How do You Leave Your First Love?
by Ian Schwartz

There comes a time when you can no longer recognize your first crush. The object of worship that spanned your childhood, adolescence and fledgling adult years becomes a stranger, foreign as Pluto and twice as cold.

This metamorphosis doesn't happen all at once; the change is gradual. What does strike with the suddenness of lightning is the knowledge that a parting is inevitable. Then the horrific import of the insight hits and you scream aloud in anguish… "My God, what will I do without football!"

I can't remember a time when the NFL was not a part of my life. Growing up with a pair of football-mad parents, my brother and I used to joke that instead of orthodox Jews, we were orthodox Jets. Sunday, of course, was our holy day.

Football was our time together, and my entire family looked forward to it. In the 1970s, when, because of the NFL's blackout policy, Jets home games were rarely broadcast on TV, we'd take glorious 2½-hour rides to nowhere in our claustrophobic yet immaculate Volkswagen Beetle, Marty Glickman bellowing from the radio loud enough to warrant a noise pollution ticket.

As my brother and I grew older and the gulf of understanding between our parents and us inevitably widened, football could bring us together. For about a dozen years, we were a family that never once ate dinner as a unit, yet rarely did we watch football apart. Even while nursing solitary grudges in separate rooms, four TVs all running at once, a big play was enough to send us surging into the living room for "didjaseethats."

It's been more than 30 years, and I have remained a zealous disciple of Lord Pigskin. So it is with sadness beyond description that I must confess: Since the first week of this season, I have yet to sit through an entire football game. For me, the NFL has become patently unwatchable.

The focus has shifted. The battle that counts is no longer on the field. New trenches have been dug, and instead of grimy heroes scraped and bloody, immaculate executives without so much as a shaving nick are huddling. Advertising is the game. Football, which — right or wrong — means so much to so many of us, is just a product to sell — a show, just like "Friends."

But unlike a sitcom, nothing about football is funny these days. Exploitative executives know how desperately we need our fix. They know how, without football, a bleak winter Sunday is just a day you sit around and count the swift-moving hours until school or work Monday morning.

How have we been taken advantage of? You figure it out. Football is a 60-minute game, with maybe a third of that devoted to on-field action, yet it routinely takes more than three hours to finish one contest. That is an awful lot of advertising, which translates into an awful lot of advertising dollars for the networks, which in turn becomes a monstrous amount of TV revenue for the league.

This means that if you plan on sitting down to a day and night of football on a Sunday, you are viewing five or six extraneous hours, the overwhelming majority devoted to brain-shriveling commercials featuring beer and food shilled by plastic blondes. You could fly from New York to California, retrieve your luggage and maybe find your rental car during that time. And you'd get three hours back.

Other major American sports have their problems, but none are so presumptuous as to think they can force fans to sit through a round of commercials, then cut back to the game to hear the commentators tell us it's time for "a break."

Unconscionable. Yet we are sitting through these breaks in ever-increasing numbers.

Last season's 4 percent jump in TV ratings over the 2001 campaign represented the biggest annual gain since 1994. Well, at least that must mean that despite the distractions, the game is at its most sublime.

Actually, no.

In the past nine years, the NFL has expanded from 28 to 32 teams. That means roughly 200 men who a decade ago would have been doctors, truck drivers, lawyers, teachers, drag queens, etc. are instead NFL players. And the game is suffering because of it.

Football is certainly not the only major American sport to expand. Hockey, basketball and baseball all have done the same, but they've also expanded their talent search. And football? When was the last time you heard about the rifle-armed quarterback just waiting to make the jump from the Czech Republic or Japan? Or the pure runner who paddled over from Cuba?

You haven't because, except for the odd place kicker, they don't exist. College and the inferior leagues made up of former collegians are the NFL's only preserves.

Maybe football and TV aren't entirely to blame. Could it be they're just giving us what we want? We watch games in tiny "sight bites." In bars, swiveling from screen to screen to keep tabs on our fantasy league teams amid a visual cacophony, all the while trying to avoid dripping Buffalo wing sauce on our $150 officially sanctioned NFL jersey. (There's nothing odder than hearing someone ribbed for having a "fake" jersey. Here's some news: They're all fake; we don't play.)

Do we like the commercials, additional games with inferior players and ads superimposed on the field? Or maybe we enjoy the puzzling antics of the players. After all, Tampa Bay Buccaneers defensive end Warren Sapp gets more airtime for his skipping than he does for his quarterback sacks. Maybe we want Terrell Owens laying the ball at midfield like a gladiator offering the bloodthirsty crowd his vanquished foe's head. I don't think so. For most of us, I think, it's the tiny pockets of purity that cannot be bought or choreographed. The infinitesimal change in a defender's gait when he knows he's beaten deep. The imminence of a blindside sack. The balance of a perfect spiral leaving one hand and falling into two others over 100 feet away, as if on a string.

It's those moments that keep me hanging on as if to a faithless lover. Your head can tell you anything it likes, but it's your heart that runs the show.

That was illustrated last Sunday, while I was reading a book with the Jets getting trounced in the background. My girlfriend asked if she could change the channel, and after a brief pang of inner pathos, I assented. I got lost in the book for a few minutes, then looked up and saw a pretty young girl in a sequined outfit prancing around an ice skating rink.

"No," I told my girlfriend.
"But you —"
"No, not a chance." I took the controller back, put on the game and returned my attention to the book. My girlfriend was perplexed, and not a little annoyed.

And since she knew of my deep disenchantment with the sport, who could blame her? How could I ever explain? Because while you may ignore your first love; while you may temporarily abandon her, revile her in print and swear to never watch her again, there one thing you don't do… and that's leave her for someone uglier.

E-mail Ian Schwartz at pokeyca at hotmail dot-com.

— graphic by D.P. Barsam (barsam@hotpop.com)