You bet it is, baby, the most popular sport in this country for decades now. If the recent attack of college football bowl games didn't prove it to you, the professional football playoffs, which start tomorrow, will. In America, football is king. The playoffs will culminate in the Super Bowl, watched even in a bad year by some 100 million people of the land. Director Oliver Stone searches for the answer in his current film Any Given Sunday, and to a large extent he finds it.
Football is a game of inches moved forward, a game of struggle.
Football's combination of plodding forward, then breaking away to glory, of trying to wrestle life to the ground or risk being bulldozed right over, its plethora of metaphors and symbolic behavior, make it appealing on a primal level that we feel more than consider. And then there's the movie's title, the real key to the game's appeal. On any given Sunday, one team can beat another. Nothing is for sure. This is reality.