.Gridiron Gladiators: Block That Metaphor!
It’s too bad Bob Hope isn’t part of the “Fox NFL Sunday” crew. He might have been able to do something with the odd incongruity of Sunday’s program, broadcast from Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan: a show glorifying fake warriors and their game, playing to a crowd of real warriors locked in an eight-year-old conflict.
You can imagine Hope — always so good at telegraphing that he knew the absurd discordance of bringing Hollywood glamour into a war zone — having a fine time.
“You grunts think you’re the only ones worried about dodging bullets?” he’d say. “Heck, Plaxico Burress gets nervous every time he sticks his hand in his pocket. You flyboys and gals think you’re taking risks? Michael Vick got shot down in a dogfight, and he never even left the ground.”
But Sunday’s show, a nice gesture by Fox in advance of Veterans Day, ignored the incongruity in favor of the opposite: by the end of the two-hour broadcast a visitor from another planet might easily have concluded that football and warfare were the same thing.
The broadcast was full of mutual back scratching, both during the show and in promotional spots during the commercial breaks: Fox and the National Football League trying to establish themselves as the country’s most fervid supporters and thankers of the troops, the military steering the Fox crew to feature segments without an ounce of blood or moral ambiguity.
Each member of the Fox on-air crew — Howie Long, Terry Bradshaw, Michael Strahan, Jimmy Johnson, Jay Glazer and Curt Menefee (who was excellent as the frontman) — wore a uniform commemorating a different branch of the service. Early on there was a segment spotlighting N.F.L. players and employees who have served in the military and relatives of current players and coaches who are serving now.
A military unit led into a commercial break with a marching chant promoting the show and its personalities. (“I wanna hear the news by Jay; his latest scoopage makes my day.”) A promotional spot in which the N.F.L. honored the troops wrapped both football and military images around the words “teamwork, courage, leadership.” In a feature we saw American soldiers advising a village on agriculture, trying to encourage it to be self-sustaining and, presumably, to stay out of the opium business.
And then the lines got even blurrier. In another feature Mr. Bradshaw tried to use a robotic device to pick up a football. Presumably in real life it’s used to poke potential bombs and such. A group of soldiers joined the Fox men on an impromptu field to demonstrate the blitz — the football one, not the military one.
At no time, though, was the show more eerie than when, in the second hour, it turned its attention to Pat Tillman, the N.F.L player who left football to enlist and was killed in Afghanistan in a 2004 friendly fire incident that is still reverberating.
Mr. Menefee introduced the Tillman segment without mentioning how he died, and then the camera shifted to a festive scene inside the Pat Tillman Memorial U.S.O. on the base. Soldiers extolled the computers, phones and other nifty communication gear in the lounge, named for a man whose death was shrouded in miscommunication and cover-up.
Of course there’s no reason you’d expect a show from a military base to be anything other than what this one was. These broadcasts, whether Fox’s pregame show or Comedy Central’s “Colbert Report” (which spent a week in Iraq last June), are carefully orchestrated these days by both the television companies and the military, an opportunity for each to project a certain image, no spontaneity allowed. (The closest Sunday’s program came to anything unscripted was when Mr. Menefee asked for a moment of silence for those who died in the Fort Hood shooting.)
Nothing wrong with that; certainly the troops seem to enjoy the visits. They like hooting and saying “Hi, Mom” into a TV camera just as much as the college kids on ESPN’s live-from-the-campus pregame shows.
But it was a bit surreal seeing the war in Afghanistan through football’s eyes. The sport has always been full of war imagery: the gridiron gladiators, the drives into enemy territory, those blitzes. But there may never have been a war that’s less like football than the one in Afghanistan. In football the enemy is known, the rules are well defined, what’s at stake — i.e., not much — is clear, and the endpoint is predetermined.
For two hours the Fox show — though it acknowledged several times that soldiers, not football players, were the real heroes — gave us the illusion that the war and the game were the same. Maybe Tommie Harris of the Chicago Bears had been watching it just before heading onto the field for his 1 o’clock match against Arizona and became confused about which world he’s living in. Within the first 10 minutes he was ejected from the contest for slugging an opposing player.
