The full-force return of college and NFL football also means it’s time to kick off what’s become an ever more fanatical tradition for many in this country: sitting on the couch for hours, lost in pigskin stupor, overloading our stomachs.
In a nation where hardly anyone is able to concentrate on anything, we are fixated on football. If something is to intercede, it’s often because we have no choice. The kid is being baptized, for instance, and you can’t put it off until Monday morning.
It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that as Americans get dumber and larger, football gains in popularity. We’ve learned much regarding the on-field dangers of the sport via chronic traumatic encephalopathy studies, but what about the dangers of being a typical football fan, as per the dictates of American popular and “leisure” culture?
The way it works now is that a football game tends to beget another football game, until a totality of them comprises the day. We think, “I’ll just watch the first half” of the latest contest, or “Gotta see how my fantasy league picks are doing,” as though we were a real general manager, and then tomorrow becomes today.
The nature of football is to imbibe and eat as you watch. Does anyone sit there drinking black coffee? We cut loose. Ingest that red meat. Pound those beers.
We do this with the knowledge that many other people are as well, which helps us feel like we’re a part of something, rather than some misbegotten exception to the mores of society.
You never want to be a couch zombie. You don’t want to be any kind of zombie, if you can help it, and we always can. There’s a 300-stair obelisk in which I run circuits every day. And on each of those days, I’m bound to be asked by someone going up just the once if it’s “worth it.”
That’s how lazy we’ve become — we’re loath to take five minutes to see the world from an angle we haven’t previously.
The above isn’t a result of being a football couch zombie, but the behavior patterns are traceable to the same stuporous state. Getting up and moving isn’t just a physical proposition. We need to ambulate mentally as well. I watch my teams. I watch teams that aren’t my teams. I write and talk about football professionally. But I do other things as I watch. Read. Learn. Look into what I’m going to do next. Recharge.
The truth is that watching football games and coverage thereof from morning to the following morning can suck the life juice from you. Just as games beget games, lethargy begets lethargy.
Henry David Thoreau advised people to feel cold, hungry and tired. Sounds like fun, right? He didn’t mean it literally. He meant that you should have at life. Basically, until you feel sleepy. The good sleepy. Not the “I can’t believe I ate all of those wings and drank all of that beer” sleepy.
When have you felt your strongest? It’s when you’ve been active, right? Not when you were passively sitting somewhere.
Recently I was working as it came up on 2 in the morning. I thought I could use a break, so I flipped on the TV, and there were no fewer than two college football games still in progress.
Is this necessary? Does every game have to be on? Wall-to-wall football. It feels like a mass opiate. And we’ll swallow that opiate, because the sensation is of doing less, and we are a society riddled by the notion of doing just that whenever possible.
Consider someone without family obligations. Nothing going on, their friends married off. It’s so easy to then become a couch zombie, and there goes the weekend, which becomes a form of recreational grind, before it’s back to the actual grind of the workweek. But fear not, for there are games a’plenty awaiting then too.
But we should fear the glut, the same as we should fear becoming gluttonous. Taxing our hearts physically and creating more flab around our brains mentally.
Be a wise watcher. Put some limitations on that couch time. Look up a word you don’t know each commercial break. Drink that water. Do some push-ups. Reach out to that person you’ve wanted to. Put yourself in the best position to truly be well, same as you wish your team to do well.
Otherwise, too many of us are going to keep falling to the bottom of the league — the one that matters the most, where no draft picks can save anyone.
Colin Fleming is the author of “Sam Cooke: Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963,” an entry in Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series.
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