in 10 years we will put a man on the moon and then to work together. and to put his brother bobby in charge. the lead guy had his year to the ground. he faced down the russians. and then to say just the opposite. an incredibly brave. ronald reagan. look at that leadership which resulted in bed dissolution of the soviet union.

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why football matters. he talks about the contributions that go has made and continues to make to the american culture

and argues for many boys playing football is how they've learned about courage, faith, patriotism and teamwork. he spoke at the university of virginia bookstore in charlottesville virginia. >> thank you very much for being here and to the gentleman from c-span who driven all the way down to record this event and your adulation worded versions or whatever it is you have which shouldn't be too terribly long. what do we have? we have a book called my education in the game and it's written by an english professor. it is my tenth book and most of my books have to do with education as this one does come, so is in a different key than some of those other books. but nevertheless it is in the

scope of what i'm doing. my next book is called ideals, and it's in the defense of ideas and it involved what will be published by the harvard university press at this time next year so with any luck i will see you back again next year and we will talk not about football or ancillary football i'm a bit about ideals. so, what kind of a book is this and what kind of a creature do we have? this creature is a hybrid and it is a memoir first of all and it talks about two years of my life when i was a junior in high school and senior in high school and during that time i played my two years of undistinguished but both for the mustangs over massachusetts. so that's about my life during that period.

it's about the qualities of education that one can derive. so every chapter is devoted to equal the deed that football supposedly dispenses. there's a chapter on there is a chapter on character and courage and loyalty and all kind of good things that could affect. and it tries to be both analytical on the one hand and a memoir on the other. the best way to talk to you in the introductory fashion why did i write this book and for whom did i write this book and i have three answers as it turns out and the first i wrote it for myself. this is a very important year in my life, 68, 69, and it is a very difficult year as i said.

it wasn't just about playing football. by the time she was 3-years-old and by the time she died she had at least six or eight of these strokes and finally went to the hospital and returned no more. we knew this was coming, but the blow was absolutely staggering to us all. british writer said that it was a blow to every one of us and we all took it differently. my father was a gambler. he worked two jobs and my uncle told me not long ago the reason he worked two jobs he worked one to pay his bills and the other to pay his gambling debts. the reason he had a gambling

debt he would never leave when he was ahead you of the ways good theater chains to win their money back. not a strategy that i recommend unto you. my brother was a brilliant, smart, capable cave and he was young. nine, 10-years-old if you don't visit the best that he could by getting a lot of friends and by doing really good things. he is now a very successful businessman in boston and also somebody that is interested in politics and has been very successful as a state senator that might be just a little bit too much. keep watching him. the one that had had the hardest was my mother. she wanted a girl ever since she had been married. everything was going to be wonderful. my mother had that hope and wish that when she died my mother was just overwhelmed. that's what my mother did it do is rather simple and i couldn't

preceded them and this is a part of my reason for writing the book and it will sound in a minor key she hung on and got up every morning and made breakfast and packed a lunch for me and my father, she did the laundry, she cleaned the house and she kept it together and you could tell she wanted to break down completely and i would see her pass the curse of the embedded room and whispered and all she would say is the lord jesus, help me and this went on day after day after day and what was i doing i was doing badly in school, i was barely a presence anywhere it seemed to me but i did decide for whatever reason to go out for football. i wasn't a good football player and my main contribution to my family life is i didn't screw up in a major way.

i screwed up in minor ways if you get to the end of my book you will read about a night during which for football players ran out and broke some large windows. three broke the windows and one watched. so i didn't screw up totally. that was my contribution. i could see in rich respect that my family had come through, we had pulled it together and that we were all going to be okay. so i wrote this for myself, i wrote this as a tribute for my mother and father could have easily disappeared at the race track and never came back but he didn't. he kept showing up and doing things. so i also wrote it for my children and my nieces and nephew so they could see what their grandparents had achieved to give my brother and me a life

and so they could appreciate that gift but they didn't see directly it was very real and strong. the book is first of all a memoir and a visitation to a period in my life that was determined and for me. they said the signal time is often when you know you want to go back to the childhood childhood and you revisited the time of the perception and it is furthermore an athletic people in the critical people to signal that the time his adolescence because that's when you begin to develop a critical perspective on the world and you begin to break away a little bit from the world that has been bequeathed to you by your parents and teachers and you begin to see things rather fresh. so, this is my period and i go back to that end i've written about it and one other book. he said to me you have a teacher in the same years he said now you have about 50 years ago is

about and my father before the world cup really harsh and bad. i watched the games with him in my apartment in massachusetts. it was 1958, 1959 we rooted for the giants might by father loved getting ready for the game he went to the middle of the living room, sat down and tested it. then he was up to get a side table where he wanted to place this smokes along with his matches and ashtray.

