If you had ever seen John Madden in his Oakland Raiders football uniform, you would know the reason for this custom. Now I've mentioned football. Baseball and football are the two most popular spectator sports in this country. And, as such, it seems they ought to be able to tell us something about ourselves and our values. And maybe how those values have changed over the last 150 years.
Football is a twentieth-century technological struggle.
Baseball is played on a diamond, in a park. Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life. Football begins in the fall, when everything is dying. In baseball you wear a cap. Football is concerned with downs.