 I've just been reading a terrific book on how postmodernism explains football and how football explains postmodernism. So the book's really about the stories that we construct. We construct these narratives, that's how we live our lives according to meanings that we construct or meanings that we believe are given to us by God or by our ancestors. And this book is so much fun. It's written by Professor Robert L. Kerr and he is at Gaylord College at Oklahoma University. He's a professor of media and law. And so this 2015 book is how postmodernism explains football and football explains postmodernism. The Billy Clyde conundrum. So Billy Clyde was the Bert Reynolds character in the 1977 movie Semi-Tuff, which was based on a 1972 novel by Dan Jenkins, who was a longtime sports writer for Sports Illustrated. Dan Jenkins wrote a story about that 1970 Super Bowl played in January 79, where the Steelers beat the Cowboys 35-1. And Dan Jenkins wanted to focus the story on how some bad calls by the ref distorted the outcome of that game. But the editor of Sports Illustrated did not approve of that at angle. This book is just so much fun to read. I love academic approaches to normal life. And the book begins with a photo of this bloke as an infant holding a football that's about two-thirds the size of him. It's like 18 months. So he says he noticed that when he writes a book that people usually want to talk to him more about why did he write the book than what the book's actually about. So in the introduction, he talks about why he wrote this book. And he recalls on a cool bright fall afternoon that he was playing with a football that was about his size. And he still has this memory when he's like 18 months or two years of age playing with a football. And so memory, we have this engaging blend of fact and fancy that imaginatively recreates for us some kind of mythical adaptation about what actually happens. So we all have memories and stories about what happened, but our memories and stories are not fully accurate, all right. But nevertheless, we tend to be incredibly devoted, intensely ferociously devoted to our stories. So he wants to write about these memories when the meaning of moments passes like the breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaf of the willow. And then another of his early memories is all the grown-ups that are family gathering are particularly animated by what's happening on this little black-and-white TV. He watches only fleeting moments, but he eventually comes to grasp that a team from the University of Oklahoma has been playing football on TV, and that's what's commanded the attention of the adults. And that stays with him. And he learned stories that his father was an all-state halfback who joined the Navy instead of playing for Oklahoma. And then he grows up, he becomes an adult and he becomes a sports writer. But then he realizes that the business model for news is dead, and so he becomes a professor. So there was a famous American historian, Carl Becker, who gave a famous speech to the American Historical Association around 1930, called Every Man His Own Historian. So his point was that scholarship is of little importance unless we transmute it into common knowledge. So writing history that no one will read is a vain and pointless business. So our protagonist here, Professor Robert Cursus, I want to write a book that people want to read. It's going to be an academic book, and it's also going to be aimed in part at a popular audience. So he wrote, How Postmodernism Explains Football and Football Explains Postmodernism. So he talks about the beginning of football on American college campuses. He references Steve Arman's book Against Football. So Arman is a lifelong hardcore fan of the game who's recently turned against football. Arman has written previous books on rock and roll, on chocolate, and various other pop culture staples. So football has a narrative structure to it that's so rich that it's easy for even mediocre sports writers to give readers a sense of the thrills, spills, suspense, and athletic prowess that goes on. I mean, people respond viscerally to football as an irresistible duality. Mythic and visceral, liberal and lethal, rolled into one compact drama. Football succeeds as spectacle because the game's own structure makes narrative drama possible. And so early thinking about football was profoundly influenced by a series of books and essays about a fictional character, Frank Meriwell, who embodied manly virtues, who was essentially a manifestation of muscular Christianity. By the 1890s, there was growing pressure to completely ban football in the United States because it was too violent. But the powers that be stepped in, they made illegal some of the more violent aspects of the game. And with a few revisions, football moved on to become America's sport by the 1960s. So chapter three is called Time Runs Out on the Wholesome Warrior. So this is referring to Bud Wilkinson. So he served in World