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Dear Cory:
What is the difference between American Football, Canadian Football, and European football? --Fumbling towards Fantasy
Dear Fumbling:
You are right to come here for arcana in sports. Cory was legendary in the athletic department of his high school and has forgotten little. He lettered in shower, and while no one wanted him to actually play football, he feels certain that his services to the teams are remembered only too well. Cory exemplified the term "team player".
European football (soccer) is played with a round ball. It is an ancient game that predates the Christian era. By the mediaeval period it had reached a zenith of player violence and spectator rowdiness that makes today's "soccer hooligans" and players look like campfire girls. It was often played to celebrate military victories, and was popular with soldiers. By 1365 it had become insane, and King Edward III had to try to ban the game; subsequent bans insured its popularity. While the upper classes prepared for war with elaborate jousting tournaments, the lower orders used soccer as war games, no doubt to vent their frustration at being the lower orders.
American and Canadian football derive from the English game of rugby, invented supposedly at the private school of the same name in 1823 (just how the ball got pointy ends Cory does not know, but his obsessive-compulsive but slow research assistant will no doubt eventually tell him, along with the exact geometric name of that shape). In England, while the lower orders played football, the elite at private schools and universities played rugby; the split into two games was complete by 1863. Elite Americans, slavering after the ways of the English upper classes as they do, adopted rugby in preference to soccer as the football of choice. Intercollegiate rugby games in the United States had become so violent and injurious by 1905 that the faux-butch Teddy Roosevelt felt compelled to regulate the game: here American football was born (the innovative rule being the forward pass, another activity at which Cory excels). The forward pass did not come to Canadian football until 1936.
So let us try to weave together these threads: homoerotic, homophobic hothouse private schools; military war games; violence; class struggle; men running around together.
The elite game rugby and its descendants, American and Canadian football, have gone downscale into a formal, highly ritualized and lucrative violence. Spectators tend to be men who can only achieve emotional expression through fandom lubricated with alcohol, and can only permit themselves to admire the bodies of other men if those men are engaged in socially-approved violence. Spectator frustration at being in the lower orders is satisfied in player violence and injury, a negative form of sexual intimacy. The professional side of American and Canadian football are no longer games, they are vehicles for advertising. It is one thing when scantily-clad, rambunctious and testosteronic youths want to get sweaty and close on a field, it is quite another when sad steroid monsters raised in veal-fattening pens careen into each other on Astroturf like knights in a tournament. Player uniform padding creates, with broad shoulders and accentuated buttocks and legs, a hypermasculine parody that recalls the body changes of puberty. This sells, but few understand why: the psychodynamics of unacknowledged homosexual desire.
European football, soccer, the working class sport, is inching upscale...towards ballet. We should have been tipped off about the trend when Elton John became "involved" with a soccer club. The slinky fabrics of "footie gear" so beloved of fetishists (do an internet search) grow more diaphanous by the year. The allure is perhaps in the idea that they could slither off at any moment. The sport still remains a venue for fan rampages, which recall the game's origin as a semi-controlled war between city-states.
Soccer is to football as figure-skating is to hockey.
If Cory were you, Fumbling, he would turn off the television set and hie himself to local rugby or soccer games, where callipygous youths get muddy and awash in pheromones. Do not concern yourself with learning the rules. Take some hot, buttery muffins and offer them around. Mingle!
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