my ashtray. my father was always on the move. he worked two jobs and we had a second one at the chuck wagon and hour or two before he could get a little bit of sleep on sunday on game day he called down. my father dearly loved the new york giants. he loved what names and sometimes [inaudible] all week he looked forward to sunday afternoon when the giants came online. they had decided to table set up and my father was ready to watch the game but there was one more thing, his chocolate bar. every friday she would buy my father a hershey's bar with almonds and my father relished that candy bar. slowly, deliberately conceiving it through the course of the game he took a noble and stared

off into space and looked at a sweet gratitude being as wonderful as it was the chocolate bar he gave orders. i ran to get his hershey's bar and waited for the game to begin then came the music through the black-and-white tv set. my father played the flute and began to saying in harmony football is about to begin. to my mother who was working in the kitchen cleaning up the sunday dinner that my father cooked with a great skill he issued one of his favorite lines. he said with tenderness they are playing our song. then we watched football or at least we tried. the picture was black-and-white into the reception was miserable. during certain games i had to stand up and monkey with the antenna to my father gave the command though, straight up, no,

3:00. my father got closer to see the next play and sometimes his nose nearly kissed the screen. i think that you are just going to have to hold it there. it sometimes improved the picture bringing it from the sandstorm in the desert to the cloudy day. so there i would sit with my hand clasped staring into the screen told in my head almost upside down looking into the action of my glasses sliding down the bridges of my nose. that's a little better my father would say. that's almost good. but mostly i was spared the acrobatics and contortions. mostly my father and i sat and watched football together. through football my father explained the world to me. my father believed that almost no one. he's like politicians he called john f. kennedy who was then the senator. he had no time for newspapers and authors and he never went to church or opened a a bible and

never said a word about god. he thought that his bosses were false and in time he came to love johnny carson and richard nixon but when i was a small boy of the football players were the only man my father admired. here comes a little vignettes now and i guess if i wanted my sons and nieces and nephew to remember my father by one little story this might be it. i like this one. the football watching meant a lot to me and one day my father showed it might mean something to him, too. my father was usually generous with his chocolate bar in any time during the game i was free to ask can i have a piece and he knew i didn't care for the omens in the bar so he crafted a piece of pure chocolate. i could ask again especially if they were doing especially well or jim brown was running a race

up and down the field but i had probably better not ask three times. one saturday morning, the day before the game day i crept into the pantry and founded the bar on the top shelf and isolate it down, spelled the intoxicating scent of chocolate and my father told me the whole town of hershey pennsylvania is no better way and i wanted to go and get a dose. then i broke a piece of chocolate from between the omens and dispatched it. why was this so bad my father always gave me a piece of chocolate during the game. by sunday morning game day the chocolate bar was the longer a chocolate bar that was a collection of all men's inside of a crumbled secure wrapper. the chocolate covered crimes were not attractive now. they were misshapen and sharp edged and looked like black

rocks. the game began and my father didn't call for the chocolate bar. my father loved to call for these. when i hear the christmas carol about how he would call for his pipe and builders three i think of him. did he know? my father didn't you back and i had been tempted to recite my confession that saturday in the absolution but by 2:00 when i was kneeling before the priest at the sacred sacred heart the chocolate bar was still intact and might have been passing and even i recognized there was a certain ring to bless me father for i have sinned my last confession was one week ago and since then my wife three times in four tries and figured they

would leave a lot of the rest and at halftime by father called for the bar and i went to his hiding place and turned it down and opened the wrapper and walked to the living room. i put the remainder before my father with both my hands. he looked at it and without a word placed it beside his ashtray and smokes. he picked up in normandy and popped it in his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. the second half went on but unusually quiet most of the time it's over announced and usually a landslide victory i sat in silence waiting for the storm. early in the fourth quarter they be beefed into raising the eagles and the redskins and my father made his move.