War II and he developed his coaching philosophy from what he learned in the Army. And he was the head coach at the University of Oklahoma for 17 years. He won three national championships. His team from the 50s hold the record for the most consecutive victories by a major college football team. And then after every game, he would publish a newsletter, his football letter, and he would articulate his worldview. He would promote a narrative, a story about his games. And he'd present this idealistic vision of college football as a metaphorical realm where wholesome warriors strive for collective progress. But starting about 1957, there's an entire sea change in the attitudes of his athletes. So his early athletes were all World War II veterans who were willing to sacrifice for the common good of the team. But as the team became less racially homogeneous, there were different attitudes that took over among his athletes. So his vision of raw, collectively working together for the common good was challenged by this younger generation of athletes raised on affluence on TV and on individualism instead of wartime sacrifice and collective effort. And also behind the scenes, he was quite a heavy drinker and alcohol was illegal in Oklahoma until 1957. So he was presenting this very respectable public image while at the same time he had somewhat of a problem with alcohol. He was doing deals with bootleggers to get his alcohol. So Los Angeles Times sports columnist Jim Murray wrote about him, the Oklahoma Sooners are the only team in football with a head coach who looks more like a poet than a punter. I used to cover the San Francisco 49ers in the 1980s. Bill Walsh had a similar reputation for a cognitive approach to the game. So Bill Walsh didn't engage in like rah, rah motivational talks. And so sports writers would describe Bill Walsh on the sidelines as his headphones on it looked like he was listening to Mozart. And Jim Murray wrote, but Wilkinson looks like he got lost on the way to a Browning lecture. He would write poetry for his wife. He read Shakespeare for fun. He played the organ to relax. He won loyalty from the sports reporters by inviting them to his home after a game and explaining what happened in the game to them. So they could then give their audiences the impression that they understood the game much better than they really did. So he would try to push his presentation of the moral meaning of football through his football letter narrative. Now what was not said in his football letter narrative is that much of his success was that Oklahoma had a lot of affluent oilman and these wealthy Oklahomans kept him supplied with all the cash he needed to attract the best football players around the nation. And it was quite a hard drinker. Oklahoma did not repeal prohibition until 1959, but 1957 an entirely different bunch of guys showed up and they questioned everything. They didn't see the importance of discipline. It was like a watershed in the Wilkerson era. So Wilkinson had served as an officer on the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise. He participated in Iwo Jima and Okinawa, those invasions. And he was assigned to the U.S. Navy's V-5 pre-flight program. So the Navy developed a training model that featured a strong athletics component, which included developing a football program. So men were trained for war through sports, just like in England. Like the future leaders of England were developed on the playing fields of Eaton, which was the elite high school in England. Trans cheerleaders are the best cheerleaders. So I love this book. Our postmodernism explains football. So one of his last All-Americans was a running back, Joe Don Looney. He was an unruly hedonist and he spent his one season on the team defying the coach. And shortly after his Joe Don Looney experience, Wilkinson retired from coaching football after 17 very successful years as the head coach at Oklahoma. And he ran for political office and just lost narrowly and he became a TV commentator. And then for two years he served as the head coach of the pro football team, I think in St. Louis. Men eat a lot of junk food watching the game. It numbs the pain of the word commercials. Clip Medley, my God. So it used to be the dominant image of the college football hero was that of Frank Meriwau. But then you had the rise of the anti-hero with the beatniks, the late 1950s, moving into the 1960s. So Joe Don Looney had such enormous talent that Bud Wilkinson tried to turn a blind eye to his troubled reputation. So Oklahoma was his fourth college in three years. He was an obsessive street fighter. He kept an elaborate gun collection in his dorm room at OU. He was a self-absorbed individualist. He became an All-American on the field. But off the field, his violence bordered on the sociopathic. So psychopathic means that I think you don't know what's right and wrong. Sociopathic is you do know what's right and wrong, but you just do what you can get away with. So he once