The Star-Spangled Future Page 14

  Commissioner Gene Kuhn Addresses the First Annual Owners’ Meeting of the National Combat Football League

  Gentlemen, I’ve been thinking about the future of our great sport. We’re facing a double challenge to the future of Combat football, boys. First of all, the NFL is going over to Combat rules next season, and since you can’t copyright a sport (and if you could, the NFL would have us by the short hairs anyway) there’s not a legal thing we can do about it. The only edge well have left is that they’ll have to at least wear heavy uniforms because they play in regular cities up north. But they’d have the stars, and the stadiums, and the regular hometown fans and fatter television deals.

  Which brings me to our second problem, gentlemen, namely, that the television network which created our great game is getting to be a pain in our sport’s neck, meaning that they’re shafting us in the crummy percentage of the television revenue they see fit to grant us.

  So the great task facing our great National Pastime, boys, is to ace out the network by putting ourselves in a better bargaining position on the television rights while saving our million-dollar asses from the NFL competition, which we just cannot afford.

  Fortunately, it just so happens that your commissioner has been on the ball, and I’ve come up with a couple of new gimmicks that I am confident will insure the posterity and financial success of our great game while stiff-arming the NFL and the TV network nicely in the process.

  Number one, we’ve got to improve our standing as a live spectator sport. We’ve got to start drawing big crowds on our own if we want some clout in negotiating with the network. Number two, we’ve got to give the customers something the NFL can’t just copy from us next year and clobber us with.

  There’s no point in changing the rules again because the NFL can always keep up with us there. But one thing the NFL is locked into for keeps is the whole concept of having teams represent cities; they’re committed to that for the next twenty years. We’ve only been in business four years and our teams never play in the damned cities they’re named after because it’s too cold to play bare-ass Combat in those cities during the football season, so it doesn’t have to mean anything to us.

  So we make two big moves. First, we change our season to spring and summer so we can play up north where the money is. Second, we throw out the whole dumb idea of teams representing cities; that’s old-fashioned stuff. That’s crap for the coyotes. Why not six teams with national followings? Imagine the clout that’ll give us when we renegotiate the TV contract. We can have a flexible schedule so that we can put any game we want into any city in the country any time we think that city’s hot and draw a capacity crowd in the biggest stadium in town.

  How are we gonna do all this? Well, look boys, we’ve got a six-team league, so, instead of six cities, why not match up our teams with six national groups?

  I’ve taken the time to draw up a hypothetical league lineup just to give you an example of the kind of thing I mean. Six teams: the Black Panthers, the Golden Supermen, the Psychedelic Stompers, the Caballeros, the Gay Bladers, and the Hog Choppers. We do it all up the way they used to do with wrestling; you know, the Black Panthers are all spades with naturals, the Golden Supermen are blond astronaut types in red-white-and-blue bunting, the Psychedelic Stompers have long hair and groupies in miniskirts up to their navels and take rock bands to their games, the Caballeros dress like gauchos or something, whatever makes Latin types feel feisty, the Gay Bladers and Hog Choppers are mostly all-purpose villains—the Bladers are black-leather-and-chain-mail faggots, and the Hog Choppers we recruit from outlaw motorcycle gangs.

  Now is that a league, gentlemen? Identification is the thing, boys. You gotta identify your teams with a large enough group of people to draw crowds, but why tie yourself to something local like a city? This way, we got a team for the spades, a team for the frustrated Middle Americans, a team for the hippies and kids, a team for the spies, a team for the faggots, and a team for the motorcycle nuts and violence freaks. And any American who can’t identify with any of those teams is an odds-on bet to hate one or more of them enough to come out to the game to see them stomped. I mean, who wouldn’t want to see the Hog Choppers and the Panthers go at each other under Combat rules?

  Gentlemen, I tell you, it’s creative thinking like this that made our country great, and it’s creative thinking like this that will make Combat football the greatest gold mine in professional sports.

