\u201cBehind Kansas City safety Daniel Sorensen\u2019s competitive fire: Daniel Sorensen is a quiet, engaged father at home but when he gets on a football field, he turns on a switch as Dirty Dan. Here\u2019s a look at where he gets it\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
And, while we\u2019re on football, perhaps I can share this absolutely classic little piece,\u00a0Thomas Hornsby Ferril\u2019s\u00a0\u201cFreud, Football and the Marching Virgins,\u201d\u00a0which, so far as I can tell, first appeared in Readers Digest\u00a0<\/em>(September 1974),\u00a0 71-73:<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
As I look back over the intellectual caprices of the past quarter century, I am amazed that the Freudians never took out after football.\u00a0\u00a0There\u2019s not a single book on the subject.\u00a0\u00a0Let me set down some findings that might have been made.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nObviously, football is a syndrome of religious rites symbolizing the struggle to preserve the egg of life through the rigors of impending winter.\u00a0\u00a0The rites begin at the autumnal equinox and culminate on the first day of the New Year with great festivals identified with bowls of plenty; the festivals are associated with flowers such as roses, fruits such as oranges, farms crops such as cotton, and even sun worship and appeasement of great reptiles such as alligators.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nIn these rites the egg of life is symbolized by what is called \u201cthe oval,\u201d an inflated bladder covered with hog skin.\u00a0\u00a0The convention of \u201cthe oval\u201d is repeated in the architectural oval-shaped design of the vast outdoor churches in which the services are held every Sabbath in every town and city, also every Sunday in the greater centers of population where an advanced priesthood performs.\u00a0\u00a0These enormous roofless churches dominate every college campus; no other edifice compares in size with them, and they bear witness to the high spiritual development of the culture that produced them.\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nLiterally millions of worshippers attend the Sabbath services in these enormous open-air churches.\u00a0\u00a0Subconsciously, these hordes of worshippers are seeking an outlet from sex frustration in anticipation of violent masochism and sadism about to be enacted by a highly trained priesthood of young men.\u00a0\u00a0Football obviously arises out of the Oedipus complex.\u00a0\u00a0Love of mother dominates the entire world.\u00a0\u00a0The churches, without exception, are dedicated to Alma Mater, Dear Mother.\u00a0\u00a0(Notre Dame and football are synonymous.)<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nThe rites are performed on a rectangular area of green grass oriented to the four directions.\u00a0\u00a0The grass, symbolizing summer, is striped with ominous white lines representing the knifing snows of winter.\u00a0\u00a0The white stripes are repeated in the ceremonial costumes of the four whistling monitors who control the services through a time period divided into four quarters, symbolizing the four seasons.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nThe ceremony begins with colorful processions of musicians and semi-nude virgins who move in and out of ritualized patterns.\u00a0\u00a0This excites the thousands of worshippers to rise from their seats, shout frenzied poetry in unison and chant ecstatic anthems.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nThe actual rites, performed by 22 young priests of perfect physique, might appear to the uninitiated as a chaotic conflict concerned only with hurting the oval by kicking it, then endeavoring to rescue and protect the egg.\u00a0\u00a0However, the procedure is highly stylized.\u00a0\u00a0On each side there are 11 young men wearing colorful and protective costumes.\u00a0\u00a0The group in so-called \u201cpossession\u201d of the oval first arrange themselves into an egg-shaped \u201chuddle,\u201d as it is called, for a moment of prayerful meditation and whispering of secret numbers to each other.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nThen they rearrange themselves in relation to the position of the egg.\u00a0\u00a0In a typical \u201cformation\u201d there are seven priests \u201con the line,\u201d seven being a mystical number associated not, as Jung purists might contend, with the \u201cseven last words,\u201d but actually with sublimation of the \u201cseven deadly sins\u201d into the \u201cseven cardinal principles of education.\u201d<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nThe central priest crouches over the egg, protecting it with his hands while over his back quarters hovers the \u201cquarterback.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Behind him are three priests representing the male triad.\u00a0\u00a0At a given signal, the egg is passed by sleight of hand to one of the members of the triad, who endeavors to move it by bodily force across the white lines of winter.\u00a0\u00a0This procedure, up and down the enclosure, continues through the four quarters of the ritual.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nAt the end of the second quarter, implying the summer solstice, the processions of musicians and semi-nude virgins are resumed.\u00a0\u00a0After forming themselves into pictograms, representing alphabetical and animal fetishes, the virgins perform a most curious rite requiring far more dexterity than the earlier phallic Maypole rituals from which it seems to be derived.\u00a0\u00a0Each of the virgins carries a wand, which she spins on her fingertips, tosses playfully into the air and with which she interweaves her body in most intricate gyrations.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nThe virgins perform another important function throughout the entire service.\u00a0\u00a0This concerns the mystical rite of \u201cconversion\u201d following the success of one of the young priests in carrying the oval across the last white line of winter.\u00a0\u00a0As the moment of \u201cconversion\u201d approaches, the virgins kneel at the edge of the grass, bury their faces in the earth, then raise their arms to heaven in supplication.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nSpace does not permit interpretation of football as related to dreams, or discussion of the great subconscious reservoirs of thwarted American energy that weekly seek expression through vicarious enjoyment of ritualized violence and infliction of pain.\u00a0\u00a0To relate football to the Oedipus complex alone would require, as it well deserves, years of patient research by scholarly men such as we find in the Ford Foundation.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nI only regret that these studies were not undertaken a quarter century ago, when the Freudians were in full flower.\u00a0\u00a0It\u2019s just another instance, so characteristic of our culture, of too little and too late.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 Rumor has it that there is a football game scheduled for this weekend, COVID pandemic willing.\u00a0 Here are a few links to articles about people in the game that might be of particular interest to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.\u00a0 I was alerted to them in a newsletter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[21013,1809,909,5367,2905,1812,1815,788,55,1667,743],"class_list":["post-90142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-andy-reid","tag-church-of-jesus-christ-of-latter-day-saints","tag-faith","tag-football","tag-latter-day-saint","tag-latter-day-saints","tag-lds","tag-mormon","tag-mormonism","tag-mormons","tag-religion"],"yoast_head":"\n
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