Moving the Chains

There’s an expression in football about “moving the chains.” The idea is that the distance a team needs for a down is measured by two posts with a ten-yard chain stretched between them. To move the chains is to maintain possession by advancing up the field toward the end zone.

This terminology isn’t new or groundbreaking. In fact, I expect that more than half the people reading that first paragraph have responded with a great big “duh” regarding the statement of the obvious. Unlike those of you who grew up football fans, or even players, I learned about moving the chains in my mid-twenties. I’d both never been interested in football, and been more stubbornly opposed to the sport in my younger days for viewing it as a part of a larger jock culture I never fit into. I spent most of my twenties working in an office and hanging out in social circles that did watch the sport, however, and paid particularly close attention to the NFL. Indeed, living in Baltimore, I’d even go so far as to say that I got in on the excitement to a degree those seasons when the hometown team thrived.

So it was that bought a copy of Football for Dummies on the hope that I might educate myself enough to not just passively watch along those times when a social gathering was centered on a game, but remedially learn what was actually going on on the field.

I read the book, but not all that much stuck. I went to get-togethers to watch games, but never enjoyed the football nearly as much as the company or food, and in time started passing on invitations, reckoning I could re-purpose that time to work on projects or, you know, watch something I actually liked.

Moving the chains stuck with me.

Moving the chains became a metaphor for writing five hundred words a day to eventually arrive at a novel, and a metaphor I’ve used in my teaching to suggest how the reticent reader might get through a book, or the nascent writer might compile a five-page essay. It’s sort of beautiful in its simplicity and effective in its accessibility, particularly to people who don’t otherwise connect with my experience or the way my mind works.

It’s concepts like moving the chains that I think make me want to like football--the hard work embodied to learn the intricacies of the game, and the inspiration of someone breaking tackles and streaking down a field to score.

I suspect it’s for all of these reasons that I like football movies a lot more than I like watching actual football games.

Rudy. Remember the Titans. Varsity Blues. The Longest Yard. Jerry Maguire. When Heather and I moved in together, she laughed at me for my tradition of watching football movies on Super Bowl Sunday, and I’ll be the first to admit that it is a silly habit. Sure, someone can like these movies without much liking football, but going so far as to watch them so consciously in place of the biggest football game of the year? It reads as contrarian and silly--not unlike Dawson Leary proposing a screening of Pretty in Pink on the night of the school dance to escape real life experience via the comfort of his bedroom TV.

But I rarely play a football movie just the for the sake of watching it. My DVD collection is too large to naturally gravitate toward them, and that’s when I go so far as to pull out a DVD, rather than settling for the marginally even-more-convenient choice of streaming something on Netflix or Hulu. So, Super Bowl Sunday invites a return to these forgotten favorites and all that they carry with them.

I’ll be darned if I don’t tear up when Rudy finally gets to run out onto the field for a late-in-the-game play, the last opportunity he’ll have his senior year at Notre Dame.

When James Van Der Beek, recast as an underdog quarterback (a poor man’s Friday Night Lights riff), challenges his teammates to play the second half of the big game on behalf of the rest of their lives to come, it pumps up not only the young men on screen, but me at home, too.

When Cuba Gooding Jr. finds the good in himself in his love for not only the coin, but the quan after surviving a career-threatening collision unscathed--well, I feel a little bit like dancing and calling out everyone I’ve ever known, too.

So enjoy your big game next Sunday if you’re so inclined. The older I've grown, the more I’ve realized the futility, if not backwardness of trying to deprive anyone else of what brings them joy. But as for me, as time allows, I’ll pick away at an old favorite movie, knowing just how the chains will move before I press play.