Michael MacCambridge's 2004 America's Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation:
Pro football succeeded ultimately because it struck a resonant chord in
the American psyche. In a time of increasing alienation and urban
flight, when a sense of community was dissipating, it unified cities in
ways that other civic enterprises could not.
What no one
could have counted on, though, was the sheer degree with which sports
fans began to care about, and build their lives around, their respective
pro football teams. The NFL became a reality unto itself, one that far
transcended its domain of Sunday afternoons and, later, Monday nights.
From Dallas to Los Angeles, Cleveland to Baltimore, New York City to
Kansas City, modern American men found a truth and beauty in pro
football that was more reliable, more sharply defined, than almost any
other aspect of their lives.
Like the best of the arts, pro
football worked on multiple levels. For the loyalists, there was the
fortune of the home team. For neutral or casual fans, there was action,
skill, suspense, and violence. For gamblers, the wagering proposition.
For those with a deeper interest, the game could exist on a canvas -- as
a morality play; a cultural metaphor; a crucible of values in which
teamwork, sacrifice, and dedication were rewarded, while selfishness,
cowardice, and sloth were harshly punished. What those who were
contemptuous of sports misunderstood was not merely that a middle-class
sports fan might revere football to the same degree that an inveterate
theatergoer revered Shaekspeare, but that he might do so for many of the
same reasons.