a hand ran down in front of my face and i jumped. now what was coming. but they can't opened and in front of me was a bit of chocolate completely off and free. he missed a piece, my father said. [laughter] so that is a memoir that's for me. the book is also in a certain way for my students and for students in general. as some of you know i'm a book for learning guide and most things come directly or indirectly out of the reading of books that i agreed with plato in the republic that if you only have an intellectual education is sufficient and people's

philosophies have the souls of warriors they are strong and resilient and they are charged with a word i will be coming back to. flush everybody else was flying

around and he said you can't move and i have an idea. and the next thing you know you have blood coming out of your nose and you're looking at the sky and its beautiful. i have to learn to run through and i worked on it and i worked on it and i repeat it and then i finally like the bolt my coach said stop that. run through. you had to push against to get where you were going and somehow that clicked with me and it worked so there were definitions

to character which was a little bit enigmatic and it was held by an individual that which is not pronounced and not expressed but you can sense it. my sense of character is the goals and then working towards them very slowly then finally reaching the goal only to see that you have only further and further to go. character is about practice. and character is about repetition until you get it right. so, there's no doubt about this all through the book i'm thinking about not only the writing of this book that of the other yet to come and i feel as though a lot of what i learned strangely enough on the football field i learned how to revise and fielded so many times you

would think this is just impossible but above me in that voice somewhere in my head some kind of a voice is likely to come through and say it's not really about what you think it's about moving 10 degrees and you will be fine. but you get to hear that voice because you sweat so much in the process that you open yourself up to get out of the sheer need and exhaustion. i'm not saying that there is no other way to -right-brace people that are larger than in the practice field but i'm saying it's my way and i think that all kinds of sports and activities provided this possibility for education. now, one of the things if you have had read the reviews by the book and i have, he has a great line that says sometimes i walk out and walked out and i see that magnificence of the side and in those moments i can

forget that i have been reviewed. i don't forget even then. but some, bless their souls for reading a little bit of it they think this is an outright endorsement of football. i meant english professor and i am in the wind about everything. you know what i mean. nobel prize. there is a degree of criticism in all these and all these things and it seems to me that character is a wonderful quality to develop but at the same time practice is based on repetition and you do not need sigmund freud to argue there is something about the repetition that if you do it over and over and over again then you threaten to become something like a machine.

there is a theory of laughter and jokes to and say the funniest thing in the world at least to him is when a person turns into something machine like and he laughs. i wish that he had lived long enough to see the nfl players interviewed on espn. i love those places and what they do with the repetition turned them into the day with the coach says i love my city. where am i.. back sort of thing is the downside to any pursuit of character it seems to me. i found myself subversive to say the words that were antagonistic to the character but it's true. too much character relies on the personality and inspiration into some of the more glorious things that we can have. so i wanted to put forward visions of these qualities that i think the fault and many other sports can have courage,

loyalty, and i wanted to show both the upside and the downside and i wanted to show you can achieve an ability to turn it on and turn it off. you can express your passion on the field and flip the switch. but always waiting these kiwis. of the warrior that simply goes mad in the battle and when hector turns to the noble and says do not talk about the terms i am so enraged that i could eat your flesh. that's the way of a beast and not a human but who wins? maybe you put your self in a likely position to win. they are complex positions that have to be asked about any kind of a competitive activity and it seems to me that football is a rich place to be asking these kinds of questions. i am for the game there is no doubt about that but i do have my doubts and there is a steady stream of.

