Sacking The Huddle When We're All Getting Tackled

Video from Tariq Toure and AJ+ Video 

Antonio Gramsci, a founder of the Italian Communist Party and a major communist theoretician, wrote an article in 1918 entitled Football and Scopone. Scopone is a popular Italian card game which depends on players being able to challenge, intimidate, and distract other players, as well as on luck and skill. Teamwork counts for something in some variations, but not for very much. The game practically invites what non-players will call cheating. Scopone has regional variations.

Gramsci’s point in his article was to draw a parallel between the culture of scopone, and Italy’s relative under-development and backwardness, and western Europe’s development and progress under what passed as modern democracies. Football has rules and a division of labor and a code of fair and open play, Gramsci noted, while scopone has drama, distrust, and secret diplomacy. Football is played in the open air, a healthy environment, while scopone is played in darker places with artificial light. Football matches end with gentlemen shaking hands (apparently ultras didn’t exist in 1918), but a game of scopone can end with a bloody mess. Gramsci’s parallels were drawn correctly in 1918: the ruling classes of Europe and the U.S. were set about the project of ensuring fair play and progress under their rules and with their teams, while a differently-developed world of unfortunates used other means to order their world and could not progress. Sports and culture mirrored social conditions. Gramsci used a sports analogy in order to make his point, but he did not reduce social relations to a game. 

Now come to an article on the front page of today’s The New York Times under the headline “Fast Offenses Are Sacking the Huddle, Long a Part of N.F.L. Lore” by Bill Pennington. Pennington makes the point that the football huddle is being abandoned or shortened in order to win higher scores and hurry and force the game play and action. The arguments against the huddle are many: there is no need to check in on player’s moods, the work of the players is regimented to the point that huddles have become unnecessary, players can’t hear one another because of fan noise, hand signals and codes can be used in place of talking, play has become especially complex, linebackers and coaches run the game, and young people coming up don’t have the experience of the huddle. The space which once belonged to players has been taken by the coaches and, standing behind them, by the owners and investors who profit from high-scoring, constant-play games. If the huddle has value now, it is because of a need for secrecy.

Unpack each of the reasons given above for abolishing the huddle and find its social or political corollary. Workers are pushed to do more and accomplish more, and this echoes through society. Our bosses don’t check in with us, unless it is to discipline us or push us to do more, and the loss of unions has meant that we have less space to check in with one another. Work is increasingly regimented, or is done less by crews and units and more by individuals and automated machinery. The social aspects of work are disappearing. Your mood, your health, and your suggestions on how things might be done better don’t much matter. You learn how to perform a job; you are not apprenticed into a craft or trade where a variety of special skills is needed and will be improved on over a lifetime of skilled work. The instructions you are given at work are either terse or come in volumes of policy manuals; make a minor mistake, or find a shortcut, and you can be fired. Managers are either ever-present or they keep their distance until they have to enforce rules which you don’t have a role in making. Those managers owe their jobs to the owners, and they know it. Young people coming into your workplace don’t have much experience in solidarity.

Now, let’s take it one step further. The gentlemen’s agreements which once served to call the plays in America’s version of democracy have broken down, or are breaking down. The emphasis in society is on profits, competition, militarism, and individualism. Trump uses executive orders and secrecy to govern. The “Army of One” slogan could apply to soldiers, or to us at work, or to us in our homes and schools. A relatively small number of people give us direction, and they increasingly speak in either the coded languages of racism, sexism, and classism or throw the codes away. And the people giving the instructions from he sidelines don’t see much need to check in on anyone’s moods or injuries. This may not be new. or news, but the stakes in calling the plays in this way today count for more. Redistricting and stacked elections means that people with other ideas are shut out. The huddle that was your union meeting, community meeting, lodge or club meeting, down time at a neighborhood watering hole, dinner with your family, church social, book club, coon hunting buddies, nature hiking group, bowling league, barbershop or beauty shop time, or civil or human rights organizing is getting pushed to the margins or has already been marginalized and disempowered.

Those gentlemen’s agreements were never good, and they can’t be defended, but their breakdown has much to teach us. You might not miss them until they're gone and you hear your friends wishing Bush or Ford or Nixon were around and saying that McCain and Corker maybe aren't so bad after all, though they are. We have not exactly gone backwards from football to scopone (from democracy to semi-feudal chaos or fascism), and we have not moved forward to a better way of playing a game (from a slow-moving democracy to something less costly and more efficient). Sacking the huddle or throwing out the rule book in order to achieve higher scores in less time is not making life better for the players or the fans, though the owners and managers seem to be doing just fine. Debating the efficiency or costs of democracy, or the specific rules which hand society over to a different set of owners and managers, already concedes too much. It only looks like scopone because of the blood and drama.