There is one very important book that you should read as “deep background,” concerning television sports. This is: James A. Michener, _Sports in America_, 1976. The kinds of questions Michener asked about sports were things like who watched them. For example, college football has a significantly different audience sociology from pro football. College football involves things like homecoming parades and tailgate parties(+).

There are certain points which can be applied to electronic media. Even if one assumes that everyone has cable television, cable television is not set up for mobility. It insists on everyone being at their assigned place, as defined by the cable company. The classic form of sports-watching with an Ipad will be while doing something else, which requires one to be somewhere else, such as at work. The assumption which cable was operating under was that cable television would be feeding football games– preferably in high-definition format– into big-screen televisions in living rooms, so that groups of young men could sit on sofas and drink beer, and cheer noisily. This is all based around the assumption that everyone works nine-to-five. The cable company assumes that there is a certain time of day for children’s programming, a certain time of day for stay-at-home housewives programming, a certain time of day for young men’s programming, etc.

Well, the economy isn’t organized that way, anymore. It is organized on a contingent/temp/graveyard-shift basis. Ipads have taken off because they have a good fit for the way most people, especially young people, live nowadays. An Ipad is for watching sports, somewhere in the world, while you are clerking on a convenience store on the night shift. Depending on your hours, you might wind up following Indian Cricket. Another interesting book is John Bowers, _In the Land of Nyx: Night and Its Inhabitants_, 1984. Bowers develops the notion that night is a frontier. For example, you can often get a job on the graveyard shift when day positions are closed. Or you can go to night school, either because you need to work, or because your credentials aren’t good enough to get into day school.

(+) Here is a poem of mine which I think captures some of the distinctiveness of college football.
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Little Girls and Football (*).

Football is conventionally a boy’s game/ being rough and tumble/ a way to get hurt/ and among men/ it can be a deadly sport/ but up to a certain age/ girls play football too.

On a morning before a football game/ in the bright sun of a clear, crisp day/ a little golden-blonde girl, no more than four/ tomboyish in a blue windbreaker/ played football with her father, on the edge of a field/ where deer had played the previous night/ She rolled over the ball in somersaults/ and came back to her feet again/ over and over again, enthusiasm unimpaired/ loudly giggling all the while/
Playing like nothing so much as a small bear!

At noon, in the midst of a tailgate party/ a somewhat older girl, raven-haired/ with a face like a fashion model/ played with her three older brothers/ Three older brothers and a father/ to flutter her eyelashes at/ and only one mother to scold her./ When the ball came her way/ she did not strive overly to catch it/ but as it bounced past her/ flung up her hands with a comic expression on her face/ “who, little old me?”

In the dusk, when most of the fuss had died down/ a young man, sturdy, earnest, a future schoolmaster/ gave a lesson in football to the Indian and Pakistani children in the apartments/ half a dozen of them, boys and girls both/ and none of them much over six/ On the picnic benches sat the mothers, watching/ in the flowered silks of Asia, to lend an exotic touch/ The young man explained learnedly of the proper posture/ the better to throw to a backwards-running receiver/ The children listened seriously, chelas of this American guru/ The young man tossed the ball to a little girl, saying/ “throw it back to me so we can see if you have it right”/ For a moment she regarded him/ with a question in her mysterious eyes/ eyes which, in their strangeness, reached back five thousand years/ and then, deciding that “yes, he would do to fall in love with,” (**)/ she squared her shoulders in the correct manner/ and– precisely– threw the ball back.

2012

(*) Observations in an apartment complex adjoining a university campus, near the stadium, and parking lots used for tail-gating during football games. The events of a Saturday in Fall.

(**) Vide Elizabeth Taylor (1912-1975, the English author, not the actress), _Palladian_ (1946), ch. 4