Littlefield: America Readies For Another Football Season

It’s not that baseball’s over, for it isn’t. Is it? No.

In fact the action’s cranking up, and shortly we will know

If this could be the year that will erase Chicago’s flubs:

The year when baseball’s champion might be the mighty Cubs.

There’s also soccer to consider, here and well as there…

In England, Spain and Italy, but if you do not care

How lads and jugadores fare, now that they have begun,

You might tune in to MLS: that campaign’s nearly done…

Likewise the women’s league, preceding toward its playoff season…

It didn’t work out in Brazil, but is that any reason

To turn away from watching? I don’t think it really is…

And “No” would be my answer if I had to take a quiz.

But how much does that matter in the land where being free

Means freedom to watch football on your big, flat screen TV

Throughout the days and all the nights alone or with your friends?

For football has begun again, and like a drum it sends

Its tribal call across the land, from sea to shining sea,

Across the amber waves of grain and fruited plains where we

Cannot avoid the thunder of its annual arrival…

As games that are not football bravely struggle for survival.

I know, that is hyperbole, the other games are fine.

Still, each of them, if asked, would be unlikely to decline

To trade its place within the heart that’s beating in this land

With football, stirring passions we may never understand.

For passion is irrational, and that is passion’s point.

It’s not about analysis. It merely rocks the joint,

No matter if the joint is in Seattle or St. Paul,

Miami or New Orleans or somewhere along the wall

That hasn’t yet been built, I guess, though someone likes to say

That if it ever is, it is the Mexicans who’ll pay.

These points are linked, I think, and here’s the arbitrary nexus:

The game of football’s very big throughout the state of Texas.

Now, raising such a wall would raise some hackles, too, no doubt,

But maybe Mexico would just as soon keep football out.

If so, perhaps they’d split the cost, and figure they had won

By walling out the game that’s at the center of the fun

So many U.S. citizens so passionately embrace…

And celebrate the fact they’d kept our football in its place.