On the End of the Notion of Football As Militaristic: It's official
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I thought of medieval armor when looking at the Invaders players who this weekend, for the first time this season, put on pads for practice. Football, America's sport, is seen as militaristic, yet there is a trend away from the use of militaristic terms in the official coverage of the game. That is commensurate with a trend in the world as well. -gw
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In a little-discussed shift in recent years, the NFL has moved away from depicting its games in military terms. ... [T]he NFL no longer endorses using military terminology to describe its contests. ...
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"It's a matter of common sense," NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said. ...
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The same is true at NFL Films, an arm of the league that perpetuated for decades the image of football as controlled warfare by producing movies glorifying the game's violence with phrases like "linebacker search and destroy." In recent years the company's president, Steve Sabol, ordered all allusions to war be removed from its new films.
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"I don't think you will ever see those references coming back," he said. "They won't be back in our scripts, certainly not in my lifetime."
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The sport that once saw itself as the closest thing in athletics to the military no longer holds to this once-cherished notion.
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"We're not going to fight no war, man," Pittsburgh Steelers defensive end Nick Eason said during pregame festivities this past week before his team's clash tonight with the Arizona Cardinals. A direct contrast to Bernie Parrish, who played cornerback for the Cleveland Browns in the 1960s and said in a hotel lobby here: "We wanted to kill each other. It was mortal combat. We were warriors."
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No one in the NFL is quite certain when the notion changed.
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Baha'is know when the notion changed, with the coming of Baha'u'llah. -gw
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