  Stay Tuned, Sports Fans…

  Good afternoon, Combat fans, and welcome to today’s major-league Combat football game between the Caballeros and the Psychedelic Stompers, brought to you by the World Safety Razor Blade Company, with the sharpest, strongest blade for your razor in the world.

  It’s ninety-five degrees on this clear New York day in July, and a beautiful day for a Combat football game, and the game here today promises to be a real smasher, as the Caballeros, only a game behind the league-leading Black Panthers, take on the fast-rising, hard-punching Psychedelic Stompers, and perhaps the best running back in the game today, Wolfman Ted. We’ve got a packed house here today, and the Stompers, who won the toss, are about to receive the kickoff from the Caballeros…

  And there it is, a low bullet into the end zone, taken there by Wolf man Ted. The Wolfman crosses the goal line, he’s up to the five, the ten, the fourteen. He brings down Number 71, Pete Lopez, with a right to the windpipe, crosses the fifteen, takes a glancing blow to the head from Number 56, Diaz, is tackled on the eighteen by Porfirio Rubio, Number 94, knocks Rubio away with two quick rights to the head, crosses the twenty, and takes two rapid blows to the midsection in succession from Beltran and Number 30, Orduna, staggers, and is tackled low from, behind by the quick-recovering Rubio, and slammed to the ground under a pile of Caballeros on the twenty-four.

  First and ten for the Stompers on their own twenty-four. Stompers quarterback Ronny Seede brings his team to the line of scrimmage in a double flanker formation with Wolfman Ted wide to the right. A long count—

  The snap, Seede fades back to—

  A quick handoff to the Woifman charging diagonally across the action toward left tackle, and the Woifman hits the line on a dead run, windmilling his right fist, belting his way through one, two, three Caballeros, getting two, three yards, then taking three quick ones to the rib cage from Rubio, and staggering right into Number 41, Manuel Cardozo, who brings him down on about the twenty-seven with a hard right cross.

  Hold it! A flag on the play! Orduna, Number 30, of the Caballeros, and. Dickson, Number 83, of the Stompers, are smashing away at each other on the twenty-six! Dickson takes two hard ones and goes down, but as Orduna kicks him in the ribs, Number 72, Merling, of the Stompers, grabs him from behind, and now there are six or seven assistant referees breaking it up…

  Something going on in the stands at about the fifty, too—a section of Stompers’ rooters mixing it up with the Caballero fans—

  But now they’ve got things sorted out on the field, and it’s ten yards against the Caballeros for striking an ineligible player, nullified by a ten-yarder against the Stompers for illegal offensive striking. So now it’s second and seven for the Stompers on their own twenty-seven—

  It’s quieted down a bit there above the fifty-yard line, but there’s another little fracas going in the far end zone end a few groups of people milling around in the aisles of the upper grandstand—

  There’s the snap, and Seede fades back quietly, dances around, looks downfield, and throws one intended for Number 54, Al Viper, the left end, at about the forty. Viper goes up for it, he’s got it—

  And takes a tremendous shot along the base of his neck from Number 18, Porfirio Rubio! The ball is jarred loose. Rubio dives for it, he’s got it, but he takes a hard right in the head from Viper, then a left. Porfirio drops the ball and goes at Viper with both fists! Viper knocks him sprawling and dives on top of the ball, burying it and bringing a whistle from the head referee as Rubio rains blows on his prone body. And here com
e the assistant referees to pull Porfirio off as half the Stompers come charging downfield toward the action—

  They’re at it again near the fifty-yard line! About forty rows of fans going at each other. There goes a smoke bomb!

  They’ve got Rubio away from Viper now, but three or four Stompers are trying to hold Wolfman Ted back, and Ted has blood in his eye as he yells at Number 41, Cardozo. Two burly assistant referees are holding Cardozo back…

  There go about a hundred and fifty special police up into the midfield stands. They’ve got their Mace and prods out…

  The head referee is calling an official’s time out to get things organized, and we’ll be back to live National Combat Football League action after this message…

  The Circus Is in Town

  “We’ve got a serious police problem with Combat football,” Commissioner Minelli told me after the game between the Golden Supermen and the Psychedelic Stompers last Sunday, in which the Supermen slaughtered the Stompers, 42–14, and during which there were ten fatalities and one hundred eighty-nine hospitalizations among the rabble in the stands.

