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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now that the Super Bowl is over, let's go back and revisit something from the most watched television show of almost every year that's having a long tail postgame afterlife on social media. No, it's not that questionable holding call by the refs near the end of the game against the Eagles that may have wrongly given Kansas City the win. It's the way the NFL used the memory of a former NFL player turned US Army Ranger who got killed in Iraq, Pat Tillman, killed by other US troops in an incident the Pentagon first covered up, and has to this day never really explained.

By the way, he had spoken out against the war. Before the game, they had a presentation of something that clearly is a good thing that lives on in Tillman's name. It's a scholarship fund. The Tillman Foundation website describes it as identifying remarkable military service members, veterans, and spouses, empowering them with academic scholarships, lifelong leadership development opportunities, and a diverse global community of high-performing mentors and peers. Unquestionably, a good thing. At the game, a Tillman Scholarship presentation was narrated by the actor Kevin Costner.

Kevin Costner: A day after 9/11, Pat Tillman knew he could do more. He gave up his NFL career to join the US Army Rangers and ultimately lost his life in the line of duty. Today, Pat's principles live on in an organization that bears his name and its scholarship recipients who embody his spirit.

Brian Lehrer: So far, so wholesome. Social media posts and a raft of articles out there accuse the NFL in conjunction with the Pentagon of exploiting Pat Tillman's legacy for the glory of the football industrial complex, I'll call it, and the military, without acknowledging the Pentagon malfeasance that was involved, or Tillman's stated views about the war he got killed in. One article, published the day before the game, was not about Pat Tillman at all, but about how the Cold War mentality of a generation ago helped football develop as a game in which violence is a feature, not a bug.

Subsequent tweets by the author bring the Tillman show into it. Let's talk to Jake Nevins, digital editor of Interview Magazine, originally from Baltimore, his bio tells us, now living in Brooklyn, and among other things, the New York Times Magazine editorial fellow in the 2019 to 2020 fellowship year. He writes about topics from school shootings, to online super fan culture, to a lot about tennis, and now the NFL's development during the Cold War. Jake, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Jake Nevins: Thanks for having me, Brian. How's it going?

Brian Lehrer: Going good. The title of your article is Hit the Line Hard, which is actually a quote from Theodore Roosevelt, the governor of New York at the time. Can you tell us the context for Hit the Line Hard?

Jake Nevins: Sure. Roosevelt, at the time, as you said, he's governor of New York. He writes a guest editorial in a magazine in 1900 titled The American Boy, explaining his principles for how we can rear young men in this country to be the sort of men that Roosevelt was. He was a hybrid academic and athlete as an undergraduate at Harvard. In this article, he says a lot of interesting things. He begins with the line, "We have a right to expect of the American boy that he shall turn out to be a good American man."

He extols the virtues of athletic competition. He ends the article with a line I found interesting, where he says, "In life as in football, don't shirk and don't foul and hit the line hard." A good basis for a lot of the attitudes, as you said, that would end up being used as justification for the brutality of the sports.

Brian Lehrer: Yet it wasn't a universal attitude at the time, apparently, because you also tell us a little historical tidbit, that in 1905, the president of Harvard at the time, Charles William Eliot, a man with three first names, Charles William Eliot, maligned the sport as gruesome when he wrote, "As a spectacle, football is more brutalizing than prize fighting, cockfighting, or bull fighting." You write that in that year 1905, 19 college football players died of injuries sustained on the field. If that's true, how did the existence of the sport survive that kind of plague at all?

Jake Nevins: Like you said, 1905 was an ugly year in the sport. It was at the time played mostly in the Ivy League, and it hadn't really developed yet in its modern form, which has somewhat curtailed some of its more violent aspects. Even 10 years earlier, the Harvard-Yale game in 1894 had become known as that Hampden Park bloodbath. A player named Richard Von Gammon had died of a concussion in that game.

Roosevelt, in 1905, seems to have a vested interest in reforming the game, but he also is cognizant of its seriously unsavory element. In 1905, as this debate is raging on about the suitability of the game, especially with Ivy League students dying in the course of play, he convenes the coaches and athletic advisors of several Ivy League universities to figure out a way to reform the sport to such an extent that they can continue to play it while also trying not to change it fundamentally.

Brian Lehrer: I wonder if anybody was thinking of Roosevelt's advice to treat life like a football game and hit the line hard when Damar Hamlin of the Buffalo Bills almost died from a hard hit this season. I was stunned to see him at the Super Bowl in the stands honored, appropriately, because thank goodness, he seems basically okay, but the context was, "Okay, he didn't die, so let's keep hitting the line hard just like before," even though there were 150 concussions in the game this year, according to a stat I saw on TV, significantly up from last season. Where does that fit into the place of football in our national psyche?

Jake Nevins: I found the response to Damar Hamlin's trauma interesting, not terribly surprising. I think the NFL has used so much of its energy over the last century to become, like you said, the football industrial complex that stories like Hamlin's need to be very quickly digested by the League PR machine and turned into stories of heroism, turned into stories of redemption. Hamlin, fortunately, awoke from sedation about a week after the incident on Monday night football. I note in the article that the NFL holds this awards presentation at the end of its season, where they announce the MVP, and all that good stuff.

