Football, more than other sports, fulfills this need. It is the one sport guided by language, by the word signal, the snap number, the color code, the play name…Much of the appeal of sport derives from its dependence on elegant gibberish.
Don DeLillo is one of those novelists that is known as a “very serious writer.” That he had yet to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature as of the 2021 awards announcement is pretty much considered one of the great headscratchers in the world of 21st century fiction. The beginning of this quote reveals his postmodern credibility: the novel is not really about football the game so much as football the concept. The ellipsis inserted there between the two sentences represents almost an entire page of text, but this editorial decision makes its point: DeLillo is serious writer, but End Zone is a comic novel. He’s a funny writer. Not funny ha-ha in the generally perceived sense, necessarily, but on a certain elevated plane of intellect, DeLillo is a very serious writer capable of making some readers laugh out loud.
“I'm sure glad I'm up here. D.C. Stadium in the heart of the nation's capital. Crisp blue skies. Emmett Big Bend Creed. And there's more on tap next week when the Chicago Bears, the monsters of the midway, take on the always rough and tough Green Bay Packers of coach something something. Gary, what's going to happen up there on the banks of the Fox River in little Green Bay when the big bad Bears come blowing in from the windy city.”
Anyone who has ever watched any football game ever televised in the history of televised football will find this passage either irritatingly or comfortingly familiar. Whether it was Frank Gifford in the Monday night booth with Howard Cosell and Dandy Don Meredith or Pat Summerall on Sundays on CBS, little alteration would be required to fit the words spoken above into the mouths of broadcast announcers. Except that Raymond Toon—known as Toony to his friends—is not in the broadcast booth at D.C. Stadium beneath a brilliant blue sky waiting for the big game to start before a crowd of tens of thousands with millions at home listening to his words spew forth from their television sets.
In fact, Raymond is sitting alone at the end of the player bench and intoning his play-by-play and color analysis into a closed fist rather than a microphone. He was all by himself until the novel’s protagonist Gary Harkness shows up. Toony is not insane; he’s merely practicing. But the mere fact that everything is all so instantly familiar despite being an example of that elegant gibberish makes the point starkly that this is novel about language rather than sport.
Taft Robinson was the first black student to be enrolled at Logos College in west Texas. They got him for his speed.
These are the opening words of the novel. It was important to situate how the book is really about language and communication rather than football before commenting upon this fact. That phrase about getting him for his speed could be left intact, but inserted into an entirely different context and the color of Taft’s skin would be at least as important but in an entirely different way. In addition to contextual complexities, there is another complication to this short paragraph as the opening lines of the story: the full dimension of the meaning of speed in relation to a black man does not need to be explained further. Language can do amazing things such as fill in huge swaths of information through subtext that is completely left out of the context. It is a sport for those with gifted with more intellectual than athletic prowess.
