Look closer... (or how I learned to stop worrying and love the NFL)
Everything is interesting close up.
I recently got back into NFL. Gridiron. American football. Call it whatever you want.
It’s funny how I first got into it. It starts in the nineties, in Cyprus. This is the country of my parent’s birth, and in 1993, my family’s destination to live for two years in order to “get back to our roots.1”
Now you might say that in hindsight, uprooting a family and moving them overseas on such flimsy ideological grounds suggests a deeper level of discontent and issues that might not be fully resolved by a change of location, and you’d be right to say so.
No judgement of course, life is life and it takes us to some far flung places. We lived in Cyprus for half of the budgeted two years.
And let me be clear, I enjoyed it. This isn’t a piece about how my parents ruined my childhood. It’s a piece about me getting back into American Football.
Summer, School and Skipping.
Everyone knows that when it’s summer here it’s winter somewhere else, and vice-versa. When we moved to Cyprus in June 1993, we jettisoned a gloomy Melbourne winter and ran, arms open into a glorious Cypriot summer.
What not everyone knows is that this affects the school year. Whilst here in Australia the school year is the calendar year, in the Northern Hemisphere the school year runs from September to July.
The rule if I understand it correctly, is that it goes burning then learning, in that order.
What this meant was that I left Australia half way through Year 10. Which posed a very important question for the new Cyprus school year. Up or down?
Now you can probably tell from my writing, that it was up. From being half way through Year 10, I jumped ahead six months, and after already being the youngest in my year in Oz, I was almost a full year younger than all the other Year 11s in Cyprus.
So far, so good. But what happened when we returned to Australia one year later? Surely I don’t have to repeat the second half of Year 11 again?! The indignity!
Now you won’t believe this happened. Looking back I still cannot actually believe it, and it happened to me. But for the second half of 1994, I didn’t have to go to school.
Sure I had schoolwork that Scotch set me that I was meant to do in my own time. It’s like they looked at my marks and thought I was a self starter or something.
Sometimes I’d go into Latrobe University with my cousin Con and do my work there in between looking through CDs at their university music store. But obligations? Attendance? Nope.
So picture the scene. We’re living in my auntie’s house because the tenants in our house had a one year lease whose term wasn’t up yet.
And I didn’t have to go to school.
“I’m Don Lane, I’ll see you then!”
So on Tuesday nights, tucked away on the ABC at 10:30pm, I watch Don Lane, one of Australian television’s great entertainers on what was clearly a passion project, present the NFL Highlights show.
I don’t have to get up in the morning. Why shouldn’t I? It’s not like I’m training myself into a lifetime of bad habits!
It was when the Cowboys and the 49ers were dominating, and I became a 49ers fan. I must have been just as much of a glory hunter as I was a fashion idiot. The Cowboys have much cooler gear.
So this season, seeking to maximise the value of my $25 Kayo membership, I decided to get back into watching the the NFL.
Life is football, and football is life.
So I started watching. And kept watching. And as I watched, and more importantly, committed some emotional energy to it, it got better.
I’m probably a lot like you. Prone to doing multiple things at once. I’d have the match on, but at the same time I was writing an email. This has been me my whole life (undiagnosed ADHD)
But recently, for comprehensively amazing reasons which I will enunciate in several upcoming pieces of writing, I have learned to focus. On one thing.
I’m not sure exactly how it happened, but I am fairly sure that being locked in my house helped. Silver linings eh?
So I decided that when I’d sit and watch the NFL that I’d actually watch it. I’d carve out time to do it. I wouldn’t do anything else.
And when I did that, a very strange and completely amazing thing happened to the thing in front of me.
It got better again.
At first I thought that I had psychic powers and that I was influencing the players to play more enthralling football.
But then I thought that maybe what was actually happening was that eighty athletes dancing a beautiful yet vicious ballet they’d been rehearsing their whole lives; watched and rallied on by sixty thousand lifetime fans of the company is an objectively fascinating and amazing thing and that I was only now fully noticing that for the first time.
I was almost convinced of the psychic explanation, but then I realised that I was watching a replay and for that to be true I’d have to have used my psychic powers backwards through time. Obviously that’s ridiculous.
American Football is an amazing sport.
American Football is absolutely fascinating.
It’s what I call a discrete sport, in that it starts and stops. Like cricket.
There’s a play:the offence tries to gain ground, the defence tries to stop them.