Hamlin and the first responders who were at that game, who bravely saved his life and performed CPR for nine minutes on him, there was a whole presentation in their honor. I think a lot of what's lost in that pageantry and stagecraft is the fact that because he lived, and perhaps even if he hadn't, it's very unlikely that anything fundamental would've changed about the game or any safety protocols would've been instituted, because this is the nature of the sport and these debates have raged on for a long time, and it remains extremely dangerous.

Brian Lehrer: Getting back to the history, where does the Cold War come in? That's at the heart of your article.

Jake Nevins: The Cold War is a really interesting era because before it, baseball is the national sport, not football. The Cold War is this ambiguous, ever-changing threat that people can't necessarily put their finger on. Obviously, it didn't necessarily involve actual warfare because of containment policy. It's my opinion and the opinion of a lot of academics, who I cite in the article, that football at the time, especially in so far as that coincides with the rise of television, becomes a proxy where America can project the image abroad that we are a manly country, that we are a mighty country. This involves quite a few methods of propaganda, particularly military elites saying in the press what a good engine for the qualities that they want to see in American men that football can be.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. I want to go even further into that with you, with a quote from your article in a second, but I also want to invite listeners in. Listeners, anything about Pat Tillman, which we will come back to, and the Super Bowl, or the meaning of football in American culture. 212-433-WNYC for Jake Nevins, digital editor for Interview Magazine, who has an interesting article on this published on Saturday. 212-433-9692, or Tweet @Brian Lehrer.

On what kind of men the US should produce, you write about how for three decades, politicians, military officers, and football coaches alike, help portray the sport as a seedbed of military prowess, frequently and brazenly instrumentalizing the game's savagery as a corrective to what they perceived as the feminization of American men and the dilution of the national character. That 30 years, that's a Cold War context, but it so relates to today where there's this Right-Wing moral panic about anybody who's trans.

One news story today is about the governor of Texas, in a football context, and other athletics context, setting out to ban transgender women from playing competitive sports as women. There's a Cold War straight line to today in a certain respect, right?

Jake Nevins: Yes, certainly. I think that football, the promotion of it especially after World War II, as we were experiencing a certain level of economic prosperity, and people feared that a decadence or weakness might come from that. Football is seen as a way of reinforcing not only manliness, but all that comes with manliness, which is the nuclear family unit. It is basically promoted by military elite, by legislators, as a way to basically stave off the Soviet threat.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a call. Brian in Harlem, you're on WNYC. Hi, Brian.

Brian: Hi, Brian. How are you doing? Thanks for taking my call. Yes, we've spoken before during the concussion crisis. I played 12 years of football and I coached for over 20 years at the collegiate level. I've studied football. I suggest to your guest that he-- regarding the history of football, when Roosevelt went up San Juan Hill, he went up San Juan Hill with football players and cowboys.

He understood that the violence, or why football was really created goes way back. I guess the first football game was supposed to be 1869, but it was not what we think of football today. I suggest that your guests read John Sayle Watterson's College Football: History, Spectacle, and Controversy to understand the true origins of football and what football has meant. I think he's on the right road, don't get me wrong.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, I don't think you're contradicting him, really.

Brian: No, I'm not contradicting him, but it goes back further and it's deeper.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Even further and even deeper. Brian, thank you very much. I'm going to get some other folks on here. Here's Bob in Salida, Colorado. You're on WNYC. Hi, Bob.

Bob: Hi, Brian. Thank you. It's Salida.

Brian Lehrer: I apologize.

Bob: If you all would recall back in the first Gulf War by Norm-- I forget. [unintelligible 00:14:12] Norman, the general who gave the halftime-

Brian Lehrer: Schwarzkopf.

Bob: -update on-- Schwarzkopf, thank you, had a halftime show was such propaganda, and the statistics were all put out. It was a halftime show, and it was more propaganda. As I mentioned to the screener, I was so enraged, and I could-- I was watching it on TV as a cook in a restaurant. I got fired for pointing this out and saying, this is all propaganda. The commercials during the halftime show were for big, gas guzzling Cadillacs and the American dream. It was so obvious. I'm curious what your guest thinks of that.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. Jake, were you able to hear the caller?

Jake Nevins: Yes, I was. Well, certainly there's obviously the flyover rituals which have preceded football games since 1968 when Air Force jets flew over the orange ball in the Packers, Raiders Super Bowl, or World Championship rather, later named the Super Bowl. This has been a staple of the pomp and circumstance with which the NFL has tried successfully to endow the sport.

In fact, in 2019, the senators John McCain and Jeff Flake investigated, basically money flowing from the Department of Defense toward the NFL for what they described as paid patriotism, of which these flyover jet rituals are a part and found that the NFL had received nearly $10 million from the Department of Defense as well as other sports leagues and their governing bodies. This has become part and parcel of the whole pageant of the NFL.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Simply put, you write in your article that American Football is shorthand for endangered national values, patriotism, virtue, loyalty. Is that where the pregame Pat Tillman presentation comes in?

