American football is an exquisitely designed game. The process of repeated interactions that structure a game’s progression is referred to by game designers as a “core loop.”
Want to know what my absolute FAVORITE part of football’s core loop is?
It’s in the moments immediately following the snap.
For those of you who don’t know football, the “snap” is the moment when the team on offense, the one “driving” the ball down the field, initiates the action state of a round of attempted progress, which is contested by the team playing defense. Such rounds are called “downs.” Successive downs compose the “drive”; that is, the iterative effort by the offense to move the ball further down the field, to a special area called the “end zone” (because it is at the end of the field). Successfully relocating the ball to the end zone is called a “touchdown,” which is how teams score points. And that, my friends, is a broad view of the core loop of football.
Let’s get back to the snap.
The moment after the snap is one pregnant with promise and peril. It is a moment when the quarterback—the player responsible for initially handling the ball and for deciding who to entrust it to, via a hand-off or pass, for the purpose of advancing its position down the field—has decisions to make. He has to look for players on his team that will face as little challenge as possible in their attempt to advance the ball’s position.
But this decision is wrought with drama. Why?
Because, for the few seconds that the quarterback’s decision-making process requires, it is quite literally surrounded by a ritual of violence. Players from the opposing team, the ones trying to staunch the drive, try mightily to reach the quarterback and tackle him, stopping the round (aka the “down”) and retarding the offensive team’s progress.
But the quarterback has teammates who are protecting him from his would-be tacklers. These protectors are known collectively as the offensive line. Because of the way the opposing teams are arrayed in a line facing each other, once the snap occurs and the defending team’s tacklers try to attack the offensive team’s quarterback, the quarterback’s protectors (aka “the offensive line”) are almost invariably pressed from being a “line” into being a... parabola. A parabola in which the quarterback has some space, ever-dwindling, to maneuver as he surveys the field and makes his decision about whom to pass the ball to.
This parabolic space is called “the pocket.”
Snap. Quarterback has the ball. The other team tries to tackle him. He maneuvers and makes decisions within the pocket, this space created for him by his defenders.
The quarterback has to remain calm and make a thoughtful decision when he faces an exponentially increasing danger of being subjected to violence and, probably, pain.
Repose and equanimity in the face of physical violence and hazard: it’s dramatic. It’s thrilling. And, to me, it is the core of what masculinity is about.
In my estimation, masculinity is defined by one’s facility and comfort with violence.
This is a neutral assessment rendered negative or positive depending upon whether the manifestation of violence is “toxic masculinity” (think: aggression, abuse, or threats thereof), or “positive masculinity” (think: protection, safety, warding off the unjustified violence of others). Whether we are deriding men who perpetrate toxic acts of aggression or lauding those who perform positive acts like protection, they are both fundamentally about how men relate to violence--our preparation and inclination to engage in it for selfish or for altruistic ends.
I do not put much stock in traditional markers of masculinity. But this morally neutral capacity to receive and dispense violence with equanimity is a masculine value that, over the years, has grown to have tremendous importance to me, and that I feel immense sadness and inadequacy regarding my deficiency in. I attribute this to the nature of my work: having consumed so much violent media over the years, I have seen men dispense and endure violence in all manner of ways. I have been inspired by the courage of men who gladly give up their lives for causes I don’t believe in. I have been inspired by the men who have received blades to their necks with relative stoicism. I have been wrecked, and found myself surprisingly and stupidly resentful, of men who have wailed and trembled as they were being murdered.
I have also come to learn about myself that while violence, generally, scares me--and I disdain myself for that--it is the anticipation of violence that I find most psychologically disturbing. I have only been punched in the face once in real life--an accident during a boxing class--and the blow to my face was much more tolerable than the fear of the blow. When playing video games, I find that I am often laughably pusillanimous and unbearably anxious in the face of the unknown, but am thrilled and excited by the flow of battle once it commences.
Which brings me back to the snap and the quarterback.
Unlike his protectors on the offensive line--who, from the very moment of the snap, know that their sole job is to engage in the positive masculinity of counter-violence to protect their teammate--the quarterback exists in an oasis where violence is at the edge of a world collapsing in on him. He might be subjected to it. He might not. But he has to marshal his faculties with repose in the face of peril.
Masculinity at its finest. Masculinity that I aspire to.
And that is why those precious seconds immediately after the snap, but preceding a pass, fill me with a frisson of pleasure, a swell of admiration and suspense verging on the erotic, that is superior to what I experience as a spectator of any other moment in any other game there is: sports, video game, or otherwise.
What about you?