my students come a students to be into people that want to to learn to develop themselves not only intellectual but through as they should, third audience for whom did i write this book lacks bells whistles whatever you have in a certain manner of speaking i wrote this book for while i hope to flesh out the mirror in the direction of the united states of america not that it is always too eager to look in a mirror, but when i heard the line by the journalist, baseball is what we were in football is what we have become. i was very jazzed by bass line and i wanted to think about the ways in which football may reflect to the american cultural state and i found myself coming away with lots and lots of writing and questions. so writing about football and i

will make it short that is a complex subject. all over that football field there are signs of religion, christianity in particular, prayer. i just spent a lovely day with a virginia cavaliers and before they went out onto the field, god bless them all, they said that they are in unison with the coaches together and then they went out and tried to bust the spleens of the kids in pittsburgh. it is a cop located question and to imagine the apostles taking an interest in baseball. in baseball you have lots of christian terminology. the sacrifice. the save, going home. ..

it is possibly true? how could it be? another question that comes up is raised. 70% of the players who play in the national football are african-american and they grow up there and they they run full truck against each other on saturday and sunday. it's really hard to find a word for this. entertainment, edification, all of what is largely an american

nontheists annoyed that i hope is somewhat provocative but not defended. i attached this process to an amazing thing will recall. this is the scene of the battle royal. in the battle royal, it will become the incredible man ends up at a banquet where he is going to give a speech on self-reliance. that's what he calls it. instead it's in the middle of every with live by phone on with nine or 10 african-american guys. bang, bang, bang. their promise to listen to the edifying speech come to sit there and listen and watch. this is the best entertainment they've had in a long, long time. they beat the stuffing out of the narrator. he is to go against the biggest boy at the end of the story. after that, the boys get paid.

bills, money is all over the place. it's on the green carpet of a run for the green carpet. guess what, the green carpet has been electrified. they are shocked and in pain, but they keep caring for the money. you could say this is in a completely fair vision of what happens on saturday or sunday afternoon. there is the racial component. there is the financial reward and you might say there's no electronic charge. football players make tremendous amounts of money. they live flakiness. they live likings. well, two thirds have financial trouble of the year after they leave the game. you know what the players called it. you're gone. your money is gone. then you walk with a limp and you can't always remember

exactly what you like to remember. football is one of the places in america where black people in why people get together and pretty much equal terms. a become friends with each other in ways they don't in other parts of our cloture. it's hugely enriching to have the opportunity to make contact with other people. also what they do on saturday and sunday, with all the players do, black and white cupboards to default to me. it involves enormous expenditures of courage. not the highest degree which i think are different things. so football is a mirror of america come as a way of thinking provokes a lot of questions. football related, football and racing a symbiotic relationship to the military. always those soldiers standing out there. marching across the field and

maybe the soldier picks up the soldier picks up a clamor by virtue of its affiliation and maybe football picks up a little bit of true or it least possible bravery by way of association with the military. or maybe young people in the military think they will find football like grammar? probably not. they've at least not get the salary. it's a complicated world and football reflects america in its perplexed geese come in its strengths and also some disturbing qualities. race, religion, all those things come to life on the football field and they won't say they are easily resolvable. they are complex, but they do make you think. so three dimensions. three audiences. myself and my family. you're welcome to read over her shoulders if you like. my students whom i would like to

see develop not only their minds, which they do very impressively in which i love to be a part of, but also to do some part of themselves that plato talked about all the time and they probably don't talk about enough and that is such a manic side, the wechsler achievement, the glory and its resilience to take losses. i'd like to see that they develop and a self-aware mercian in sports is one of the ways. one of the ways in which it can be developed. third dimension. i noted as a kind of a wall call it a valentine exactly, but it kind of letter to america about what i think is revealed at a staggeringly beautiful a staggeringly dangerous game. another crucial word is the last thing i will say, football if i

had to title the book again and i didn't care if it sold any copies at all, i would say football is a farmer can't. what is a farmer can't? havard famous by plato and taken up by shackford all if you live in an english department called latest pharmacy. a farmer can't is a poison an elixir. football can be an elixir. it can make you strong and give you coverage. it can develop character, help you develop loyalty, which will soon be brilliantly later on in the world. but it can also be a poisoning. it can be a poisoning that it can get you into behavior. guys, messed up a-alpha mail, alcohol will be travel. courage can turn into brutality. somebody who's brave on the field can't turn it off in the

hector like fashion in the next thing you know it's all over the news. he is sitting in front of a policeman, a judge or magistrate explained why he had heard why he hopes will never do it again. it is an elixir and it's a poisoning. i try to do in my book was by virtue of making a two dimension self-conscious, perceptible to the reader. put readers in a position where they could grasp the good and beware of the bad. and in so doing can you give themselves a secondhand of first-hand what i'm so grateful for this fight by many ambulances and not as a football education. so, thank you. [applause] so now we can talk. i've been talking about this book for the last two months.

