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I first must say that I am normally all for psychological / sociologial studies and inquiries into “contemporary” topics, but every so often someone just goes so far off the edge that its just plain silly. An essay in my current book did just that. In “God in the Details” one of the essays is entitled, “Collective Effervesence, Mail Performance, and the Ritual of Football”. The essay starts well and good in focusing on the religiosity inherent in the american fascination with sports, football in particular. There are many parallels of how people act at sporting events and how they act in religious events (singing, group chants, emotionalism, ecstatic experiences, etc. There are, of course, limits to this comparison, but you get where I am going.

Well, the last part of this essay focused on the relationship between the male oedipal experience (if one believes Freud was in the right on this) and the male fascination with football. He brings up all these points about how the “one team against another” concept represents the inner struggle a male has with coming to grips with the fact that he cannot sexually have his mother, but has to settle with other females instead. He also speaks of how the language used by coaches, players, etc is sexually charged as well and that is reflective of this male struggle.

To paraphrase Freud…sometimes a football is just a football. Many of the same comparisons can be made to other sports - hockey, baseball, basketball, curling, etc. Does that mean that every sporting endeavor is a working out of the male oedipal complex? Does the fact that one is trying to get a ball into a hole in golf mean that the addiction to golf is a sexually charged one as well? Please. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Sometimes a football is just a football.