  “Every time there’s a game, we have a riot, your honor,” Minelli (who had risen through the ranks) said earnestly. “I recommend that you should think seriously about banning Combat football. I really think you should.”

  This city is hard enough to run without free advice from politically ambitious cops. “Minelli,” I told him, “yon are dead wrong on both counts. First of all, not only has there never been a riot in New York during a Combat football game, but the best studies show that the incidences of violent crimes and social violence diminishes from a period of three days before a Combat game clear through to a period five days afterward, not only here, but in every major city in which a game is played.”

  “But only this Sunday ten people were killed and nearly two hundred injured, including a dozen of my cops—”

  “In the stands, you nitwit, not in the streets!” Really, the man was too much!

  “I don’t see the difference—”

  “Ye gods, Minelli, can’t you see that Combat football keeps a hell of a lot of violence off the streets? It keeps it in the stadium, where it belongs. The Romans understood that two thousand years ago! We can hardly stage gladiator sports in this day and age, so we have to settle for a civilized substitute.”

  “But what goes on in there is murder. My cops are taking a beating. And we’ve got to assign two thousand cops to every game. It’s costing the taxpayers a fortune, and you can bet… someone will be making an issue out of it in the next election.”

  I do believe that the lout was actually trying to pressure me. Still, in his oafish way, he had put his finger on the one political disadvantage of Combat football: the cost of policing the games and keeping the fan clubs in the stands from tearing each other to pieces.

  And then I had one of those little moments of blind Inspiration when the pieces of a problem simply fall into shape as an obvious pattern of solution.

  Why bother keeping them from tearing each other to pieces?

  “I think I have the solution, Minelli,” I said. “Would it satisfy your sudden sense of fiscal responsibility if you could take all but a couple dozen cops off the Combat football games?”

  Minelli looked at me blankly. “Anything less than two thousand cops in there would be mincemeat by halftime,” he said.

  “So why send them in there?”

  “Huh?”

  “All we really need is enough cops to guard the gates, frisk the fans for weapons, seal up the stadium with the help of riot-doors, and make sure no one gets out till things have simmered down inside.”

  “But they’d tear each other to ribbons in there with no cops!”

  “So let them. I intend to modify the conditions under which the city licenses Combat football so that anyone who buys a ticket legally waives his right to police protection. Let them fight all they want. Let them really work out their hatreds on each other until they’re good and exhausted. Human beings have an incurable urge to commit violence on each other. We try to sublimate that urge out of existence, and we end up with irrational violence on the streets. The Romans had a better idea—give the rabble a socially harmless outlet for violence. We spend billions on welfare to keep things pacified with bread, and where has it gotten us? Isn’t it about time we tried circuses?”

  As American as Apple Pie

  Let me tell it to you brother, we’ve sure been waiting for the Golden Supermen to play the Panthers in this town again, after the way those blond mothers cheated us, 17–10, the last time and wasted three hundred of the brothers! Yeah, man, they had those stands packed with honkies trucked in from as far away as Buffalo—we just weren’t ready is why we took the loss.

  But this time we planned ahead and got ourselves up for the game even before it was announced. Yeah, instead of waiting for them to announce the date of the next Panther-Supermen game in Chicago and then scrambling with the honkies for tickets, the Panther Fan Club made under-the-table deals with ticket brokers for blocks of tickets for whenever the next game would be, so that by the time today’s game was announced, we controlled two-thirds of the seats in Daley Stadium and the honkies had to scrape and scrounge for what was left.

  Yeah, man, today we pay them back for that last game! We got two-thirds of the seats in the stadium and Eli Wood is back in action and we gonna just go out and stomp those mothers today!

