Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the enemies of football were civil rights, the campus protest movement, anti-war activism, beards, long hair, and other offenses against grooming. In August 1969 Sports Illustrated devoted a cover story to the plight of “the desperate coach,” adrift in a world unmoored from its old verities and tasked suddenly with managing a generation of hirsute, anti-authoritarian “free thinkers”. There was, judging by the evidence, no struggle to get coaches to go on the record. Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry lamented in the late 1960s that without football, “society would lose on the great strongholds – paying the price. There’s not much discipline left in this country.” Around the same time University of Southern California assistant coach Marv Goux, surveying the alarming growth of his charges’ hair, groused: “The bums eat the food our society produces, they wear the clothes our society produces and now they want to destroy our society. Like pigs, they have no pride or discipline.” Challenged in the early 1970s by a black power supporter over why he did not allow his players to participate in demonstrations, Southern University’s Al Taber replied, “Because I believe in America too strongly.” (Much of this history is set out in Jesse Berrett’s excellent new book, Pigskin Nation: How the NFL Remade American Politics.)
The parallels between the coach-defenders of American football during the civil rights era and those at work today are striking. The threats to football are never simply cultural; they’re also embedded in changes to laws, rules and policies. The same thinking that paints tweaks to the kickoff rule in college football as an apocalyptic menace to America has long been applied to Title IX, the federal law passed in 1970 to ensure equal treatment and funding between men’s and women’s sports on college campuses. In 1972 Texas coach Darrell Royal helped draft an amendment to the hated law. Title IX, he said, would “eliminate, kill or seriously weaken the programs we have in existence.” Surveying the likely impact of Title IX on college football and men’s basketball, which the amendment was designed to exempt, the NCAA’s then-executive director Walter Byers said, “Impending doom is around the corner.” Fedora is the spiritual heir of these men. For them, a player need only respect the flag, stand for the anthem, not make trouble, play the game, and submit to a future of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and America’s greatness will endure.