In Defense of the XFL (sort of )
GUTMANN, STEPHANIE
In Defense of the XFL (sort of) What's wrong with blue-collar football? BY STEPHANIE GUTMANN It's hard to conceive of a publicity campaign better calculated to outrage polite opinion than the one...
...other players give them to you...
...Girls...
...The spots made the XFL football look like something out of a Mad Max movie—a blasted, post-nuclear desert populated with what looked like extras from the film Conan the Barbarian wearing ominously darkened visors on their football helmets...
...A quarter of the 45-man Hitmen roster are under 6 feet tall...
...There is an inherent conflict between "reality programming" and sports...
...One is supposed to be able to hear the coach talk strategy and berate his players and curse the other team...
...No, XFL teams would have names like the Las Vegas Outlaws, the New York/New Jersey Hitmen, the Memphis Maniax, and the Chicago Enforcers...
...It's quite clear that the Roman carnival version proffered by WWF/NBC management will not, unless they decide to burn through players like dry kindling and resupply teams with the "40,000 bricklayers, plumbers, and cops" who showed up hoping to try out...
...Announcers Craig Minervini and Bob Golic, a huge ex-Oakland Raiders tackle, were in a near frenzy attempting to convince TV viewers that this was indeed the "smashmouth" football the ads had trumpeted...
...most have knocked around the globe, going from the NFL, to the short-lived American Football League, to Arena Football League, to NFL Europe...
...Early expensive-looking promotional commercials for the XFL promised too much, which is probably why TV ratings dropped about three quarters between the first weekend and the fourth...
...when an older guy like Casey Weldon, the QB of the Birmingham Bolts, says he just loves to play football, you believe him...
...In fact this has been the real drama—watching Tillman, players, and other coaches in their small rebellion against the reporters determined to get histrionics out of them...
...But if it's sport and not entertainment, will there be an audience...
...They're not happy with their lives...
...Camera crews are to roam the field unimpeded...
...George Will predicted "a further coarsening of the culture...
...The most draconian part is that the XFL is just one big company: Since NBC and McMahon own the entire league, it's impossible get a higher salary by negotiating with another team...
...These, as Hitmen coach Rusty Tillman put it, are all players with "something to prove"—to the guys that didn't draft them out of college, to the NFL team that cut them after one season...
...But this bombastic publicity, plus the Girls...
...a few hadn't played since high school...
...But the NFL began to worry that men out there saw the cheerleaders as sex objects—rather than the wholesome, healthy, enthusiastic girls we knew them to be, and those long, loving pans became a relic of the past, fileable under '70s excess...
...Thus McMahon envisioned a football league that would play in the off-season...
...it does combine all those elements...
...Can the XFL survive...
...America/I Love This Game...
...What's not to like, when you can actually talk back to your quarterback: At the end of the Hitmen's second losing game at home, the only fans left, the ones who'd stripped off their shirts and jackets in the below zero windchill and stuck beer cans in their pants, began to chant, "Puleri, you suck...
...Some are like the obviously talented Memphis Mani-ax player Rashaan Salaam, who won the Heisman trophy in 1994, was drafted in the first round by the Chicago Bears, and then choked—he had a weird first year marked by spectacular running followed by frequent fumbles...
...In 1985, for instance, Virginia McCaskey, daughter of Chicago Bears owner George Halas, abolished Chicago's "Honey Bear" cheerleading squad because, as the front office put it, "the concept of cheerleading has outlived its time...
...McMahon has always known—political correctness and feminism be damned—that people really do enjoy watching big, strong men sweating and grunting and violently throwing each other around, which is why he was able to turn the WWF into a billion-dollar empire...
...When action subsided for a time, play-by-play announcer Craig Minervini attempted a few minutes of relaxed badinage: "So," he asked Golic, "we've heard a lot of crunching going on...
...These are hard-knocks, hard-luck guys: Some are just out of college...
...This kind of fellow feeling—and reluctance to give another guy a career-ending injury—seems especially strong in the XFL...
...For many years, one of the great pleasures of football had been the moment when a besotted TV cameraman, flopped on his back, panned all the way up the long expanse of smooth, golden leg belonging to a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader...
...Here in fact is the crux of the WWF/NBC's problem...
...Of course, when pro football is at its best (think of the 1985 Chicago Bears with the "Fridge," the "Funky QB," etc...
...maybe he's finally gained some emotional maturity...
...Serious, watchable players are not entertainers...
...In fact this disconnect between audio and video was very much like what was going on in the game...
...It was an appropriately surreal introduction to the world of the XFL...
...So do the coaches and the cheerleaders, and there are innumerable mikes around the field to pick up ambient noise—especially all those thuds and grunts and howls of pain...
...A number of teams have not put nicknames on their jerseys...
...One sportswriter fretted about "cheerleaders who give lap-dances...
...Girls...
...There's a soberness and seriousness about many of the XFL players...
...So it was with some queasiness that I tuned in the home-opener for "my" new team, the NY/NJ Hitmen, who were hosting the Birmingham (Alabama) Thunderbolts at Giants Stadium on what the announcers kept calling a "frigid" afternoon (30 degrees with a purported wind chill of minus six...