Teams spend the off season practicing hundreds of different plays and developing tactics on when and how to deploy them.
A play occurs. It goes one way or the other. Then it’s over, and both teams regroup before the next play.
The team in possession’s plays are decided by the offensive coordinator. This is a coach sitting in a box, communicating via headset to the quarterback which play is next.
The quarterback is the main ball hander, whose job it is to either pass the ball or hand it off to a player who’ll rush(run) with it.
Some of these plays will be preplanned, but as they say, if you want to make God laugh, show him your play sheet.
Like a maestro, the offensive coordinator conducts the team from on high. But the quarterback is closer to the action. If he senses something aint right, he can override that by calling an ‘audible’ play.
This is why they’re yelling those numbers before they HUT the ball. It’s all code in which the quarterback is telling whether they’re sticking to the play, modifying it a bit, or changing it wholesale. The whole team understands this language.
Fucking amazing.
They’re also idiots.
I also see blind spots. Teams either pass the ball, or rush(run) it. But every now and then, they do both. Or one of them twice. These are called ‘trick plays’ And they always take the defence by surprise.
👆👆👆👆👆THIS WILL WORK, BUT YOU NEED TO CLICK AND WAYCH IT IN YOUTUBE.
In 98% of passing plays, the quarterback passes the ball. It’s a slightly pointy ball and when it’s thrown well, it flies through the air with a spiral pattern the physics of which would no doubt make a beautiful graph.
But teams can also pass the ball backwards, like in rugby. Also, anyone can pass the ball, not just the quarterback, which I learned the first time I saw a team do it before swiftly commenting “OH SNAP!'“
The reason trick plays remain a novelty is that when you throw the ball, you risk it. When it’s in the air, the other team can intercept it. Then you’ve lost the ball. And that is a very bad thing. The worst thing in fact.
So when you throw the ball twice, you risk it twice. Because trick plays involve less controlled, more unpredictable ball movement, they’re riskier. So they’re used sparingly. But what if a team could minimise that risk whilst maximising the rewards?
I feel like the first team to make ‘trick plays’ a fundamental part of their arsenal will win multiple Superbowls before everyone else catches up.
Get some rugby coaches in and over two or three off-seasons train the whole team to be able to pass and handle the ball. Recruit for it. They’ll look stupid when they don’t get it right. But when they do, look out.
Or maybe not. What do I know? But the fact I watched the game closely enough to even think it, is why I really enjoy watching it. Much more than when it was on in the background of emailing.
I’m not telling you to watch the Super Bowl.
My point of course isn’t to tell you how amazing American football is and that you’ll find it as fascinating as I do. You probably won’t, I appreciate things on some VERY nerdy levels.
My point is, whatever it is you’re doing?
Do it. And only it.
Give it your focus. Commit to it.
Humans can’t actually multitask, they’ve done studies2. But we still try. Why?
Because we’re scared.
About our relationship. The rent. Whatever.
Call it the weight of living, call it primal anxiety. It makes sense, I have it and I get it.
But when we split our focus, for some temporary relief? We do it at the price of our joy.
This detachment from our lives is a far bigger pandemic than COVID. And the solution to both is the same.
Pay attention.
It doesn’t matter to what. It can be one thing for ages. It can be one hundred things in a row. As long as it’s one thing at a time. Be monogamous.
And most importantly, humble your eyes. When you look, see what a thing is, not what you wish it were or already believe it to be. If you can do that my friend, the world will reveal its secrets to you.
There’s joy wherever you are right now.
Look around you. Pay attention.
Maybe you see your kids. Maybe it’s a book you read when you were young. Maybe you hear music and wonder how sound propagates through the air. Your cockatoo. The wall socket, a portal manipulating the fundamental forces of nature so that you can see whimsical and decontextualised images of cats on demand.
When you see any of these things, pay attention to them. Become interested in them. In what’s happening. How they work.
From the ‘shit internet’ to the crap hidden away in closet corners your house contains wonders enough to keep Leonardo Da Vinci captivated for a hundred years. Remember that.
That’s what I learned watching American Football. Life’s pretty simple.
Call whatever play you want. as long as you actually do it.
Blue forty two. HUT!
At least that’s how it was explained to my brother and I. Don’t judge. One of us still believed in Santa and I was taking a course in wishful thinking at the time.
60% of the time, it works every time.