June 4, 2007
Force Football - Not Your Father's Football Team
For the past two Saturdays Bruce and Peg-Eye Nate have been traveling to Chicago's North Side to watch the Chicago Force play football. The Force play in a small, school-style stadium, where the fans sit close to the action and the referees correct scoring errors by yelling at the people in the announcer booth.
It's not arena football. It's real tackle football on a regulation field, but it's played by women. The Force belong to the Independent Women's Football League.
The subject came up during one of the perennial arguments between Bruce and Nate about whether our civilization is doomed or still on its way to greatness. Nate points out the lack of justice in the world, with the bad guys still controlling the media and the good guys continually on the ropes. There's a certain truth to that. But on the other hand, you have women's tackle football.
See, the Force is not composed of monolithic multi-millionaires who are as different from the average American as I am from a Sumatran Tiger. These are policewomen, wives, mothers, immigrants, and schoolteachers. They go out there and they play a game that combines brute force and strategy. The brute force part is important in a civilization where we spend so much time holding back. Let's face it: if brute force would fix the Middle East, we would have solved the whole thing decades ago. We're good at brute force, but we recognize that it's not always appropriate.
But none of that matters on the football field, where the 5'7" girl who dreams about owning an animal shelter turns into a human cannonball, and even after three knee surgeries the general manager can leap into the air to catch a first-down pass.
See, it's all about possibilities. There's this awful danger out there called terrorism, and they want us to feel powerless and afraid. I don't want to minimize that danger, because it's costing us people's lives and threatening our notion of privacy. But the point is, we don't have to be miserable. We have Super-Soaker Squirt Guns, cheap orange juice all year round, and anybody who wants to can make their voices heard.
And we have women's tackle football. If we can hold on to that kind of thinking, we're going to win. It may take a while, and we may make a few wrong turns on the way, but we're going to win.
Respectfully submitted,
Ferdinand T. Cat
# At Mon 5:25 AM | Permalink | Trackback URI | Comments (3) | More Force Football | Tags: Chicago Force conservative Erica Studley Ericka Bell-Coleman family feminism football Jennifer Dulski Kenshira Traylor Kristina Kucar Linda Bache Nicole Cromwell philosophy sports terrorism
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An all-women football league sounds cool, but then, I love real, full-field football at any level!
And I love it when women do something neat that at the same time is guaranteed to make our enemies foam at the mouth.
Posted by: Minta Marie Morze at June 5, 2007 12:48 AM
I've always wondered about the FORCE. But, Isn't this post a little late for the 30th Anniversary of Star Wars, on May 25?
Posted by: DebbieKinIL at June 7, 2007 1:38 PM
The teams tend to have names taken from words for mayhem: Storm, Force, Crush, Demolition, Shockwave, Rage, Rampage, Blitz, Fury, and so forth. Chicago is lucky that it got one of the good names early on, because all that's left is things like "The Obliterators" or "The Politely Leaping Ball-Kickers".
Posted by: Ferdy 
at June 7, 2007 8:50 PM
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