the poetics of football by ariel lewiton

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On Sports

The Poetics of Football

February 1, 2013 | by Ariel Lewiton

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I grew up outside Boston, a resident of Red Sox Nation, but mine was not a sports-loving

household. My father watches football regularly these days, but he didnt when I was a kid. Hed

watch a game if it was on, distractedly, while doing something else. The rest of us did not. We

didnt follow game schedules or scores. Ive never been to Fenway Park, though my middleschool was less than a mile from the Green Monster. When they tore down Boston Garden I

expressed manufactured dismayId never been there either. Until I moved to Chicago after

college and bought tickets to a few Cubs games on the cheap, at a yard sale, the only professionalsporting event Id ever attended was an early round of the 1994 World CupSouth Korea versus

Boliviawhich ended in a tied shutout.

My sister and I played soccer. She was better than me. I figure skated and entertained deludedfantasies of making it to the Olympics, but I couldnt get any height on my jumps and my spins

were too loose and wobbly. Eventually I switched to ice hockey, which I played with the same

poor-to-barely-adequate ability as each of my prior athletic endeavors. In college I spent a weekon the womens rugby team before quitting because it hurt.

As a spectator of televised sports, I preferred basketball because it was fast and high scoring and,

since the court was small, the cameras stayed close to the players. They loomed on the TVscreen, all grimace and sweat and flinching muscles. Everyone always told me football was the
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game to watch, but I shied away from it because it seemed too complicated, too populated with

players, too dependent on multicolored graphics of circles and xs and arrows superimposed over

the field. The fundamentals of the game were not intuitive. To watch football, one first had tounderstand football, and that struck me as a challenge on par with mastering quantum mechanics.

Until recently, my understanding of the game was: a bunch of guys move a ball by tossing or

running it downfield, and every few yards everyone collapses into a pig pile. Look, theyre allin a pig pile now, Id observe unhelpfully to the guy I was dating, the one who eventually got

me into watching football. In response, hed groan and bury his face in his hands.

I tended not to pay much attention to what was happening onscreen. I hadnt been raised enough

of a fan and therefore had no stakes in any of the games, neither teams to root for with any real

passion nor rivals to scorn. I could only justify sitting through a game, with its endless stopped

clocks and replays and analyses, if I was simultaneously occupied in some other more productiveactivity. Thus, I took up knitting.

I did a lot of knitting back in those first years of dating a football fan. My boyfriend and friendswould sit on couches with their bodies canted forward, eyes fixed on the flickering screen, while

I untangled balls of yarn in my lap. Still, I listened: to the commentators and sideline reporters, tomy muttering friends. And after awhile the listening became its own source of fascination,

because I kept hearing words I thought I knew, but they no longer meant what I thought.

I love the precision of language required to speak with any insight or depth about sports. When I

figure skated I took pride in listing the jumps, not only because I could land most of them(sloppy, single versions of them) but for the sound of them and the sense that naming them made

me an insider: lutz, toe-loop,flip, axel,salchow. In hockey we talked about face-offs, neutral

zones, hat tricks, slap shots. My friends who play or watch tennis have their aces and deuces,

their lets, sets, and rallies.

But as far as I know, no sport has a more expansive vocabulary than football. And no sport has

taken so many common words, stripped them of their original meanings, reinscribed them and

fed them back into the English language as entirely different entities.

For me, coming to the language of football was an exercise in disassociation. I heard blitzand

thought of London. I heard down and thought up.Interference was the garble of two radiostations coming through at the same time;sackwas a bag. Listening to football games gave me

the sensation of eavesdropping on an extremely familiar-sounding foreign language.

Flea flicker. Wildcat. Touchback. Checkdown.

A while ago I moved to Beijing for a yearlong job. When I arrived, I only knew how to say ni

hao, hello. For my first few months in China, my experience of the language was entirely

aesthetic. Because the words conferred no meaning, I could hearMandarin Chinese as abstractnoise, an accretion of sounds, in a way that I could not with any language for which I held even

passing recognition. I did not know where words and sentences began or ended, so I heard noises

tumbled together, tones leaping and falling, vowel and consonant sounds that fit into spaces ofthe mouth I'd never used for anything before.

Listening to football evoked a similar sensation for me. Once I accepted that words no longer

meant what I thought they did, I began to delight in them as units of sound.


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The language of football is sensual: consider the euphonic assonance of apick-six or asquib

kick, the sibilant whistle ofpass interference. It is hard edged and muscular, brutal, abrupt. I love

its colliding consonants, its rhythms and punctures.

Sack,snap,spike, blitz, rush,juke,scramble.

What did any of it mean? I didnt know. Honestly, I didnt really care.

Bootleg, buttonhook, chip shot, chop-block.

Sometimes Id look up from my knitting and ask for clarification. Then a patient friend orboyfriend would explain to me and Id squint thoughtfully at the TV, nodding and saying, I

see, or Aha. But more often than not, Id immediately forget what Id just been taught.

I love the verbs and compound words of football, the way adjectives like audible have beenrepurposed as nouns. I love that option is a thing itself, rather than just a placeholder for other

things: not what are our options? but run the option.

Above all I love the phrases, which aretaken out of contextfantastically surreal, deliciouslyobscene.

Ice the kicker. Shoot the gap.Flush the pocket. Up the gut.Muff the punt.

Ive continued watching football because the people I share my life with watch football. Ive

adopted my friends teams and have come to feel genuine joy and anguish at the outcomes,

though mostly because a win thrills my company and a loss has the potential to sour an evening.Ive developed a clearer understanding of the nuances of the game, though my knowledge still

leaves much to be desired.

I suppose I am a Patriots fan by birth and a Packers fan by marriage: this Super Bowl, to mixsporting metaphors, I have no horse in the race. But Ill be watching the game, or more likely

as I have knitting to doIll be listening.

Hitch,post,slant,slot,fly.

Ariel Lewiton is an M. F. A candidate in the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program.Her work has appeared in VICE.com, China Daily, and elsewhere.

the poetics of football by ariel lewiton

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