...I'm not at home in that element...
...in fact, trying to be an entertainer distracts them from a game that, like combat, calls for one's complete attention...
...On top of the hurtling chyrons, incessant music (used in the TV broadcasts, as in a movie, to tell you how you're supposed to be feeling), and announcers baying like werewolves about "the spirit of violence" in the air, someone had apparently fallen asleep at the switch and was showing the video of one commercial combined with the audio of another, producing the discombobulating experience of watching a woman in workout clothes rolling an object around her living room floor while audio describing "The Beer Thermometer" played...
...NFL players make millions as compensation for the years of concussions and knee surgeries, but XFL players are making a much tougher gamble with their lives—espe-cially the XFL quarterbacks, who are getting sacked on nearly every play because the league has taken away rules that would protect them...
...At the end of game three, after being badgered about what it felt like to lose the game, Tillman shoved a cameraman and told him to "get out of my face...
...That's sweet...
...Some of the relatively tenuous quality could come from inexperience...
...The NFL still finds and grooms the greatest football players in the world, but over the decades its less-PC edges have been buffed away, and it's become too smug and too bland...
...Lest we forget that this is the league that's going to give us no-holds-barred tackles, there was an intermittent feature called "Big Hits" and a salute to the "Hit of the Day" at the end of the game...
...As one sports analyst pointed out, the XFL's target demographic is "disaffected...
...But all this maniacal chortling over "hits" actually seems designed to distract the viewer, so he won't realize that the play in general is not at all gratuitously violent— no more violent than your average football game...
...In fact there seems to be a general player rebellion under way, directed at all of the XFL's gimmickry: the announcers' heavy breathing about the money...
...If a player wins the game, the announcer relentlessly crows, he's "going to win $100,000...
...I don't want to be a TV star...
...The announcers kept trumpeting the XFL's all-access locker rooms, but it seemed to take longer and longer for coaches to let cameramen in...
...nicknames come later...
...They like the WWF because it's a release, they know it's fake but they don't care...
...in fact for quite a long time it wasn't quite clear what the hell was going on...
...That's all I ever was and will be...
...It would also help if the announcers calmed down and stopped the relentless shilling...
...the idea that players will develop outsized WWF-like personalities...
...the promises of "blood on the field...
...cortisone shots...
...Color commentary mostly consisted of, "Yeah, a lot of crunching going on," "Man what a hit...
...During the game the announcers attempt to build tension over the Who-Will-Walk-Home-With-That-Cash drama with a little break in which players are asked what they'd "Do With That Money...
...The tenacity of the guys—usually elevated to star rank in the XFL—who have had seasons in the NFL before being cut and roaming the globe in search of more football work is quite poignant...
...What's not to like when you can get a great seat for $25, when you can hang out with your friends in the stands and act goofy and not get shut down, when you have commentators like Brian Bosworth who like to diss quarterbacks...
...Coaches had begun covering their playbooks when wandering cameras happened by...
...Oh man," Golic said dreamily, "that feeling when you land on him and you hear the air kind of going whoooooof out of his chest...
...How big a fortune could you make, he must have wondered, if you combined all the hot elements in one, i.e., reality programming (Survivor, Temptation Island, etc...
...The blinding white of the hot pants set against the blue of the Texas sky produced a God Bless Stephanie Gutmann is the author of The Kinder, Gentler, Military (Scribner...
...Quite a few are short...
...Selected XFL players (like the quarterbacks) have mikes in their helmets...
...It could only be a signal that, yes, it is hip to watch football—as long as one is sufficiently ironic about the "retrograde" macho of it...
...Commercials trumpet the XFL's "unprecedented" "All-Access" locker room—yelling...
...He now says the years of injuries and weight gain—and illness caused by dieting—were caused by his addiction to marijuana...
...Like professional wrestlers, players would have nicknames on their jerseys—to speed up the process of "character development...
...Just a few minutes into the broadcast, though, it was clear that this was not the fall of Rome...
...Lest anybody chicken out, or come on the field without the proper "rip 'em to bits" spirit, the XFL has thrown in what it is supposed to be an extra incentive...
...Under the hyperactive screen graphics, the bombastic music, and the frenetic announcers, however, is something small and brave that could survive and should...
...gloated Golic, as XFL star Keith Elias (who has been on a football hiatus, spending his time writing screenplays with his brother) walked stiffly to the frozen field...
...Keith Elias, a running back for the New York/New Jersey Hitmen, predicted, "It's going to be mass carnage...
...In its first month, the new league has gone from 14 million to 4 million viewers...
...Then we might have a less pretentious, shaggier, more accessible alternative to the overbearing NFL—as New York Post sports columnist Wallace Matthews put it, "football as it oughta be...
...As in Survivor, mikes and cameras are placed everywhere around "players," who are supposed to ignore the attention and just "be real...
...Another described his last job as "breaking bricks...
...From there, it was probably just a short step to deciding that the concept of football has also outlived its time—that the game is too downmarket, too redneck, too old-fashioned...
...What does it actually feel like from inside the helmet...
