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No, the phenomenon of professional football—with its relentless specialization, its inordinately complex "strategic planning," its rapid assimilation of new technologies (Can anyone imagine Namath with a radio in his helmet? Can anyone picture Jim Thorpe in a helmet?), its rhythm of quick bursts and pregnant pauses, its gleaming sensuality of (safe!) violence and sex, its worship of the youthful body, its intense drive for the jolting climax—spits our way of life back at us in neat three-hour packages, Sunday after Sunday (and occasional Mondays and Thursdays). We watch football, and we see our world far more roundly than we ever see it on CNN. Many of us feel it as fully as we feel it anywhere. The NFL is us. No wonder we don face paint.

To the extent that there is a surging cult of pro football in our day, it is at least partially bound up in an elaborate form of self-worship—which, of course, the NFL feeds off of. Every cult—every culture—needs its symbols, its priests, its holy places, its icons, its laws, and its gods. The NFL attentively furnishes them all. To my left, as I write, lies atop a filing cabinet my Super Bowl XL "locker room hat," with the word "Champions" emblazoned between the Steelers logo and the NFL logo. Is it by accident that the NFL logo is positioned above the Steelers logo? I doubt it. The placement is a subtle assertion of rule, authority, and might.

Former NFL player and cultural historian Michael Oriard vividly charts the league's cultlike ascendance in his illuminating new book, Brand NFL: Making and Selling America's Favorite Sport. Namath, it turns out, was "the best thing to happen to the NFL since television"—not due to his effect on the league's role as custodian of the sport but rather on its development into a "multimedia entertainment business." Just as the NFL was searching for ways to enlarge its place in American life, Namath's celebrity in the late 1960s wed pro football to the emerging empire of hip in utterly memorable, if not always salubrious, ways. Not only Sports Illustrated, but Time, Life, Esquire, and Playboy felt compelled to regularly comment on the meaning of Namath, the person of Namath, the sheer fact of Namath. For his part, Namath, writes Oriard, became "the first athlete in any sport to be himself an advertisement for a lifestyle." Who can forget—try as we might—Namath hocking pantyhose?

That persona led thousands right back to the game—the NFL's game. For Christmas in 1974, my brother and I received presents we greeted with mighty portions of yuletide glee: official Namath helmets, shoulder pads, and jerseys! The long arm of the NFL, via its nascent NFL Properties division, was reaching into our hearts and imaginations, connecting boys to a league in transforming ways, spawning identities rooted in whatever vision of life suited its own vision for its future.

Here's what I wonder: What kind of organization provides us with everything we want, from extraordinary spectacles to godlike athletes to dancing girls? And what kind of people accept such offerings?

These are dangerous questions, costly to ask. So we don't.

But ask we must—if that troubling, first-century category "the world" and the older notion of "idolatry" are to have any contemporary meaning. What do these ancient words get at if not a people's steady refusal of the true pathway to life and their accompanying preference for counterfeits?

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September 2007, Vol. 51, No. 9