an accidental despatch from the US south

Behold! I have had a thought.

Hi!

Hello! I have terrific news. I was in South Carolina earlier this week and I sat in the garden of friends of friends of friends and watched American football on a big projector and I quite simply had the best time. It was so fun. The game lasted for five hours and there was a very dramatic debate about reffing decisions and my now beloved Georgia Dawgs won against boring, poxy Texas.

I didn’t know a single rule of American football when I sat down by it turns out that there is no happier person on earth than an American man being asked by a foreign woman to explain the rules of a sport he’s grown up with, so I would argue that a terrific time was had by all. I don’t believe I actually know all the rules yet, especially as you can really pack a lot of drinking into five hours, but I think I've now got the gist of it.

Perhaps most importantly, I am now able to say, with a reasonable amount of conviction, that American football is the most homoerotic sport I have ever had the pleasure of watching. Here is why:

1. Little sluts in their little slut outfits

It is possible I may have shocked some of our hosts on that night because at some point a woman asked me if I was having a good time and I told her I’d not expected to be watching quite this many cocks and balls, but sometimes that’s just where the night takes you. She giggled in that quite high pitched way which makes you realise that you maybe had the right remark but not quite the right audience.

Still, I stand by it. American football players have all the money in the world. Why are their little shorts and little trousers so thin, so white, so see-through? Somehow they all looked like they were wearing that one pair of leggings every woman owns but knows are so knackered that it would be unwise to wear them outside. On multiple occasions I found myself thinking “christ, buy me a drink first”.

2. All those fleshy, fleshy mouths

I don’t have the internet on my phone in America but my friend does so throughout the game we got stuck in this pattern of me throwing a name at him, him googling the name, then us looking at the little screen together. The reason this kept happening was that I would, every ten minutes or so, see a close-up of a player and think “well hello, sailor”, and feel the need to see him outside of his helmet and mouthguard situation.

On precisely no occasion did the player end up looking even remotely as hot as a civilian as he did on the field (pitch? field? fitch? pield?). This confused me at first but I eventually realised what was happening. Women have make-up and contouring and false lashes and what have you and male American football players have their own little get-up.

The mouthguard they have to wear at all times makes their lips look all swollen and pink and pouty, and the way the helmet frames their face makes their cheekbones pop and stand out. As it turns out, it is very easy to look like a model while playing American football when, in real life, what you look like is “someone who gets concussed for a living”. 

3. You construct intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men

I mean I’m just not sure I need to go into a lot more detail here. The subtitle above is from a piece of art produced by Barbara Kruger, in case you’d not encountered it before, and it popped into my head on at least seventeen separate occasions over the course of those five hours.

American football isn’t merely a game that involves a lot of physical contact. Many sports involve a lot of physical contact. No, what makes it special is the sheer frenzy of it, the fact that they actively launch themselves at each other, and that the goal is essentially to make a player drop to the ground. That’s hot! Again, Not much more to add here. Pretty self-explanatory.

4. Everything is edging

I remember the moment at which I finally understood the point of cricket very clearly, because what I did seconds afterwards was shout “oh fuck off”. Cricket has one hundred thousand rules but all they do is obscure the fact that it is, as a sport, just remarkably straightforward. British people like to make it sound entirely impenetrable but ultimately the basics are very simple, even bordering on the silly.

I suspect I will also remember the moment at which I finally understood the point of American football, because someone explained it to me and, without meaning to, I said “oh it’s edging!”. If you don’t know this - no shame here, neither did I until last week - the reason why the game keeps starting and stopping is because each team is trying to travel ten yards down the fitch, with the ball.

If, at any point, one of the players from the other team manages to slam The Special Boy Who Is Carrying The Ball onto the ground, the play stops. If the knees of The Special Boy touch the ground, the play stops. If The Special Boy throws the ball but it falls on the ground, the play stops.

Because ten yards isn’t a lot of space, it is pretty easy for the other team to make The Special Boy falter in a matter of seconds. The only thing they can do in that case is stop, regroup, then give it another brief but intense go.

In practice, watching American football means watching all these men - some large, some little, some surprisingly lithe - throw themselves at each other with all the enthusiasm they can muster, getting to the ground, then stopping, then doing it again a few minutes later. The ten yard line, which you can see in yellow on the screen, always looks agonisingly close. It’s just there. It’s just there!

And yet sometimes it takes them three tries to get the ball, The Special Boy or ideally both over it. “So close and yet so far” is, as far as I can tell, the true essence of the game. You can see it but can you touch it? Can you put all this sweat and energy and dedication in getting there, when all these warm and heaving bodies have but one goal in life and it is to crash into you in order to stop you in your tracks? Maybe you will, maybe you won’t. Maybe you won’t this time, but you will next time. You’ll have ten seconds, maybe, and it is very likely that you’ll end up on the grass, with all this weight on top of you.

You’ll try to run but instead your head, incased in that big helmet, will crash against other helmets and your fleshy pink mouth will feel dangerously close to all these other fleshy pink mouths but no matter how hard you crash into one another those lips will never be able to touch. You’ll fall and lie there for a moment then get up, take a breather and start again. The line is there, you can practically smell it, but can you touch it?

This is the pitch I made to my Americans; I explained to them that their sport was all built on tension and brief but intense fits of passionate physical contact, only a few of which would have a satisfying resolution, and you know what? I’m just not sure I convinced them. I don’t think they loved my theory. That doesn’t mean I won’t stand by it. Go Dawgs!