...BY STEPHANIE GUTMANN It's hard to conceive of a publicity campaign better calculated to outrage polite opinion than the one that heralded this year's new football league—the XFL, brainstorm of the World Wrestling Federation's Vince McMahon and his partner, NBC Sports chairman Dick Ebersol...
...crying...
...As far as I'm concerned, it's real football...
...It's the team that wins $100,000, and that is divided up among the, say, 40-man roster, boiling down to $2,500 a man...
...That's reality TV when it works...
...XFL teams are also much smaller, which means there's very little time off...
...But the average XFL player earns $45,000, a quarterback only $50,000, and players on the practice squad, only $1,000 a week...
...The gaps have been filled in with . . . whatever...
...I suggested to Tillman that if management wanted more drama and violence on the field, they could start by smacking down the roving reporters who dog coaches and players, asking inane questions...
...Such a grand project requires lots of money so he recruited Dick Ebersol as partner...
...with the out-sized warrior characteristics of WWF wrestling...
...If there is going to be a training ground for athletes getting involved in domestic violence because of their sport, it is going to be the XFL...
...In the Hitmen opener at Giants Stadium, players said things like "pay my bills," "pay my '98 tax return," "buy a whole lot of diapers for my newborn kid," and "buy a whole lot of sandwiches...
...they know the XFL isn't as good as the NFL but they won't care about that either...
...and, "The Hitmen Are Hitting...
...By the time the Hitmen opened in their home stadium, players had begun turning their backs and simply walking away from the roving camera teams...
...I'll be back next week and the week afta...
...So McMahon and Ebersol set out to showcase retrograde macho...
...What I'm hoping is that coaches will continue to demand the conditions they need to field a good team, that the players will tune out the persistent demand to act like WWF wrestlers, and that management will lose the Rocky Horror Picture Show cheerleader get-ups (long sinister black leather coats, platform boots, and garter belts...
...But players with "something to prove" put energy on the field— sometimes more energy than a blasé million-dollar NFL player...
...Rusty Tillman, who came from the Seattle Seahawks where he was an assistant coach, has in fact stated on the XFL pre-game show that "if management wants actors, they can call Al Pacino...
...Hah, Ha...
...Sure, this meant running the ball into NFL territory, but the NFL, McMahon knew, is more vulnerable than people think...
...As one player pointed out, "If they don't know your name, you want them to know your name first...
...McMahon decreed that XFL teams would not be named after animals—what genius in the NFL, for instance, decided to let so many teams to be named after birds (Ravens, Cardinals, Falcons, Eagles, Sea-hawks...
...Actually that's tricky wording...
...Who knows...
...Much was made of the fact that the XFL was removing the player-protecting rules like the signal for a "fair catch" and the "in the grasp" rule for quarterbacks...
...Maybe Salaam is just a hopeless neurotic who will never let himself win...
...One young player with a good college record said his last job was at a Bed Bath & Beyond, and in a profile for TV he is seen lecturing a teammate about the low thread count in the hotel's bedsheets...
...How else to explain ABC's decision to put comedian Dennis Miller in the color commentator spot for Monday Night Football...
...When the quarterback fumbles or the wideout drops a pass—and we know who he's dating—I want our reporters right back in her face on the sidelines demanding to know whether the two of them did the wild thing last night," growled McMa-hon...
...With the XFL, they would present "reality programming wrapped in a sporting event...
...But there also seems to be a sweet, simple determination to just play football—in defiance of management's drooling about smashing mouths...
...moment more powerful than anything the NFL promotion team could dream up...
...Basically guys are happy if they can just see pretty girls jumping up and down...
...As the credits rolled, there was file footage—I'm not even sure if it was from that day's game—of a player lying on the ground tossing violently from side to side as he moaned and clutched his leg...
...Mariah Burton Nelson, author of a book titled The Stronger Women Get, the More Men Love Football, told the New York Times: "The XFL may become to sport what gangsta rap is to music...
...I'm just a football coach...
...If they are reluctant to blow the other guy's knee out, it may be because they know how he must feel about getting a break, and what it would be like to end this big break by dealing a career-ending injury...
...In general the potentially murderous game of football is played in a sportsmanlike way...
...Puleri, who was once quarterback for Lehman High School in the Bronx, started to answer a reporter's question but roared into the mike to address the crowd over the Jumbotron: "You can keep booin.' I love it, baby...
...What can you say about an organization that banned crowd-pleasers like end-zone dancing and cheerleaders...
...angle, and Vince McMahon's press-baiting pre-season press conferences, did succeed in sending sportswriters and columnists from all parts of the paper into apocalypse-of-the-month mode...
...Football players from the NFL on down are mercenaries—they get shuffled from team to team, and they often find themselves playing opposite guys they used to stand next to in the huddle...
...It is supposed to be a "you are there" kind of thing...
...The play is, in fact, downright sportsmanlike—as when you tackle the guy just hard enough to stop him, then get off him fast and pass up the opportunity to get in that sly little extra bounce on his spine...
...You know he wants to hit...
...Dating between players and cheerleaders is now supposed to be out in the open (even used as Temptation Island-style narrative), not swept under the rug as in the old days...
Vol. 6 • March 2001 • No. 25
