Football the Way It Ought to Be

By Sarah Vowell

Until comedian Dennis Miller's debut as an announcer on ABC's Monday Night Football last week, I had not watched an NFL game since Black Sunday, January 1979. By which I mean, Super Bowl XIII. I was then a Dallas Cowboys diehard. When the Pittsburgh Steelers beat America's Team 35-31, I cried like a girl, because that's what I was, a nine-year-old in a Cowboys T shirt. Cradling the Roger Staubach-autographed football I had received for Christmas (which he had graciously signed despite the fact that my well-meaning mother had sent him a Joe Namath ball), I decided I was through with the game then and there. I think I suspected that there are a finite number of broken hearts a girl can mend, and knew to save up the bandages for the important stuff, like unrequited love or the cancellation of Melrose Place.

So ABC's preseason match between the San Francisco 49ers and the New England Patriots at the Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, was my first football game in 21 years. If ABC hired Miller in part to bring in a new audience to aid Monday Night Football's slumping ratings, I fit the bill. I'd grown up to be a suspicious female who prefers the plaintive nihilism of Hank Williams Sr. to the "rowdy" antics of his Monday Night Football theme-singing son.

Compared to, say, the computer industry in the past two decades, football has hardly changed. As a Dennis Miller fan and a beer drinker--there were approximately 6,000 Coors and Budweiser commercials during the three-hour game--I felt reasonably at home. Having forgotten a lot of gridiron lingo, I had no idea what a "fifth-place schedule" is, but Miller sure did. In fact, my listening to him debate the intricacies of a game I no longer completely understand must be similar to my aunt in Oklahoma trying to keep up with Miller on his HBO show. I can just hear her asking, "Who's this Lina Wertmuller, dear?" Because part of the joy of listening to motormouth Miller is that occasionally he'll stump you, but in the most respectful way. Rather than talk down to his audience, he simply assumes they get him, or at the very least that they know how to use the Biographical Entries section of the dictionary. Which is why he'd be the perfect keynote speaker at a convention of reference librarians.

Miller's detractors find him too sardonic. What they miss is the fact that to get as riled up as Miller does about the things he bad-mouths, one has to be in love with the world. One must care. Thus my favorite moment on Dennis Miller Live is the night he postponed the monologue a few seconds to say he'd been driving around blissfully listening to the Beach Boys and wanted to thank songwriter Brian Wilson. Clearly, he has the same soft spot for the football players he admires. During the Canton game, he talked about a Hall of Fame dinner he'd just attended, swooning, "There's such a nobility about those guys. It really tears at your heartstrings when you see how many of them have limps. The price they paid for greatness is touching."

The banter among Miller and colleagues Al Michaels and Dan Fouts was congenial, not to mention interactive. With Fouts, Miller was downright deferential, prefacing a query about a thing called a "two-gap" defense with the apology, "You know, Danny, I hate to do the Socratic method with you and ask you all these questions." After Miller deemed Canton the "Tigris and Euphrates of football history," Michaels elaborated, "This could be Three Rivers Stadium--the Tigris, the Euphrates and the Cuyahoga," sailing Miller's Mesopotamia one-liner to the New World. When Miller cooed he was having "so much fun!" Michaels ribbed him, "This is like you won a prize to a fantasy announcing camp, isn't it?"

The Patriots won 20-0. Like I care. The game was over way before it ended, and the forward-thinking Miller came prepared for such fourth-quarter doldrums with the catch-phrase, "Start blow-drying Teddy Koppel's hair, because this one's done." His patter included a mention of the sword of Damocles poised above San Francisco's offensive line, a riff in which he imagined a player whose jersey number was pi, and the observation that Patriots head coach Bill Belichick "blinks about as frequently as Clint Eastwood in a Sergio Leone film." This isn't just wit. This seems to me to be the point of sportscasters. Football, like all your big American pastimes, is a metaphorical arena. So who better to announce it than this country's poet laureate of simile? It's not just a game. Sports are analogies for all our finest hopes and truest dreams. Hey, I never said I stopped watching Bob Costas' lofty basketball play-by-play on NBC.

Sarah Vowell is the author of Take the Cannoli and a contributing editor for public radio's This American Life