I have a weakness for world conquest, which may explain my fascination with the New England Patriots. You can have the sentimental underdog; I’ll take the dynasty or the empire every time. There’s an imperial marching quality to the way the Patriots have trampled their NFL competition, which I frankly appreciate. This is a team that clearly wants to sweep the board, own everything from Egypt to Babylon. There are those who don’t appreciate the Patriots, who find their dominance cold and unappealing. This is merely weakness, a common complaint from those whimperers and whiners who don’t understand what dark beauty lies in dominion and the exercise of total power.
A football game is one of the few instances in which it’s okay to guiltlessly enjoy oppression of the weak. Critics complain that there’s no honor in the way the Patriots run up the score, but there’s nevertheless something sort of magnificent in the way they crush opponents, in their hard quantitative search for total victory, while Coach Bill Belichick watches from the sideline with that expression on his face, part Lord Sauron and part Doctor No. . . .
To their critics, the Patriots are chilly practitioners who invite a visceral anger with their Thracian massacre-like final scores. Against Dallas, their last points came on fourth down with just 19 seconds to go. Against the hapless Miami Dolphins, Brady threw six touchdown passes and was still in the game in the fourth quarter. And then there was this week’s game against the Redskins, when Brady was again on the field late in the fourth, and they went for two fourth downs despite leads of 38-0 and 45-0. It’s an understandable gut reaction, based on the Golden Rule: Would the Patriots like it if another team did that to them?
But in a way, the discussion about whether the Patriots are running up scores is really about competing ethics. It’s about gamesmanship vs. sportsmanship. The gamesman is exclusively focused on winning. Rules are something to be maximally exploited, and the final score is an expression of superiority. The sportsman is more focused playing the game the way it “ought” to be played, and is perhaps even willing to lose in the name of sportsmanship. . . .
The fact is, whether you like it or not, the Patriots have their own distinct ethic. It’s based in the single-minded principle of all-out effort, and the self-interested pursuit of perfect excellence. They don’t care what anyone thinks outside of their clubhouse, their motto might be Clark Gable’s in “Gone With the Wind”: “I believe in Rhett Butler. He’s the only cause I know. The rest doesn’t mean much to me.” They’re strictly interested in their own high performance, the tuning of a perfectly repeating machine.
Notice how Nietzschean this sports writer and the Patriots are (according to her): the explicitly stated disdain for Christian ethics, the contempt for the weak, the worship of superiority, the personally-created ethical code. Nietzsche may be our future, if this attitude bleeds back from sports into the culture as a whole. So civilization may just turn on an Indianapolis victory.
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