Although I’ve watched my fair share of NFL games on television, I only experienced my first live gridiron game yesterday afternoon at ANZ Stadium.
As a rugby league fan it was quite a bewildering, bemusing and fascinating spectacle, not least because the University of California Golden Bears and the Hawaii Rainbow Warriors seemed determined to really put on a show.
In a nice touch, ANZ technically counted as a California home game, and the Bears brought all their cast, crew and props, including a cannon that fired every time a touchdown was scored.
On television, you can tell that NFL is a stop-and-start game, and that the spectacles surrounding the game are as important as the game itself.
In person, however, that’s clear in a new and visceral way. Not only is the spectacle more immediate but you don’t have all the commentary, analysis and replays to fill in the space between actual gameplay.
Instead, you have the spectacle of the venue and the spectacle brought by each team’s entertainment squadron. For the first time, I realised how much of the NFL is not about football.
As the afternoon proceeded, it felt like there was more celebration of football than actual football. That wasn’t a bad thing, just different from what we experience in Australia.
After all, despite the fact that every gridiron game occurs over four 15-minute quarters, the match itself effectively balloons to about three hours (closer to four today) with the actual football only taking up about eleven minutes in total.
As a result, a great deal of the game revolves around what happens when football isn’t happening.
Being there in person, I wondered whether the high-octane music and gladiatorial imagery so characteristic of the NFL was a way of injecting a strong hit of testosterone and adrenaline to what often felt like a strategy game.
At times, it was more like a nightclub than a sports field, with hip-hop, dance music and top 40 medleys blasting out across the pitch, light years away from the Chicken Dance, the theme from Zorba the Greek, and all the other daggy songs you get at NRL matches.
At the same time, the action was periodically interspersed with Karaoke Cams, Kiss Cams and Dance Cams. Coming from an NFL context, the Hayne Cam is really not such an extravagant notion.
Indeed, there were moments in each quarter when the stoppage of play was long enough for an interview with a coach, a player or a professional. At these points, it was almost as if the game were proceeding slow enough for us to experience live commentary from the people playing it.
In many ways, then, the afternoon was like a celebration of Americana – brass bands, dancing, music – in which football was largely incidental to the overall effect.
That’s not to say that football wasn’t significant, but that it was folded back into one mere component in a rich tapestry of what it means to be American.
Watching it all come together, I realised how naturally a spectacle like the Super Bowl half time show emerges from the extended periods between plays and the need for supplementary entertainment– and at half time we were provided with our own special show, a fantastic dance performance that transformed the whole field into a parade ground.
In fact, the field felt like a parade ground for the whole afternoon, both in its visceral intensity and its calm and steady focus.
Like watching soldiers play chess, it was a statistician and analysts’ dream, exuding an extraordinary, restrained complexity that made me really grasp, for the first time, why people get so obssessed about this game.
Apparently one of the reasons Hayne couldn’t quite make it at the 49ers was his inability to grasp every “play” in such a short period of time, and I have never been to a live sporting match where I, too, felt such an overwhelming sense of depth, intensity and focus.
While the militaristic overtones of American football are clear from even the most cursory commercial, watching it live gives you a new insight into how it draws on the patience necessary to any great military mind. Each team etches out its territory, bit by bit, second after second – and this is very much a game played in seconds, rather than minutes.
That sense of militaristic focus was only enhanced by the enormous size of each team and the enormous number of players on the sidelines, something you don’t grasp in quite the way in a televised game, where the focus stays mainly on the field.
Yesterday afternoon, however, the huddle on the side of the field was as visceral to watch – and more consistent – than the fleeting gameplay.
With so many personalities and so many talents to choose from, it made me realise why NFL players who rise to star status need to have such huge profiles and personalities.
Similarly, it made me realise how much American popular culture is drawn from the NFL huddle, with the debut of Kanye West’s All Day at the Brit Awards coming to mind in particular. Looking backward, it also felt as if the Civil War was a touchstone and point of reference.
Closer to either a military parade or a board game – or both – than what I’d conventionally think of as football, it was a fascinating and eye-opening experience.
I can’t imagine how NFL fans would find rugby league, let alone State of Origin. Although we sometimes get frustrated with the hold-ups and penalties, to them it must seem like the most fluid, free-flowing and improvisational game in the world.
More generally, actually attending a gridiron game makes you realise that the whole stop-and-start approach doesn’t really exist in the same way in Australian sports, especially not in rugby league, which is taking more and more measures to speed the game up.
The closes we come is probably AFL, or possibly short-format events like the Auckland Nines or rugby sevens, where short, sharp, sudden, explosive play is the name of the game.
As I left ANZ, I wondered whether NFL or NRL was more exciting. Both have their moments.
One thing I learned yesterday is that the touchdown is so magnificently cathartic partly because it’s the main point at which the game opens up into something closer to what we’d think of as free-flowing football (although it’s also over as soon as it’s begun).
For that reason, I think that some of the touchdowns in the third and fourth quarters were easily as cathartic as any try or goal I’ve seen.
At the same time, however, the stop-and-start approach gives the conclusion a bit of a different flavour.
In most Australian codes of football, the last couple of minutes are often crucial and brilliantly suspenseful. I don’t think I breathed once during the Titans’ final set of six against the Panthers at Pepper Stadium last night.
By contrast, the last couple of minutes of this game had a different vibe. With the action halting around the fifty second mark for discussion and further planning, and then halting again around the ten second mark, it felt as if the suspense was a little bit dispersed by the final siren.
At the same time, the game itself had a different kind of suspense and tension, so maybe it all evens out.
One thing’s for sure: it was great to see gridiron in Sydney after such a long period.
Now that Jarryd Hayne has returned to the NFL, it’s hard to know what to do if you own one of his No.38 jerseys, since it doesn’t quite work as an object of nostalgia or aspiration, referring more to a future that never fully eventuated.
One of the nice things about the match, then, was that it was one of those rare occasions when a Hayne jersey still felt appropriate – and his No.38 seemed to be as frequent as those of every other NFL icon combined.
It was also great to get an introduction to College football and to see that such a great sense of spectacle isn’t confined to the NFL.
I’m now curious about everyone else’s impressions. Who else went to the game? What was your take?
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