NYT
You can imagine Hope — always so good at telegraphing that he knew the absurd discordance of bringing Hollywood glamour into a war zone — having a fine time.
“You grunts think you’re the only ones worried about dodging bullets?” he’d say. “Heck, Plaxico Burress gets nervous every time he sticks his hand in his pocket. You flyboys and gals think you’re taking risks? Michael Vick got shot down in a dogfight, and he never even left the ground.”
But Sunday’s show, a nice gesture by Fox in advance of Veterans Day, ignored the incongruity in favor of the opposite: by the end of the two-hour broadcast a visitor from another planet might easily have concluded that football and warfare were the same thing.
The broadcast was full of mutual back scratching, both during the show and in promotional spots during the commercial breaks: Fox and the National Football League trying to establish themselves as the country’s most fervid supporters and thankers of the troops, the military steering the Fox crew to feature segments without an ounce of blood or moral ambiguity.
Each member of the Fox on-air crew — Howie Long, Terry Bradshaw, Michael Strahan, Jimmy Johnson, Jay Glazer and Curt Menefee (who was excellent as the frontman) — wore a uniform commemorating a different branch of the service. Early on there was a segment spotlighting N.F.L. players and employees who have served in the military and relatives of current players and coaches who are serving now.
A military unit led into a commercial break with a marching chant promoting the show and its personalities. (“I wanna hear the news by Jay; his latest scoopage makes my day.”) A promotional spot in which the N.F.L. honored the troops wrapped both football and military images around the words “teamwork, courage, leadership.” In a feature we saw American soldiers advising a village on agriculture, trying to encourage it to be self-sustaining and, presumably, to stay out of the opium business.
And then the lines got even blurrier. In another feature Mr. Bradshaw tried to use a robotic device to pick up a football. Presumably in real life it’s used to poke potential bombs and such. A group of soldiers joined the Fox men on an impromptu field to demonstrate the blitz — the football one, not the military one.
At no time, though, was the show more eerie than when, in the second hour, it turned its attention to Pat Tillman, the N.F.L player who left football to enlist and was killed in Afghanistan in a 2004 friendly fire incident that is still reverberating.
Mr. Menefee introduced the Tillman segment without mentioning how he died, and then the camera shifted to a festive scene inside the Pat Tillman Memorial U.S.O. on the base. Soldiers extolled the computers, phones and other nifty communication gear in the lounge, named for a man whose death was shrouded in miscommunication and cover-up.
Of course there’s no reason you’d expect a show from a military base to be anything other than what this one was. These broadcasts, whether Fox’s pregame show or Comedy Central’s “Colbert Report” (which spent a week in Iraq last June), are carefully orchestrated these days by both the television companies and the military, an opportunity for each to project a certain image, no spontaneity allowed. (The closest Sunday’s program came to anything unscripted was when Mr. Menefee asked for a moment of silence for those who died in the Fort Hood shooting.)
Nothing wrong with that; certainly the troops seem to enjoy the visits. They like hooting and saying “Hi, Mom” into a TV camera just as much as the college kids on ESPN’s live-from-the-campus pregame shows.
But it was a bit surreal seeing the war in Afghanistan through football’s eyes. The sport has always been full of war imagery: the gridiron gladiators, the drives into enemy territory, those blitzes. But there may never have been a war that’s less like football than the one in Afghanistan. In football the enemy is known, the rules are well defined, what’s at stake — i.e., not much — is clear, and the endpoint is predetermined.
For two hours the Fox show — though it acknowledged several times that soldiers, not football players, were the real heroes — gave us the illusion that the war and the game were the same. Maybe Tommie Harris of the Chicago Bears had been watching it just before heading onto the field for his 1 o’clock match against Arizona and became confused about which world he’s living in. Within the first 10 minutes he was ejected from the contest for slugging an opposing player.
NYT
posted by madtom at 8:30 PM
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