broke in, Looney broke into the apartment of a young couple and he beat them up because they voted for Lyndon Johnson for president instead of Barry Goldwater. So Looney was like an Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando, anti-hero type. He was like a rebel without a cause. He was like the wild one. He was like some character out of Blackboard jungle. He was just a complete rebel. I eventually died on a motorcycle in 1988. Never achieved his athletic potential. So then he had one full season together. Dak Prescott really disappoints and how much he curses on hard knocks. I know it's supposed to be raw and unfiltered. That's to understand he's a role model for kids. Yes, I agree. But aside from his drunk driving conviction in college, Dak Prescott has been reasonably responsible for a pro football player. He's not quite like Russell Wilson with the Seattle Seahawks who's like always in his Bible, but overall Dak has been a pretty solid citizen. So Oklahoma was trailing Syracuse 3-0 with less than three minutes in the game in their one full season together. Looney approached the coach and said, look, I'll win the game if you just send me into play. So Looney enters the game, he delivers a 60-yard game-winning touchdown run. It's been described as the single most impressive touchdown run ever. Dak Prescott is a responsible mid-20s guys, but I don't like the cursing on camera. Yeah, I get it. So eventually Wilkinson has to kick Looney off the team for his undisciplined. But throughout his 17 years as the head coach, Wilkinson kept pushing the same set of basic ideals, collective effort, fighting spirit, good sportsmanship. Now, what happened to Wilkinson can be characterized as the failure of his idealistic Frank Meriwellian meta-narrative, right? But Wilkinson could dismiss Joe Don Looney from the team, but he could not dismiss the future. Like, I can dismiss you from my life, but I can't dismiss the future, all right? So Wilkinson failed to sense the abandonment of the Frank Meriwell model for good sportsmanship and solid, upstanding citizen among athletes, and we see instead the development of the anti-hero. So Wilkinson ends up running for political office and he loses and he's never great again. So then 1972, we get the rise of the anti-hero in Dan Jenkins' novel Semi-Tuff, Billy Clyde Puckett, who is the running back played by Bert Reynolds in the 1977 movie Semi-Tuff. And so this is like the opposite of the Bud Wilkinson selflessness, Tom Landry, you know, wholesome Christian, muscular Christian portrayal of the football athlete. So Semi-Tuff portrays these professional athletes as pimps, as sex maniacs, as dope fiends, as violent and criminal. So all the behavior that Bud Wilkinson rejected is normal now in the world of Billy Clyde Puckett and his roommates in the Semi-Tuff novel, maybe the greatest novel written about football came out in 1972. So the players in this novel, they have no interest in moral decency, they'd simply party their way to a Super Bowl championship with a week of routine debauchery. And it's filled with sex and drugs and bad behavior. There is a nonfiction version of this book that was written about the same time by Roy Blount. He spent six months with the Pittsburgh Steelers and he calls this book Three Bricks Shy of a Load. It was inspired by a conversation with a member of the Pittsburgh Steelers defensive line who told him, you pick the right team. We're a bunch of crazy guys. I'm crazy too. We're all about three bricks shy of a load. That sentence summed up my six months with the Pittsburgh Steelers team better than anything else, says Roy Blount. And the Steelers won three Super Bowls in the 1970s in large part because they were probably the most roided up steroid team in the national football league. So when the Steelers and the Cowboys would play, you'd see a dramatic difference in the physique. So with the Cowboys offensive line and even some of the defensive line, their bellies would hang over their belts because they weren't nearly as roided up. The Steelers were roided up. So they were just like hawking their big physical specimens and Landry would tell his Cowboys team, do not get into fights with the Steelers because they'll kick your ass because the Steelers were bigger and meaner and more roided up than the Cowboys. The Cowboys would try to win on trickery. So football was not always the most sexually charged of American sports. I mean, this really only developed during the 1960s. So the mythical Frank Marywell figure, he wooed his sweetheart for years with just two kisses over the period of several years before finally marrying her and starting a family. But you can call Semi Tough the most complete portrait of the stud football player in American fiction. Sax is the foundation of Semi Tough. Everyone enjoys it and nobody is hurt. So in Semi Tough, all the football players live out the male fantasy of abundant and perfect sex. There's another novel that came out at the same time. This