I began to play full-contact football at about age seven. At the Silver Spring Boys Club, just outside of Washington, a retired Baltimore Colts offensive lineman, who served as a consulting coach, pulled me aside one day and told me that I had the potential to reach the National Football League. (This was absurd; I weighed ninety pounds and was several years short of puberty. Nonetheless, you can imagine the impression he made.) I played guard and center. Our Boys Club teams strove to win championships and sometimes did. Our coaches were off-duty policemen and electricians who drove us hard. Despite their screaming, I did enjoy blocking.
On Saturdays, we played our games, filmed on Super 8 by our parents. On Sundays, if the Redskins were at home, we rode with our fathers or grandfathers to Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium. To walk through the tunnels approaching the stadium with scores of grown men who sang “Hail to the Redskins” made its own impression. My grandfather had four season tickets; he had purchased them just after the Second World War. My father had two season tickets. He was a lawyer who handled ABC Television; when the Redskins played on Monday nights, at home, I would tag along with him to pre-game cocktail parties and allow myself to be patted on the head by Howard Cosell. To say that I became a Redskins fan as a boy would be incomplete.
I attended the team’s three winning Super Bowls. The last one, in 1992, required me to fly to Minneapolis from New Delhi, where I was then posted as a correspondent. I might have considered myself an extremist if I had not understood my case of Redskins-dom, empirically, to be somewhere near the median.
I attended the final game played by the Redskins at R.F.K. Stadium, in 1996. Afterward, I climbed over railing onto the field, pulled up several chunks of turf, stuffed them into my pants, and walked nonchalantly, alongside other looters, towards the exits. At the time, I held a position of responsibility at the Washington Post. I feared that I might be arrested and embarrass my employer, and yet I walked on. Some days later I carried the turf to a cemetery in Northeast Washington and planted it beside my grandfather’s headstone.
Tonight, the Redskins will play the Philadelphia Eagles at home on national television. If you tune in, you will undoubtedly hear the commentators speak at length about the crisis that now surrounds the team. The owner, Daniel Snyder, is widely reviled in Washington, and for good reason. He meddles, bullies, and trusts his own football judgment too much. John Kent Cooke, who ran the team before Snyder purchased it about a decade ago, remarked recently that Snyder had “destroyed the franchise.” Fans did not generally receive this comment as hyperbole. The issue is not the team’s performance on the field, dismal as that is. It is the culture created by the owner—one of greed, expediency, and mean-spiritedness. The general atmosphere around the team suggests Zimbabwe—a failed state, an intractable dictator, and an impotent and suffering populace.
Joe Gibbs, the three-time Super Bowl-winning coach who was the last fully dignified leader of Redskins, returned from retirement a few years back and temporarily rescued the team’s culture; he brought his on-field assembly twice to the playoffs, but failed to recapture his former championship glory. Gibbs seemed to intimidate Snyder, however, and after his departure the owner seemed to crave a different sort of coach. He brought in a likable but vastly under-qualified replacement, Jim Zorn, who had never held a position in the N.F.L. above quarterbacks’ coach. Last week, Snyder returned to his bullying ways and forced Zorn to hand over play calling to Sherman Lewis, a retired offensive coördinator. Lewis had only joined the team, at Snyder’s instigation, in early October; at the time, Lewis was calling bingo games at a retirement center in Detroit.
Although tonight’s game is at home, I won’t be there. Guiltily, I gave up my grandfather’s inherited seats two years ago. This year, after attending a 9-7 “victory” over the St. Louis Rams that was less entertaining than a game between basement-dwelling high-school teams, I handed over the family’s remaining two seats to one of my brothers and wished him luck.
Over this weekend, I happened to be in Seattle, and I went to see the University of Washington Huskies play a rivalry game against the University of Oregon. It was a cool, dry afternoon and our seats afforded a view of Lake Washington. There was none of that air of drunken, barely subdued violence that now attends rivalry games in the N.F.L., especially at night. Oregon’s team is known as the Ducks, and while it is true that in the men’s rest rooms, Huskie partisans had scattered scores of plastic and rubber yellow ducks in the long metal troughs that serve as urinals, even this mischief seemed good-natured. I bought a purple University of Washington sweatshirt and thought that perhaps I would follow the team as best as possible from the other Washington. I cannot give up on football; I can hardly give up on the Redskins; but like many other oppressed peoples worldwide, I can at least fall back into exile and await regime change.