Football crosses generational lines

From the 1970 JC Penney Christmas catalog. I loved this stuff.

I’ve always been a fan of the NFL — and especially the old AFL before it became part of the NFL. My attention to professional football ebbs and flows but I always pay at least cursory attention. At any given time I’ll know who’s good and not so good, which teams and players are on the rise/decline.

Growing up in Cumberland County in the 1960s, I was a Tennessee Volunteer first but beyond that I was a fan of football. There wasn’t a professional team in Tennessee (it would be 30 or so years before the Houston Oilers moved to Nashville) so my dad and I watched whatever games the leagues and the networks decided to show us on Sunday afternoon.

We loved the AFL, and those teams are generally still my favorites. Because I have no home allegiance to a professional team I’ve always been a fickle fan, liking any number of teams for any number of reasons. For example, I was an Indianapolis Colts fan for years simply because Peyton Manning was their quarterback. But that allegiance didn’t transfer with Peyton to the Denver Broncos, although I still wanted Peyton to do well. Don’t ask me to explain it. I can’t.

By the mid-1960s the AFL was encroaching heavily into the NFL’s markets, revenue and player pool and had themselves a television contract. I was too young to understand all this at the time and I certainly didn’t understand the AFL-NFL merger in 1970 but they kept playing and even added Monday Night Football that year. Life was good for a 10-year-old fan of football.

(This makes me sound old but … in those days we only got the three network channels (ABC, CBS and NBC) on our black-and-white TV — two from Knoxville and one from Chattanooga. We had to go outside and “turn the antenna” toward either Knoxville or Chattanooga, depending on what we wanted to watch, and sometimes just to fine-tune the reception. It was a two-person job — one person outside turning the antenna and one inside, hollering out directions based on picture quality. “Keep going. Keep going. Stop! Back just a little. Whoa, whoa — too much. Back the other way. Stop! Right there! That’s it!”

(Some people had a rotor box on top of their television connected to a small motor on the antenna. You would turn the dial on the rotor to a particular compass point and the motor would turn the antenna to that direction. Folks who had a rotor usually had a color television too.)

This all came to mind a couple of months ago when I realized that on the NFL show I watch most mornings, the four hosts largely dismissed the way professional football was largely played before 1980. That they would do so really jarred me until I realized that the oldest person around that desk was in his early 40s, at best. I looked them up and yes, the hosts ranged in age from 33-43. All are knowledgeable and bring good information to the table — three are NFL reporters/personalities, the fourth is a former player — but their experience is generational.

So I started thinking about my own experience with the NFL and how it’s generational as well. I was born in 1960, coincidentally the same year the AFL started play. I grew up with the AFL and with Generation Jones, the second wave of Baby Boomers. I enjoy and appreciate the game before 1960 — it was only two years prior, in 1958, that the Baltimore Colts beat the New York Giants in the first sudden-death overtime championship game, one that was watched by a large television audience and is generally credited with kicking off the modern era of the NFL — but my personal history and experience with the league starts, at best, in 1960. My memory picks up somewhere in the mid-60s. For instance, I have no memory of the Kennedy assassination or how my parents and other people reacted. I was barely 3. My football memory starts with the Green Bay Packers, winners of the first two AFL-NFL Championship Games, in 1966 and 1967, and how excited I was that the New York Jets beat the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III, because the Jets were the AFL team and I had watched them a lot that season.

I was watching the Oakland Raiders-Pittsburgh Steelers playoff game in 1972, the recently recognized Immaculate Reception game where Franco Harris, a rookie running back, caught a ricocheted pass off his shoestrings and ran for the game’s winning touchdown. I was pulling for the Raiders and couldn’t believe it. I’d seen Harris and running mate Lydell Mitchell get shut down the year before in Neyland Stadium, when they were seniors at Penn State and came south to get shut down by the Vols. My dad hollered “Go back to the bush league!” at Penn State the entire game. (RIP Franco Harris, who died only a few days before the 50th anniversary of the Immaculate Reception game. By all accounts Harris was a good guy.)

I understand how the hosts are constrained by what they know and by their experiences — just like we all are. To be fair, their reporting and commentary around Harris’ death was honest and measured, and they seemed to genuinely enjoy interviewing and listening to Terry Bradshaw, the Steelers’ quarterback who threw the pass that begat the Immaculate Reception, talk about his friend and teammate Franco Harris. It would be like me listening to someone who was there talk about that 1958 championship game — as a football fan I understand and appreciate the significance of the game but I have no real frame of reference. It was before my time.

My lifetime parallels that of the old AFL but my frame of reference actually dovetails the Super Bowl era. I can’t tell you who played in either the AFL or NFL championship games the year before the Super Bowl but with a little thought I can tell you who played in every Super Bowl. And who won. (I looked it up: The Buffalo Bills beat the San Diego Chargers 23-0 to win the 1965 AFL title; the Green Bay Packers beat the Cleveland Browns 23-12 to take the 1965 NFL title.)

Football is a game built for television — the pacing, the strategy, the violence, the passion, the excitement. The Super Bowl has become an event of global scale.

But in the end, it’s a game of execution and always has been. The team that can block and tackle and not make mistakes will usually win, and that doesn’t change.

On that the generations can agree.