novel had a huge effect on me. I read this novel for the first time in the summer of 1980. So I got to finish eighth grade Pacific Union College in the Napa Valley, seventh Adventist college. And then I moved to Baltimore that summer to be with my father who was preparing a defense of his heretical theological views for the seventh Adventist church. So I didn't know anyone in Baltimore. So I spent my days at the local library. And surprisingly, the black kids did not want to allow me to play basketball with them. Man, if I could have just shown them my shake and beg moves, I was shocking. I opened the door for this young black lad at the library as he was coming in and he cursed me out. And I didn't understand it. Luke thinks he's so cool because he knows how to read. And I said, why'd you curse me out? I'm just opening the door for you. And this young man was a strong embodiment of ethnic nationalism because he said to me, I hate what your people have done to my people. I've never encountered like this gratuitous racial hatred before, but I would get to encounter it a lot in secular life once I start going to a secular high school. But I read this nihilistic novel, North Dallas 40. It was a bit of a downer because I had fallen in love with the Dallas Cowboys in the 1970s when I came to America in 1977. So I read books on Tom Landry and Roger Storbach and the Cowboys just seemed like the most Christian of the teams. And so I felt like I was doing, you know, my Christian duty by supporting the Dallas Cowboys. The fall of wasp dominance in football parallels that in American society. Yeah, I've got another book on my agenda about the fall of the wasps. So it's by Michael Knox, Baron Ford. It's called Wasp, the splendors and miseries of an American aristocracy. So I was all set to read this book this morning and then I got sucked into, first of all, a book on the sociology of sports talk radio and now a book on how football explains postmodernism. So next I'm going to read a book on the wasp. So I read North Dallas 40 and all the characters, there are no heroes in this book. Like people are having promiscuous sex. People are getting raped and are raping and they're doing all sorts of drugs. And so I mean, pro football players use massive quantities of alcohol and drugs to deal with the constant pain from injury and their fear of losing their jobs. This book was a real downer. It was, this book really shook me up. It was the most, I think it may have been the first sexually explicit book that I ever read. So I was 14 years of age, fairly lonely. So maybe this was the beginning of my learning to use fantasies and explicit depictions of sexuality to distract myself from my loneliness and dysfunction. So coaches in North Dallas 40 is modeled on the Dallas Cowboys. Peter Jen played for the Dallas Cowboys for many years. And so the coaches like Tom Landry, just part of corporate management, they view players purely in business terms and just players are just interchangeable parts to be kept around for the best price possible as long as their value to the enterprise exceeds their cost. So these players lead anxious lives in which the violence they appear to engage in on the field does not end after the game, but manifests itself in all sorts of ways off the field in parties. And I mean with their spouses. So players bottle up their frustration and then deal with it with amphetamines, lecker and adrenaline. So there are more punches thrown between player and wife than there ever are between player and players. So Peter Jen, the author of North Dallas 40 never writes such a powerful book again. It's funny that the Cowboys in the 60s and 70s, the ones with the most straight laced public figure according to Skip Bayless were the ones most likely to be indulging in massive amounts of drugs. And those with the most hippie counterculture figure were the least likely to be engaging in drugs. That's in Skip Bayless's book, God's Coach, that book twice about Tom Landry. So this book was a real downer. It talks about the pro football experience. The first hours of the morning are always the most miserable. Getting arthritic joints, torn muscles, traumatized ligaments, warm took at least an hour. Large quantities of blood and mucus had to be emptied from my head. And so the book, the demise of the central character here plays out in a climactic clash between this wide receiver and the Tom Landry light coach. So the Tom Landry coach says, football is other things besides ability. It's about dedication and discipline. And the player says, look, I can barely stand up. I can't breathe through my nose. I haven't slept for more than three hours at a stretch in over two years or from leaving pieces of me scattered on playing fields from here to Cleveland. Isn't that giving back? And the Tom Landry coach says, you must live by the rules that are being built up over the years by people who love the game and who have sacrificed it. You just can't come in here and disregard