Football America

Football rules the republic--from NFL grudge matches to colossal college rivalries, from 32 Division I-A bowl games to 16-team small-college playoff brackets. Across the nation teenagers are desperately trying to reach the next round of the state high school playoffs, while eight-year-olds are getting their first taste of playing for a national championship, at the Pop Warner Super Bowl, in Orlando. Most who strap on helmets and settle into three-point stances aren't doing it for money or fame. They're in it for the camaraderie, the satisfaction that comes from a well-executed assignment and because, quite simply, it's fun to knock the snot out of somebody.

Thanksgiving is an excuse for Everyman to get out and draw up plays in the dirt in so-called Turkey Bowls. For the last 20 years the Sherowski family of West Rutland, Vt., has gathered for a game of touch. Play doesn't always start at the same time each year, but it always ends, and a winner is declared, with the noontime tolling of the bells at nearby St. Stanislaus Kostka Catholic Church.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls, baseball fans. Yes, the national pastime is timeless and pastoral, but football is cathartic. An NFL team plays one tenth as many games as a major league club, meaning there's 10 times more at stake at kickoff than when the ump yells, "Play ball!" The tension is ratcheted higher still in a 12-game college season, when a single loss more than likely dooms a team's chance to play for the national title.

Football is a unifying force as well--and we're not just talking about how the Super Bowl bagged a 41.6 TV rating last February (the highest-rated World Series game this year? an 11.6). On Sept. 25 the New Orleans Saints returned to the Louisiana Superdome, which 13 months earlier had come to symbolize the horrific damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina and the government's botched response to it. Before the game, wideout Joe Horn spoke for many of his Saints teammates when he predicted that he would cry running onto the field for player introductions. After Bono and Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong rocked the house with an inspired version of The Saints Are Coming, the team delivered a belated relief package, beating the Atlanta Falcons by 20 points to get to 3--0 for the first time since 2002.

Such emotion not only fuels the violence on the field but can also take over a game. The intensity builds over the course of a week, and there is no outlet for it until kickoff, when all hell breaks loose. Not so on the diamond. Even when baseball players brawl, their hearts aren't in it.

The game was history. Michigan was dispatched, Carmen Ohio sung, the Big Ten trophy bestowed upon the victors. Wading through the pandemonium on the field of Ohio State's stadium was a bespectacled 50-year-old who was too busy embracing Buckeyes to dry his own tears. The man was Ted Ginn Sr., the football coach at Glenville High in Cleveland. For many fans, football is a pleasant diversion, an escape from the routine of their lives. For Ginn and his players, football is an escape in a more literal sense--from one of the toughest neighborhoods in the city.

Twenty-one players from last year's Glenville squad earned college scholarships. Seven former Tarblooders dot the Ohio State roster this season, including Ted Ginn Jr., a junior flanker who caught eight passes for 104 yards and a touchdown in that Nov. 18 victory over Michigan, and senior quarterback Troy Smith, who will thank his high school coach, among others, in his Heisman acceptance speech on Dec. 9.

"People ask me, 'What's the key?'" Ginn Sr. said after the crowd had thinned. "I tell them there's no magic dust. It's just having the love, passion and understanding for these kids. And look what can happen."

David Baker, the 53-year-old commissioner of the Arena Football League, is a fixture at USC practices. His son Sam is a three-year starter at left tackle for the Trojans, who steamrollered Notre Dame in the Coliseum last Saturday night (page 54). In the week before the game the elder Baker received an e-mail from a former USC player who recalled a speech made in the 1970s by fiery Trojans assistant coach Marv Goux.

Addressing his team at Notre Dame Stadium the day before a game against the Fighting Irish, Goux wandered around the field, inspecting the turf, looking for a spot and shouting, "Where is it?" Finally he stopped, pointed to the grass and announced tearfully, "This is the spot. This is where they got me. I was clipped from behind right here."