurling racist slurs at a Japanese assistant trainer, Incognito makes it a point to ask him for “rubby rubby sucky sucky.” He nicknames another submissive teammate “Loose Booty,” and routinely grabs him and asks him for a hug. The homophobia has an anxious, compensatory feel to it. At one point, Pouncey restrains “Loose Booty” and tells Jerry to “come get some pussy.” Jerry then touches the victim's ass in a way that simulates anal penetration. Because, you know, that's how you prove you're definitely
not
gay.

What's most striking about
The Wells Report
is its depiction of the volatile friendship between Incognito and Martin.
Teammates describe the two as inseparable. In the course of their stormy fourteen-month relationship, they exchange 13,000 text messages, or nearly 30 a day. They seek each other out “at all hours of the day or night” and discuss “the intimate details of their sex lives, often in graphic terms.”

Martin tells the investigators he befriended his tormentor hoping to stem his abuse, as victims often do. He appears genuinely perplexed by Incognito's mood swings. “At one point he pulled his shirt off & tried to beat my ass yesterday,” he writes in one text. “Then 5 min later it was like nothing even happened and we went to the strip club.” He refers to Incognito as “bipolar.”

But the deeper one reads into the report, the more it seems to describe a psychic crisis. Richie Incognito is guilty of bullying. But his true crime seems to be that he harbors forbidden desires for Jonathan Martin.

As he admits to investigators, his term of preference for Martin is “my bitch.” When Martin declines his offers to socialize, or to take trips together, Incognito reacts like a spurned lover. His invective reflects a familiar preoccupation. At one point, Incognito pressures Martin to vacation with him in Las Vegas. Here's the exchange of texts that causes Martin to back out: