Political Football.(Brief Article)

If baseball, the greatest of sports, is stereotypically regarded as the game of intellectuals--with annoying eggheads who throw like girls wearing Red Sox and Cubs hats with bravado--then football is the sport of the lunkhead, the lamebrain, the brawny illiterate. Poets and novelists --Donald Hall, Marianne Moore, Bernard Malamud--find beauty and metaphor in baseball; the football novel occupies less shelf space than hockey haiku.

Yet football, however unpoetic, has been the sport of American politicians, even the odd political intellectual. Why, is something of a mystery, for football is committee meetings punctuated by violence, while government is ... well, the mystery is solved. Henry Adams once defined politics as the systematic organization of hatreds; Vince Lombardi would have understood. (The Green Bay Packers coach was a Bobby Kennedy Democrat.)

College football was a virtual prerequisite for the Republican presidents of postwar, pre-millennium America: Nixon at Whittier, Ford of the Michigan Wolverines, Eureka's Reagan, Eisenhower at West Point. To his lifelong regret, a knee injury (against Tufts, of all powderpuffs) relegated Ike, whom the New York Times deemed "one of the most promising backs in Eastern football," to the West Point cheerleading squad, where he huzzahed on the Black Knights of the Hudson decades before cheerleader Senator Trent Lott shook his pom-poms for Ole Miss.

Gerald Ford had to choose between football and politics before his political career even began, and he selected the gridiron: In 1940 Ford resigned from the original executive committee of the antiwar America First Committee because he feared that his involvement might jeopardize his position as assistant football coach at Yale.

Long before former Buffalo Bills quarterback Jack Kemp spoke of football as a solvent of racial hostility, another America Firster, New York Republican Congressman Hamilton Fish, a Walter Camp All-American tackle at Harvard who had commanded a black infantry unit in World War I, acted as a congressional ombudsman for black America.

Football intellectuals are rarer than gridiron politicos, though more common than drop kicks. Newly inducted Pro Football Hall of Fame coach Marv Levy of the Buffalo Bills is a Harvard M.A. who was beloved by his players for stumping them with ...