Jake Nevins: Yes, I found it interesting. You played the Kevin Costner clip and so much that's crucial to the story is left out in that clip. I think that Pat Tillman and his family, based on what we know about his anti-war sentiments, would certainly have objected to his legacy being retrofitted to this narrative that the NFL pushes. Watching the game and seeing that clip, I immediately recognized a lot of the things that have preoccupied me in my research.

It's not only that the NFL has taken this narrative and run with it, but also, the US Military itself did not say that he was killed by friendly fire initially. They concocted this story in which he was charging up the hill and was shot by the Taliban. I think it rhymes in a really sinister way with a lot of these things that we've been discussing and that I wrote about.

Brian Lehrer: Listener tweets, "It should be mentioned, this all-American sport thrives in a socialist business structure with imposed caps on salaries, shared advertising dollars, all to create more balanced teams." That's a footnote. Tom in Manhattan, on the Tillman thing. Tom, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Tom: Hi, Brian. How are you doing? Thanks for this and this fascinating segment. Pat Tillman, certainly, he died. He was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan, and the fantastic book that was written by Jon Krakauer called, Where Men win Glory, exposed the military's effort to turn him into a hero, which arguably he was, but to falsify that he was killed by friendly fire.

The context is absolutely important because the Cold War context in 1980 to '90 when Afghanistan was a proxy war in which America sought to bleed the Soviet Union, but with Saudi Wahhabi fundamentalist allies who were trying to restore a futile system to Afghanistan, which now exists today. It's a very long tale of blowback, and it fits in the narrative of the heroic American football player and soldier who can do no wrong. Thank you very much to Mr. Nevins for this really excellent article.

Brian Lehrer: Tom, thank you very much. Fact-check me on something, Jake. I said that Tillman was killed in Iraq. I believe he served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The caller said Afghanistan. I could be wrong. [crosstalk]

Jake Nevins: Yes, he was killed in Afghanistan.

Brian Lehrer: Afghanistan.

Jake Nevins: Killed in Afghanistan.

Brian Lehrer: It was the Iraq war he spoke out against, or even Afghanistan, which was less controversial at the time.

Jake Nevins: Yes. He, before his death, had actually planned to meet with Noam Chomsky, a famous anti-war intellectual, which he never got a chance to do, but that leads me to believe he would've strongly objected to the revisionist history the NFL is guilty of here.

Brian Lehrer: You also wrote in your article a reference to the media and football. You got close to this before, but let me come back to it, especially, since we're on a radio station. You wrote, "As televisions replaced radios in American households," [unintelligible 00:20:06] they didn't replace radios, they accompanied radios in American households, but football overtook baseball, not only as the country's most popular sport, but also as an entertainment product. Its ennobling, martial character was significantly enhanced by the small screen. Can you talk about that, why football is more viewer-friendly than baseball or other sports, because it is so much more watched than just about anything else on television these days, and certainly than any other sport.

Jake Nevins: Yes, it is. I can speak to that from my own personal experience, as someone who has watched football for much of my life, and only in the last several years, the American public has wised up to the real costs of the game, which were really concealed by the NFL for quite a long time. I would say that it was one of those sports where developments in technology also were really conducive to it. You can see all the players from one camera angle, which can't really be said of baseball.

There's this really interesting contrast between the macro perspective in which there's 22 men on the field, and they're following their specific orders on each play. I think that really appealed to notions of authority and collectivism at the time, especially in the Cold War. Then, you zoom in, as I write in the article, and you get a different story that is thrilling and exciting in equal measure and markedly more violent than what you see at the macro level.

I think that this was unprecedented at the time. Not only that, but color broadcasting was emerging. It's often been called the perfect television game and the commissioner of the NFL at the time in the 1960s, Pete Rozelle, was this media savant, who was able to struck existing antitrust laws in order to ink these really lucrative broadcasting deals with the major networks that would allow profit sharing among the franchises and also make football much more readily available to American audiences.

Brian Lehrer: We'll end on a couple of stats. I'll make it a quiz for you. Maybe you know these already, but just for fun. Of the 30 most-watched TV shows ever in this country, how many were Super Bowls?

Jake Nevins: I would venture 25, 28.

Brian Lehrer: 29. What was the one exception?

Jake Nevins: I'm not sure.

Brian Lehrer: The finale of M*A*S*H which is interesting that it was an anti-war TV series. Of the 100 most-watched television shows of 2022-- and I should say I saw all these stats on NBC News, I'm assuming they're true, of the 100 most watched television shows of 2022, how many were football games?

Jake Nevins: I think this is in my article, so I've had a heads-up about this one, but I think about 87.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, it was 82 I think so. 80-something out of the 100 most-watched shows of any kind in the last year have been football games. Jake Nevins is the digital editor for Interview Magazine. His really interesting article about the history of football and how it connects to militarism and other such things was published on Saturday. Jake, thanks for coming on.

Jake Nevins: Brian, thanks for having me. Have a good one.

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