In football, as in life, the spectator faces innumerable complications, but all the action takes place within a clearly lit framework and can be followed more or less easily.

The fast plays, the fakes, the great moments can be savored thanks to slow motion replay. Here there are no irrational mysteries to bedevil the mind, which can effectively master the patterns unwinding before it. The spectator, like the Eye of God, can scrutinize the same play from three or four different angles. (This is more significant for football, where the action is rich and diverse, than for linear and static sports like baseball, golf, or tennis.)

VII

The rest of the universe may still be in the grips of determinism, but in football, the charismatic, the unexpected, in a word Grace, is still present and potent.

The course of play is seldom a one-way flow. Fumbles, interceptions. field goals, and the "long bomb," among other things, can punctuate the game and turn it around. The long touchdown pass (an interesting symbol of cooperation between White Quarterback and Black Wide Receiver) is both the most exciting coup de theatre in sports and a revolutionary possibility liable to explode without warning. Finally, when the charisma is flowing, even time itself can be overcome: by time-outs, running out of bounds, incomplete forward passes, etc, the clock can be made obedient to human wishes.

In pro football, then, the spectator sympathetically participates in a heightened form of existence. During the brief hours of the game he sees the base matter of everyday life lifted up, purified, clarified, intensified: idealized figures, stronger, swifter, more cunning than ordinary men, fight a bruising battle in a make-believe microcosm (the stadium as ideal universe). Football is a synthesis of illusion and reality. A good football game is real enough to involve the spectator, illusory enough to liberate him. It creates a series of what Sartre called "privileged moments" -a temporary and imaginary redemption.