all those traditions. The player says, you guys change everything. Now this game has become a corporate enterprise. And the coach says, you think there's something wrong with winning. I won't tolerate that. Winning is the most important thing. The sacrifice and responsibility that must be shorted to win are what make men, what makes this country the greatest country in the world. So Peter Gent, the author of his own injuries from the game included three ribs detached at the spine, permanent damage to several vertebra, lingering paralysis on the left side of my body. He died in 2011. So New York Times obituary caught his book, one of the first providing unsettling views of pro athletes that went beyond the game details. And near the end of his life, Peter Gent said that despite the physical toll, football held the same power over him that it does to millions of other Americans. It was violent. It was cruel. It was insane. And I loved it. We hear so much about how heterogeneous white communities are. But imagine how insulated that black guy must have been to see 40 is the embodiment of slave driving. I was in eighth grade. I wasn't wearing a yarmulke. I didn't convert to Judaism for another 20 years. All right. So the real life antihero that rose to prominence in professional football 1960s was Joe Willie Namath, who played quarterback for the Jets and then for the Los Angeles Rams. And then Dick Butler is probably the most famous linebacker in American history, still celebrated for his savagery. He would just twist opponents as if he could snap that person in half, take them over the sideline and drop them in a garbage can. I've never seen a person that intense and that vicious every damn play. When he tackled people, he didn't want them to get back up. He just kept banging them and banging them. So at the University of Oklahoma in the semi-tough era of the 1970s, a young coach took over and won games at a rate that would top even Bud Wilkinson's years. And he did it by demonstrating how comfortable he was with the Billy Clyde Puckett model from semi-tough. So we are talking about Barry Switzer, the son of a bootlegger. So he was named head coach in 1973. His fun loving freewheeling style helped him to relate to that era's players, won three national championships, recorded 12 more wins in one last season than Bud Wilkinson. So he says the university president taught him in the mid-1980s after a season in which he lost four games that he needed to go to church more often and marry the woman he was dating. But the president says if you go 10 wins and two losses next season, and as long as you beat Texas and Nebraska, you don't have to attend church and you don't have to get married and we won't fire you. And if you win the national championship, the regents won't fire you even if we catch you smoking dope. So Barry Switzer was expected to pay lip service to all the high sounding ideals. But what really comes down to is money and winning. Those two things control everything. So Switzer referred to the expectations created by Bud Wilkinson's success as the Oklahoma football monster. It is real, it is huge, it is hungry and my job is to feed it. And Switzer's most famous Billy Clyde character in the mid-1980s was Brian Bosworth who was eventually banned by the NCAA for steroid use. But he was the most famous player in the game at the time. He was called Barry Switzer in uniform. Switzer also said he was an asshole that strutted around campus like he owned the place but stiffing and intimidating people. Now eventually Barry Switzer's career at the University of Oklahoma ended because there's a rape and shooting in Bud Wilkinson's house, our football dorm. His quarterback was arrested for selling cocaine to an undercover cop. The NCAA charged our football program with 16 rules violation and put us on three years of probation. And Sports Illustrated did a cover story with the caption how Barry Switzer soon has terrorized their campus. So another failed narrative, the Frank Marywell narrative didn't hold up for Bud Wilkinson and the Billy Clyde narrative didn't hold up for Barry Switzer. Now if there's anyone who comes close to the Frank Marywell muscular Christianity ideal of professional football player, the one player has probably come closest to that is Roger Storbach. He was the Dallas Cowboys quarterback who won two Super Bowls. No one's going to find anything wrong with him because he does everything right. That's Cowboys safety Charlie Waters. And Mike Dick has said if you depict the prototype great American I would say that is Roger Storbach. And Troy Aikman, former Cowboys quarterback said Roger Storbach is everything that people think he is. So in the Billy Clyde era of professional football figures like Roger Storbach and Tom Landry stand out as exceptions. I mean Coach Jimmy Johnson is much more like Billy Clyde. Like he encouraged his teams to gloat to run up scores on their opponents and not worry about social niceties. So he was