How Football Explains Manifest Destiny

"There was no football, if one may except a New England fashion of kicking a substitute made of a pig's bladder in skylarking fashion after Thanksgiving dinner."

— American football founding father Walter Camp, 1891

Tedy Bruschi of the New England Patriots walked casually through the tunnel of Giants Stadium, the aging concrete structure in a thousand-acre swamp located about eight miles west of Manhattan, and stepped into the light of an unusually warm Sunday morning on September 9 — the first Sunday of the 2007 National Football League season. He stopped. He'd seen this view countless times. This was the beginning of his 12 season. Yet his smile, with the brown-eyed hint of his Italian and Filipino ancestry, had a boyish, naïve glow — for a reason.

He has a hole in his heart. A real hole, not the kind left by an unrequited lover — a hole left by a stroke in February 2005 that would have claimed the professional football career of any normal human being. But doctors performed some kind of newfangled surgery to fix the hole — and, more important, Bruschi is not your normal guy. He has the rare determination of an astronaut, the drive of a stagecoach pioneer. So, even after winning three Super Bowl rings, Bruschi shocked his wife, his coach, and his teammates and came back to play the middle linebacker position with the kind of, well, heart few players possess. When he looked up at the sky that morning, he was thinking, I'm still here. Still doing this. And he was determined to win one more championship, hoist that trophy named after the guy named Lombardi, who grew up not far from this stadium in northern New Jersey, but was denied a chance to coach his hometown New York Giants and instead went into exile in the small town of Green Bay, Wisconsin, with his unhappy wife, Marie, in 1959, and went on to win five NFL championships, including the first two Super Bowls. That's why it's called the Vince Lombardi Trophy.

It was all there for Bruschi to feel on that Sunday morning — the layer upon layer of story lines filled with ethnic heritage, American history, and current football rivalries, pitting former friends and colleagues against each other in a game and a season that would tell us about ourselves in many more ways than were apparent that day.

The story of Bruschi's cool, aloof, single-minded coach, Bill Belichick, facing off against his former protégé, Eric Mangini, a disciple who strayed to New York to become the head coach of the New York Jets, and who was called "Mangenius" for his stunning one-year turnaround that defied his old boss and landed the freshman coach and his young team in the playoffs a year earlier.

The story of Bruschi's new teammate, the mercurial Randy Moss, who was salvaged from the wreckage of pro football in Oakland, where for two years he wore a Raiders uniform, which Brady never fully embraced. Moss's singularly incandescent talents were now expected to transform quarterback Tom Brady from just your average three-time Super Bowl champion into the kind of player Brady idolized as a child growing up in northern California — that being Joe Montana, the coolest of the cool champion quarterbacks who waved his light saber through the 1980s in a dazzling display of magical championships.

The story of Bruschi's fellow aging comrades on defense — 38-year-old linebacker Junior Seau, who had been voted to the NFL All-Pro team 12 straight times, but never hoisted Lombardi; 35-year-old safety Rodney Harrison, who had defied age and injury to win two Super Bowl championships with Bruschi; and the gruff ageless linebacker, Mike Vrabel, who had won three Super Bowl titles with Bruschi with a guile and toughness that seem to contradict the fact that he was a pre-med major at Ohio State. Did any of them, on this day, think they had enough left in their legs, and in their will, to make it through a 16-game season, and the playoffs, to win another championship?

That story was week to week, game by game, yard by yard on a field they had to defend inch by inch, beginning with this game filled with hope and redemption, revenge and retribution — a game that would end with a shocking footnote, sending the season and this band of Patriot brothers on a complex, historic journey through one football season that would explain what America is all about.

* * *

Long before all this, there was rugby. And it was boring.

Here was this primitive Old World game, brought over from England and played mostly by college boys at Harvard, Princeton, and Rutgers.

And here was a restless nation in the year 1876, the year of the Centennial, when the thirst for new territory, for westward expansion, seemed unquenchable.

So, it didn't fit. Football, as it was being played by European rules in the New World, wasn't an attractive game. The rules of the London Football Association called for players from both teams to mass about the ball, all trying to kick it out to a teammate. In essence, soccer — with a scrum.

"The rules," wrote Walter Camp, the founding football father from Yale, in his landmark book American Football, first published in 1891, "forbade any one's picking up, carrying, or throwing the ball in any part of the field. There were no 'off' or 'on' side rules, and the goals were made by sending the ball under the cross-bar instead of over it. Fouls were penalized by making the player who had committed the foul toss the ball straight up in the air from the place where the foul occurred, and it was unfair to touch the ball until it struck the ground."

Under these rules — this is hardly what we now call football — Princeton and Rutgers played a game in 1869, a contest that has often been called the first intercollegiate American football game.

But this Old World game — a blend of soccer and rugby — had no compelling action or story line. It was just a mass of humanity moving in what was then called a "scrummage." Not enough happened. There was no premium placed on advancing the ball, capturing territory, quickly defeating your opponent — the core of what America was becoming. And the players and, most important, the spectators quickly grew tired of it.

The boys at Harvard made the first move. They called it "the Boston Game," which allowed running with the football and tackling. Their game was a little more open and much more physical brand of rugby that had for years been played in Wales and England. Still, it wasn't a far cry from "kicking a pig's bladder in skylarking fashion after Thanksgiving dinner," as Camp described early football in America.

As the Harvard Advocate said in 1874, the Boston Game was much better "than the somewhat...