Football has started again, with a new chance for teams to win, for fans to cheer on their favorites, and for America to behold the spectacle of freedom, association, and excellence—a manly spectacle, perhaps the last such spectacle we can boast. Football is as technological and scientific as anything we do these days, but it’s still violent, dangerous, and therefore rewards superior abilities while punishing weakness. This has become very difficult even to say, but we know it to be true.

Indeed, the violence and the suffering of football reveal the struggle to which flesh is heir. In the activity of NFL players, who are already the chosen few among the many who play college football, to say nothing of Pee Wee, we see the national drama, personal and public, based on the awareness that in America much is promised, but almost nothing guaranteed. That difficulty is why we admire the successful. They overcome much and inspire us to keep struggling.

Instead of escape, in our entertainment we in fact confront America as a whole, and commit morally to our part in the great empire of liberty, the continental democracy, the vast, restless people, often disappointed or even heartbroken, but rarely paralyzed by indecision or failure of nerve. I wonder whether we experience America as a fate, unfolding before our eyes, suggesting a power much greater than ourselves …

The Man Who Leads in America

Me, I’m a longtime Packers fan; Favre was playing when I was a boy, The Gunslinger; as an adult, I watched Aaron Rodgers for many years. I had the joy of seeing him win a Super Bowl and have a nearly perfect season (only to end, as frequently happens, in a stunning playoff defeat). But I don’t feel passionate about the game anymore. Partly, it’s how the country changed. I really disliked seeing strong men advertise in pink some cause about women and cancer, and any number of things like that. Partly, it’s the way the game changed to favor offense over defense, cheapening victory.

I tried to understand this new version of football by watching the new Netflix series, Quarterback, an unprecedented mix of documentary and reality TV. The production followed three young men, Patrick Mahomes of the Kansas City Chiefs, Kirk Cousins of the Minnesota Vikings, and Marcus Mariota of the Atlanta Falcons around for the season, interviewed them in private, showed their families, and then put it all together in an eight-episode story. It’s a success, and they’re doing it again this season.

How were the three chosen? I have no idea, but it does make sense. Mahomes is the most charming and the most successful QB right now, young, with two Super Bowl wins—one during this season, entertaining American love of victory all the way through the show. He gets about as much time as the other two combined. Cousins is a veteran, almost a decade older, and much gentler and more reserved, he’s a winner, but not a Super Bowl player, and preparing for the end of his career. Then there’s Mariota, a sensitive young man with beautiful eyes who loses his season, his position, and his job while facing the camera for interviews, a fate no one would envy. I am not sure Americans are any more tender to losers now than in the past; but I liked him.

Why look at QBs at all? Because America is obsessed with leadership, a word that has lost meaning through overuse. QBs are real, however, and they are leaders, not creatures of jargon or of the pieties of the educational institutions that foster the most inhuman conformism ever known to American history, making Puritans look like rock-ribbed heroes. QBs are tall, handsome, young, strong, confident, and therefore beautify military discipline and hint at war. They give orders, barking at the top of their voices, command the action, take the punishment, and always gloat when they win. They’re barbaric. We love them.

In an unexpected show of tact, there’s no talk of money on this show, although QBs make in a contract more than most Americans in a lifetime. Talent commands wealth—it’s the American way. They’re also celebrities. Both are necessary conditions for a successful series. Americans now claim a divine right to be entertained; we celebrate the celebrities that celebrate the American success we admire or envy. But what do these men do for a living?

Football

They get beaten up all the time, are covered in bruises, spend a lot of time in ice baths and any number of other scientific or technological devices to reduce inflammation and try to restore health. An entire episode is dedicated to this, since after all, fear of our health is one of our few very strong passions. These men take the hits, get up, and must retain use of their intelligence and accuracy. But they are not reckless, they have remarkable discipline and self-control in order to endure all this. They are walking, talking medical experimentation projects. If there is a virtue in this, it’s not manliness, but moderation.

Kirk Cousins is a modestly pious American Protestant of some denomination he doesn’t mention, being a reserved fellow. But three minutes into the series, God is mentioned. It’s a rare sign of an America that once was visible everywhere, including in entertainment. Athletes are not only the one example of man we still admire and do not, for the most part, resent or try to outlaw; they are also the only type of man who still routinely thanks God, in public. They put most clergy to shame in that respect. Why do they do it? They face so much uncertainty and there are so many burdens they must bear. It’s providence or despair, I guess.

Love of victory defines these men, which is why they are so readily identifiable, so unlike most of us. But they function in an incredibly strict organization. A QB does three things besides play a position like anyone else on the field. First, he is the voice and judgment of the coach on the field, a lieutenant to his captain, if you will; second, he exhorts his men and encourages them to fight, indeed makes demands on them, lest they slacken, become perplexed, or despair; third and finally, he is the will of the team when they are able to work together, bringing about a unity in action that civilian life prohibits otherwise. That is the secret we see naked with our own eyes every game, but do not quite make sense of.

Mahomes is the exemplar of such leadership. He’s endlessly careful to maintain his health and strength, as well as the morale of his men. He takes a lot of pleasure in studying his adversaries and reducing them to tears. He is demotic, charming, looks boyish, and faces the camera with a mix of braggadocio and puckish humor. He has a strange curly Mohawk. Men like him are the reason America is so much fun.

The Midwestern American Home

Then there’s the Reality TV part of the show. You see these young men in their silly McMansions, large, but very much middle class—nothing palatial about them—you hear from their wives, who of course love the attention and know how to prepare for the camera, and, seeing Minnesota, Michigan, and Kansas City, you try to understand what it is about Midwest America that’s so reassuring and charming. America looks normal for once, which is almost unique in our entertainment. You might not think the suburbs are the conquest of nature, but that’s exactly what they are—nothing bad ever happens there.

That’s true of these men, too. Unlike most young men, they’re married, they have kids (two new kids during the season filmed), they treat their wives well, and they thrive at their jobs. This is what success looks like in America. Cousins’s wife picks out his clothes so he looks like a sensitive version of the middle-class American dad, whose major virtue is an inoffensive reliability. Mahomes, the jokester, is dutifully supportive of his wife’s ownership of a female soccer club. Mariota’s wife helps him rehearse his play calling, to memorize and react quickly. They help each other. They all do charity and are kind to people. You could hardly wish for better neighbors!

There’s much more to say, but it’s better if you just watch Quarterback and talk it over with your friends. Enjoy the spectacle of manliness while you can, because it’s rare and endangered. These young men are impressive, but there is often a sinister undertone in the story. They sometimes talk in the pieties of public speakers, as though their statements were checked by PR, legal, and corporate HR. They go to therapy and sometimes speak like therapists. There’s surprisingly little in the show about friendship between men, but one suspects that’s the major attraction of team sports. I’m not sure these young men even know that we admire them because they are men, and we hope there will be a next generation more impressive than the previous.