Why Usain Bolt Should Run Fast and Far from NFL Football

Three days after Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt set a new world record in the track & field world championships, Pittsburgh Steelers wide receive Hines Ward ruminated on what it would be like to have Bolt try out as an NFL receiver. An Associated Press story quotes Hines speculating about the prospects of having the world's fastest man in the game of football. "In this game, you have to have great hips and great footwork to get in and out of routes. You can take a fast guy like a Bolt, he might be able to run only one way," Ward said. "He has to stop and turn. For me, I'll take a guy with quickness and great route-running ability over speed. But you can't teach speed. I'd love to have his speed."

The story goes on to note that former world champion sprinter Bob Hayes, now a professional football Hall of Fame inductee, made the most of his speed in a career with the Dallas Cowboys. Football players Willie Gault and Renaldo Nehemiah, both hurdlers in track & field, also made successful careers in pro football.

Speculation about Bolt's potential may be interesting to pro football fans who seem to enjoy the sport's propensity for recruiting a never-ending supply of increasingly fast, pumped up athletes into the killer machine that is the modern NFL. Every year the NFL draft is broadcast so that fans can bet on what team will draft what players. The game of college football equates to a minor league system for the NFL while the sports-betting industry follows it all with rabid, speculative wonder, to the point that your typical sports talk radio program cannot make it through a single show without mention of the "spreads" on everything from the draft to how many hip shakes the cheerleaders will manage before half time.

In other words, the game of professional football is a sport whose glitzy self absorption borders on the profane. Its lust for fresh flesh to throw on the gridiron resembles the Roman search for gladiators while its willing participants ratchet up their salaries and lifestyles beyond comprehension of doltish fans forking out hundreds of dollars for tickets before imbibing in drunken tailgate parties to prepare themselves for the games. All that's missing is a vomitorium and a tiger pit in the end zone of the opposing team.

Perhaps it really is no wonder that a player such as Michael Vick should get caught up in a vile sport like dog fighting because the game in which he makes his living is little more than ceremonialized violence on the field. The militaristic appearance of players in helmets, pads and aggressively patterned uniforms incites the emotions of war. Even the plays are mapped out like the drawings in a war room. America's history of conquest and Manifest Destiny (Redskins! Chiefs! Patriots! Cowboys! Seahawks!) is acted out repeatedly every Sunday on fields lined with white chalk marks so that everyone knows exactly how far you must go to achieve success or victory. We only wish the rest of life were this delineated. Football effectively parlays its regimented violence as a ritualized rite of passage for millions of fans who cannot imagine life without it.

There is also a weird, seemingly contradictory relationship between the supposedly peaceful message of a supposedly church-going nation and the packaged violence of NFL games on Sunday afternoons. Football may well represent a war of good and evil on the order of the Crusades. Only professional wrestling paints a broader picture of these themes.

It does seem ironic that many football coaches seem able to reconcile their violent sport with the Christian faith. Is this proof of the violence that lurks below the surface of the Judeo-Christian traditions? And is football simply a symbol for the warring faith of the Old Testament and overcoming the enemy? Faith's relationship to violence is well documented, most recently in the Bush administration's use of Old Testament quotations to motivate its base and staffers to get cranked up to go to war in Iraq. If these themes of war and peace, good and evil play that well at an global scale, why should they not fuel the American love of football.

Just a little American fun, you say? Nothing wrong with some wholesome head-bashing on a Saturday and Sunday afternoon, you say?

The NFL mentality now reaches down to the level of youth football, where the players at 6 and 7 years old now wear full equipment and tiny cheerleaders in short skirts learn routines that mimic their much older role models whose prodigiously uplifted breasts lead us into commercial breaks and out of the half time routines for NFL games. Parents spray paint their cars and arrive in honking caravans trying to psyche their young players up to bluster past the opponent.

The game of football certainly has its ties to the American mindset. If you study the typical football game, it consists of short bursts of action followed by distracting transfers of players on and off the field. 30 minutes of game time may take three to four times that amount of real time to complete. The dynamic of the game of football precisely fits the short attention spans evolving through television, the internet and newspapers with stories no longer than sound bytes. No wonder American football fans generally cannot stand the game of world football (better known as soccer) where the action never stops and goals are most often accomplished through buildup and sequential passing that lead to opportunity. By contrast, American football's strategy is generated not by the players themselves but by a cadre of frenetically wired coaches who send in plays executed by the players. The game of football is essentially a sport of immature scope that tells players what to do and when to do it.

At the same time football is a brutishly unforgiving endeavor for the players. Like any professional sport, the physical damage from playing pro football can be permanent and disabling. I once played a round of golf with a former Chicago Bears player who told me, "The week after I retired I watched a playoff game on television and thought to myself, 'How did I ever play that game? I was so glad to be done."

Yet for all its immaturity and acquisitively thuggish claim to be "America's game," professional football seems constantly on the make for more respect, ever on the prowl for approval, hence the export of American football to Europe and Canada. We're the only country in the world that seems to care about our brand of football yet perpetually intrigued by the idea that everyone else would find the game fascinating if they only knew more about it.

As for Usain Bolt, his temperament seems the opposite of the NFL. Rather than becoming a glowering, angry sprinter, the man playfully mugs, poses and dances through competitions in stark contrast to a long history of track sprinters who come to the line looking like they would rather kill their competitors than speak to them. Bolt shakes hands, tucks his 6'5" frame into the starting blocks and flies down the track like he simply enjoys running.

And let us hope he continues his athletic quest in track & field, not in football. There is enough money now in the sport of track & field to sustain a Usain Bolt thanks to generations of track stars who fought for professional status so that athletes could remain in the sport rather than migrating to sports like football where speed is a commodity rather than a glorious commentary on human potential in its most simple and elegant form. That is to run, and run fast.