called pork faced satan. And the now retired Jimmy Johnson hates the person that he had to be back then. So this book remember it's called how postmodernism explains football postmodernism means that none of our stories are adequate to reality. So if there is perhaps one underlying theme to my shows, it is to encourage a little distance between ourselves and the narratives that we love to encourage some introspection on why do I love this narrative? That why do I have so much disgust and hatred for competing narratives? And why do I need this narrative? Like what does this narrative do to me? Do for me? Now why do I love this particular text? Now why is it that this particular story about how the world works is something that I cling to so tightly and reject any any challenge? Billy Clyde model owner in the NFL probably the biggest was Al Davis. He branded and marketed his team the Oakland Raiders as the villain. Raider rule number one, cheating is encouraged. Raider rule number two, see rule number one. So the the Oakland Raiders in the 70s, their defensive players were called by I think the head coach Chuck Knoll or the Pittsburgh Steelers, the criminal element in the NFL. Now again, this narrative, the Billy Clyde narrative doesn't work out for the Raiders either. Lyle Alsado, he won a Super Bowl ring as a defensive end for Al Davis as Raiders and he would see about how he loves playing this violent game. Lyle Alsado was responsible for the NFL instituting a rule against players using helmets as weapons after he did just that in a Savage 1982 game. I love the NYPD blue. What does it mean? I back the blue no matter how corrupt. It means that we all need narratives, right, to give our lives meaning and order. Reality is so confusing and contradictory that we have to impose narratives on it to provide ourselves with a sense of comfort and meaning. So perhaps just have a little bit of meditation on how important narratives are for me and for you. So you're trying to say is NYPD blue? Is that a show? You don't mean Hill Street Blues. I just started watching Hill Street Blues from the 1980s. But then Lyle Alsado died. He publicly admitted that his career was based on a massive use of illegal anabolic steroids. It was his deal with the devil. It made him unnaturally big and strong enough to play pro football, but an unleashed uncontrollable violence in him on and off the field and led to the brain tumor that killed him at age 43. And then there's Jerome Brown, right, superstar lineman and Mark Bowden, author of what's that book about war in Africa where all those Americans got killed, the helicopter Black Hawk down, Mark Bowden, right, Black Hawk down. He also read an article on Jerome Brown, who was a superstar lineman, a horrible person, spoiled person. He was a defensive tackle for the Philadelphia Eagles. And he played at the University of Miami and he eventually died in an automobile accident at high speed. So he lived his life, breaking the rules, staying out late, skipping class, juggling girlfriends, drinking too much, driving too fast, blasting his music through the center of town, finishing off into the thick Florida Ville with his collection of high-powered automatic weapons, partying, partying, partying, rolling in snatch, living to the hilt until one summer day he crashes one of his six sports cars into a Florida palm tree and dies at age 27. There's just one of many young men who get paid extraordinarily well to play a violent game. So these football stars have performed a kind of end run around or a bull rush through all the truisms of America's creaking dusty Protestant ethic, writes Mark Bowden. Mark Bowden Demonstrating that just by playing that game, well, one can succeed in life brilliantly without ever doing homework. Oh, Hill Street Blues as Dennis Franz's big show, Horizon NYPD Blue. I didn't realize that NYPD Blue was the was the show. Meditate on the inadequacy of narratives long enough and only nihilism makes sense. Yeah, that's why you don't, there are lots of things that are great in moderation or even in mild amount and everything comes with dangers. Certainty comes with dangers, uncertainty comes with dangers. There's no answer that doesn't come with dangers. So I'm not pushing the postmodern approach that there is no truth. I'm just saying it helps to have some awareness of why you love a particular story and how you might benefit by considering that there are other stories that are equally or even more useful than your story. So apparently NYPD Blue ran from 1993 to 2005. But yeah, you can overdo postmodernism. You can overdo fundamentalism. You can overdo certainty. You can overdo uncertainty. You can overdo nihilism. All right, there's nothing that you can't overdo. You can even overdo crystal light classic orange caffeine free. So good, particularly when it's ice cold. This is a fun book. How Postmodernism Explains Football and Football Explains Postmodernism. Call on the Billy Clyde Conundrum 2015 book. Bye-bye.