  Really, I’m personally quite cynical about Combat; most of us who go out to the Gay Bladers games are. After all, if you look at it straight on, Combat football is rather a grotty business. I mean, look at the sort of people who turn out at Supermen or Panthers or, for God’s sake, Caballero games: the worst sort of proletarian apes. Aside from us, only the Hogs have any semblance of class, and the Hogs have beauty only because they’re so incredibly up-front gross; I mean, all that shiny metal and black leather!

  And, of course, that’s the only real reason to go to the Blader games: for the spectacle. To see it and to be part of it! To see seminaked groups of men engaging in violence and to be violent yourself—and especially with those black-leather-and-chain-mail Hog Lovers!

  Of course, I’m aware of the cynical use the loathsome government makes of Combat. If there’s nastiness between the blacks and PR’s in New York, they have the league schedule a Panther-Caballero game and let them get it out on each other safely in the stadium. If there’s college campus trouble in the Bay area, it’s a Stompers-Supermen game in Oakland. And us and the Hogs when just anyone anywhere needs to release general hostility, I’m not stupid; I know that Combat football is a tool of the Establishment…

  But, Lord, it’s just so much bloody fun!

  We gonna have some fun today! The Hogs is playing the Stompers and that’s the wildest kind of Combat game there is! Those crazy freaks come to the game stoned out of their minds, and you know that at least Wolfman Ted is playing on something stronger than pot. There are twice as many chicks at Stompers games than with any other team the Hogs play because the Stompers chicks are the only chicks besides ours who aren’t scared out of their boxes at the thought of being locked up in a stadium with twenty thousand hot-shot Hogger rape artists like us!

  Yeah, we get good and stoned, and the Stompers fans get good and stoned, and the Hogs get stoned, and the Stompers get stoned, and then we all groove on beating the piss out of each other, whoo-whee! And when we win in the stands, we drag off the pussy and gang-bang it.

  Oh, yeah, Combat is just good clean dirty fun!

  It makes you feel good to go out to a Supermen game, makes, you feel like a real American is supposed to, like a man. All week you’ve got to take crap from the niggers and the spies and your goddamned crazy doped-up kids and hoods and bums and faggots in the streets, and you’re not even supposed to think of them as niggers and spies and crazy doped-up kids and bums and hoods and faggots. But Sunday you can go out to the stadium and watch the Supermen give it to the Panthers, the Caballero
s, the Stompers, the Hogs, or the Bladers and maybe kick the crap out of a few people whose faces you yourself don’t like.

  It’s a good healthy way to spend a Sunday afternoon, out in the open air at a good game when the Supermen are hot and we’ve got the opposition in the stands outnumbered. Combat’s a great thing to take your kid to, too!

  I don’t know, all my friends go to the Caballero games. We go together and take a couple of six-packs of beer apiece, and get muy boracho, and just have some crazy fun, you know? Sometimes I come home a little cut up and my wife is all upset and tries to get me to promise not to go to the Combat games anymore. Sometimes I promise, just to keep her quiet—she can get on my nerves—but I never really mean it.

  Hombre, you know how it is; women don’t understand these things like men do. A man has got to go out with his friends and feel like a man sometimes. It’s not too easy to find ways to feel muy macho in this country, amigo. The way it is for us here, you know. It’s not as if we’re hurting anyone we shouldn’t hurt. Who goes out to the Caballero games but a lot of dirty gringos who want to pick on us? So it’s a question of honor, in a way, for us to get as many amigos as we can out to the Caballero games and show those cabrones that we can beat them anytime, no matter how drunk we are. In fact, the drunker we are, the better it is, tu sabes?

  Baby, I don’t know what it is, maybe it’s just a chance to get it all out. It’s a unique trip, that’s all. There’s no other way to get that particular high, that’s why I go to Stompers games. Man, the games don’t mean anything to me as games; games are like games, dig. But the whole Combat scene is its own reality.