Model with football players, 1939. Photo credit: Conde Nast Archive.
It’s a fact of American life that practically the entire nation is devoted to professional football. Each Sunday during the fall and winter months, millions of people from all across the country plant themselves in front of the television or travel in droves to local arenas to watch the latest NFL matchups. Many fans practice a devotion that is positively religious in its intensity.
But the national mania for football seems not to spread among the ranks of the upper class. Rich people, for the most part, don’t follow every sweaty detail of the game with unwavering zeal. Unlike their fellow Americans, the white-shoe crowd isn’t tuning in on Sundays, listening to pregame commentaries, and wondering which of their favorite teams will rule the day.
To be sure, there are among the rich a number of notable individuals who are exceptions to the rule. They are the wealthy entrepreneurs who love football enough to demonstrate their commitment to the sport by purchasing franchises and showering them with resources. (Case in point: my cousin Woody Johnson, who owns the New York Jets.) But these celebrated owners are the distinct minority—a very small fraction of the upper crust.
The significant majority of affluent people follow only those professional sports they themselves can successfully play. Tennis is the most compelling example. It is a sport the rich have adored for generations because it holds a revered place in the fabric of genteel social life. Likewise, skiing appeals to wealthy families who make annual pilgrimages to places like Aspen and then personally identify with superstars when the Winter Olympics roll around.
Similarly, indoor games like bridge provide the kind of competition rich people like to engage in during leisurely weekend hours. In certain circles, a fabled bridge player enjoys far more cachet than a Heisman Trophy winner. And if the card champion happens to speak beautiful French, then you are finally talking about the kind of consummate sportsman polite society can truly embrace.
It’s difficult to know precisely why football isn’t a bigger hit with the elite. The game certainly is exciting. Maybe it’s that wealth often makes people less physically preoccupied, less inclined to use their hands and get involved with life’s heavy lifting. But that’s the way it is. Pro football enthralls most Americans, but it just doesn’t move the high-end crowd in the same way. The closest many rich people get to following the action is seeing it captured on the pages of their crisp Monday-morning newspapers.
by Jamie Johnson “The One Percent”
Via: Vanity Fair
The life of the affluent, that for the most part consist in majority of those with tyrannical backghrounds in business, industry and banking don’t associate with common citizens and the culture and recreational activities of common citizens. They feel themselves tho above that which feeds their wealth. This article is heavy and not someting you would not expect.
I am not rich, but I don’t know anything more about football than you throw the pointy end of it. And why do we insist on calling it “football” anyway? And all I know about ice hockey is that you should get the puck in the opponents net, not your own, and I’m a Canadian. I also work with my hands, doing whatever is required. I do my own carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, and whatever else is needed to maintain our home and garden. I am compulsively handy. But I also have a graduate degree and speak three languages, albeit imperfectly, and yes, French is one of them. I also read and appreciate music, not of the commercial sort. I don’t write this to prove arrogant but to question the idea that only the wealthy don’t mix well with the “common” crowd. I do in fact mix well, on a one-to-one basis with most anybody. I’ve never shunned the “working class” and in fact live among them, and I only ask that others accept me as I am. So I’m suggesting there’s something else dividing footballers from non-footballers. I think the matter of wealth is a false division in this instance : )