Tag: Super Bowl

Not sure how true this is, but it’s kinda true.
Roman Gladiators were the true ancestors of American Football. Brute force, team sport, with audience participation. Thumbs up or thumbs down from the fans could determine life or death of the defeated.

Top: Flag On The Play – Personal foul, 10 yards.
Bottom: Offensive foul – Death By Maggots.

Once the Romans left Britain, the locals needed something to kick around. Some wags found a Roman skull, decided to kick it all the way to the next village. The folks at that village didn’t like it much, and kicked it back to the first. Association Football was born.

Kicking a skull up and down a dirt path is hard on the feet, so the Roman skull was supplanted by the obvious replacement – an inflated pig’s bladder.

Association Football was too hard to pronounce in normal conversation, so it was renamed Assoc. Football, and those who played it were Assoc.’ers – hence the name “soccer,” and it caught on, even though all of the world still called it Football. But it wasn’t good enough for some. The game had lost its Gladiator roots (except for the drunks fighting on the sidelines).

Then one day in the early 1800s,  someone got fed up and wondered, “What’s the point of kicking a stinking inflated chunk of porcine offal back and forth?” and decided to pick up the ball and run it directly into the opposition, knocking out teeth, drawing blood and breaking bones in the process. The game of Rugby was born.

Once Rugby was introduced into the States via Canada, America decided some changes had to be made. No more round scrum, the teams had to line up and hit head on in order to move the little leather covered ellipsoid mere yards at a time, and Woody Hayes was invented.

All of this requires physical protection, so the players wear helmets, shoulder pads and crotch protectors. They’re bred to be corn-fed behemoths of people capable of unprecedented brute force trained to bash each other’s heads into the ground. I love it.