By Jeff Segal
It is sometime in the early 70’s. An eight-year-old boy sits cross-legged on his bed, turning the glossy pages of a coffee table book spread in front of him. The book is about the National Football League’s first fifty years. The boy is amazed by black-and-white photos of football players wearing helmets that look more like baseball mitts strapped to their heads. (In some pictures the players wear no helmets at all!) There are color photos, too, with exotic exposures highlighting the speed and violence of the game. In one crazy collage of a picture, the stitches of a football appear to be sewn into a man’s massive forearm.
The boy can’t really follow the book’s essays, but he traces his fingers over the arrows on the diagrammed plays, deciphering the X’s and O’s. When the Chicago Bears first deployed the T formation against the Washington Redskins in the 1940 championship game, it was a simple misdirection play that launched the 73-0 rout.
He lingers longest over the four-page, hand-drawn collage illustrating the evolution of the league and its franchises. The Bears and the Packers and the Giants were all there at the beginning, but he marvels the teams that never made it out of the 20’s: Providence Steamrollers! Rock Island Independents! Canton Bulldogs! Duluth Eskimos!
The boy still owns the book, and still enjoys flipping through it, even though—or, maybe, because—it’s as antiquated now as it was modern then. It’s the NFL before there were teams in Tampa and Tennessee, before video review and four-receiver sets and February Super Bowls. Still, the Colts may have moved from Baltimore to Indianapolis, but their uniforms haven’t changed since the 50’s: simple blue and white, with two stripes over the tops of the shoulders and a lone horseshoe on the helmet. Some things change, some stay the same. He imagines an alternate universe where the playoffs would pit the Providence Steamrollers against the Duluth Eskimos, and wonders who he’d root for.
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