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Nixon with Redskins 1971
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Nixon with Redskins 1971
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Nixon at NFL dinner 1971
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According to Benjamin Rader, the "growing popularity of football in the 1960s and 1970s evoked an unusual amount of social commentary. many observers saw football as related to the larger social upheavals of the era. To right-wing political leaders, football was a miniature school for testing and nurturing physical and moral vigor. Analogies between the battlefield and the football field abounded in the public utterances of President Richard M. Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew. They saw football as a healthy antidote to the breakdown of law and order, to excessive individual freedom, in short, to the 'youth revolt.' Nixon even proudly displayed upon his desk an autographed football given to him following the 1969 Pro Bowl game. From the White House he regularly placed long-distance telephone calls to stadium locker rooms to congratulate winning college teams. On occasion he personally presented the annual award to the number-one-ranked college team in the nation. The strategy and tactics of football intrigued Nixon. He even gave unsolicited suggestions, including diagrams, to George Allen, coach of the Washington Redskins, and Don Shula, coach of the Miami Dolphins, on pass plays for big games. He repeatedly used the term 'game-plan' to describe his proposals for ending the Vietnam war and for dealing with the nation's economic problems. Proponents of the counterculture, on the other hand, connected the popularity of football to the war in Vietnam. Only a nation addicted to the violence of a sport like football, they said, could pursue such an immoral and brutal war. Several observers linked the popularity of football to the growing size of the white-collar and professional classes in the United States. According to national public opinion polls, football appealed most to the 'successful,' to those who had the benefit of a college education, lived in the suburbs, held jobs in the professions, and enjoyed higher incomes than the national average. Football, more than baseball, seemed to echo their work experiences. Football was a corporate or bureaucratic sport; eleven men acted in unison against eleven opponents. Football was time-bound; the ever-present clock dictated the pace and intensity of the game. Teams 'worked' with or against the clock. Football embodied rationality and coordination; a game of staggering complexity, football required careful planning and preparation. Since its strategic requirements resembled those of warfare, the game invited the fans to become generals, plotting and second-guessing the warriors on the field. Yet football suggested that committees, systems, bureacracies, and technologies were still just the tools of men, not their masters. The long completed pass and the breakaway run reflected not only careful planning and long hours of practice, but human potency, natural skill, and 'grace under pressure.' And like all sports, fate or luck could be decisive. Even the best of well-made plans and human performance might fall victim to an unpredictable bounce of the oblong ball. At a more primitive level, the violence so central to football may have attracted those who led lives of rigid self-control." (Rader pp. 262-263)
