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. These players aren't following a preordained script, they're going out there and banging on one another and hoping for the best. In a world swirling in artifice, where movies and advertising and web pages are all structured and directed toward predetermined ends, a football game has no predetermined end. Despite the hype and greed that discolor everything surrounding the game, the game is still the real thing. And in a world grown increasingly phony, a real thing has real value.