Good ‘nuff!

I’ve been thinking about football a lot this week … a lot for me, that is.

When it comes to the gridiron, I am a definite cultural outlier. For the most part, my kindest, most enthusiastic reaction to the game of American football – played by any team at any level – is disinterested indifference. After six decades of trying, I just don’t get football.

It goes way back to when I was a little kid. Sitting on the sofa with Dad watching the Friday night fights I understood boxing – hit the other guy in the face until he falls over. It made sense, even to a four-year-old. I got baseball – hit the ball, run, around the bases. Do it more times than the other team and you win. Ball through the basket more times than the other guys – basketball. Got it.

But football? A bunch of guys line up in the middle of a field running into each other over and over again with a committee meeting held between attempts? What kind of game is that? It was mildly amusing the first couple go-rounds, but it quickly lost its charm and I found a book to read. I still get a lot of reading done during football season.

Even so, save for inmates of a Trappist monastery, from July through January football is as inescapable as the air. Stop into darn near any bar and your whisky will be served up with a side of Vikings, Packers, Bears or some other misbegotten mascot. Week after week the exploits of oversized adults playing a kids’ game receive more coverage than armed conflicts between two mid-sized nations. Quarterbacks are better known than heads of state and coaches get more press than the pope.

So, when I was scanning the headlines last week, looking for the latest pandemic death toll, climate change generated weather disaster, or ongoing political fallout from last year’s Trumpist coup attempt, the biggest news of the day was that Ziggy Wilf had given Mike Zimmer the sack.

“Huh?” was my first reaction. A rotund comic strip character and baseball manager for the Chicago Cubs back in the 1980s came to mind, but that’s the wrong Ziggy and a different Zimmer. Nah, this was the Vikings franchise owner firing the Vikings head coach … an act that overshadowed the Russian military buildup on the Ukraine border.

I read further. This season the Vikings won eight games and lost nine. Time for Mike to go. A bit further along I learned that while Zimmer’d been coaching, the Vikings won 74 games, lost 59, and tied one. I’m guessing it was the tie that did it. Indecision has no place in football.

I was a bit puzzled. All in all, over eight years, it seemed to be fairly reasonable job performance. Not stellar, perhaps, but a solid, positive record. Significantly better than average performance. Still, Ziggy fired him.

That’s what got me thinking about football.

Y’see, over and over I hear folks telling each other and telling kids especially, that sports are preparation for life. The playing fields are the practice fields for how we will go about doing what we do from day to day, they claim, and the games we play and the teams we follow provide a valuable template for living real life.

Bunk and balderdash, that.

“Winning isn’t the most important thing, it’s the only thing,” is the approach attributed to Vince Lombardi, football coach and malignant influence on American ethics. In our real day-to-day winning isn’t the most important thing; competing isn’t a particularly positive approach to dealing with other people. We accomplish things through cooperation. We make progress when we refuse to make the perfect the enemy of the good. In virtually every human endeavor, “We’re good ‘nuff!” not “We’re number one!” is the practical, life enhancing goal.

In virtually any role except professional football coach, Mike Zimmer would have been “good ‘nuff.” Better than “good ‘nuff.” But football isn’t life, not even a little bit like life.

We’d better make sure we tell the kids that.