i think this is my last roundup, sell it for a too serious and things are learning some things. any questions are observations for anything you have come all the more than grateful for. chris. >> you may well have looked at it in the book, but would it have been better if you had better added? do you think you learn different names -- [inaudible] >> i may be prejudiced on my own behalf, but i think i would've learned much less because they had to run the game in slow motion. if nobody told me that event may pass, i would've never had to figure it out. if i'd been able to jam my head into midsections without a second thought, the brutality made the. there is a line that i really

like the way can always find them and someone wants to check the quote. it is bad inspires among the things most difficult but not impossible. you know, football is really difficult, but it was an impossible. they gave me fascination. there's actually a passage in the book weren't talking about how much better it would have been if i had the wherewithal to acquire some lenses or get some sports glasses. people would tell mikami musket sports glasses. you'd be really good. you would be the all-pro linebacker. but i never listened to them. and i kind of plot out what my football if would've been like if they manage to acquire some sports glasses. there's a little parenthetical in the book in a fit or what it's worth, how they got a sports glasses i would never read this book for anyone like

it. it's the guy at the end of the line that can see. the guy at the beginning thinks this is how it is. then he gets kicked out of heaven and says heaven and says ouch, would have been quite steep. >> i would like to follow up. i love teacher and i love the parts about football. i felt that i had -- i knew what football was. i'm curious what was it that made you think i haven't written enough about football so that i need to now do it again. >> yeah. i had the same feeling you do. i wrote an essay about football. it got a lot of attention and a lot of people said editors called me and would you this into a boat. the first thing was now, been

there, done that. and then, just for fun i sat down and wrote a page. you will know the experience of page this time. 10 were hungry. not all usable. but apparently there was still some oil left on what i thought was the world while. what would justify the drilling? what would justify why couple things. the first thing was ifo the first account, this moment of turning the knob lessons is a big deal for me. football may offend kind of the base for me they gave me the wherewithal to get interested in matters intellectual. you know, i thought football was something i was leaving behind whereas it was a base out of which a certain kind of development arose. so what i thought was an exclusion turned out to be kind to a marriage of two strong tenancies in my life.

and that is was that is what sort of animated. also, i could see that the game of football stood in some kind of really fascinating relationship now to american culture in a way that when we were boys from you could write about baseball and about how we love baseball and how he loved ourselves or loving baseball and how great baseball was. now it's more complicated because football does not show the bright shining angels, but there's a lot of cultural content in there and i didn't want to walk away from all the content. i knew i was going to get to think about religion and ulcers of things that were fascinating to me. there were two reasons. yeah, please. >> i am thinking about -- [inaudible] the loss of your sister. inextricably going to die.

that is what is happening to families and players. not that we know the relationship -- [inaudible] >> i'm not sure. he seems to me and i think this on the tenor of your question you probably disagree with me that there are certain people who in their 20s know that there are possibilities in life that involve grave risks. those possibilities also involve grave reward. they were false financial reports. they involve the words of intensity and enjoy, camaraderie and they choose those risks. they know more now about what they are getting into. there's no doubt about that. but so far the choices they are going to make.

they make the same choices. at the same time and you may feel i'm stretching things a little, you know, has long romantic over to decide that i go until i'm stopped baked those kinds of choices. painters like jackson pollock who drink themselves into a stupor and go on and on making magnificent art make those kinds of choices. [inaudible] i'm sorry. rock musicians make choices all the time. jimi and janis alvarez. they need the role they were going down and they lived with enormous intensity and i don't think they would have it any other way. people who join the navy seals, the green berets, they know that their lives may be curtailed in a moment where they may be terribly wounded at any moment, yet they make that a choice. i don't know how much you want to take that away from people.

if you say to certain highly commodity pool, you can't play, you can't go headlong come you can't go until you stop and say i'm going to make you sick and take a timeout. what happens to those people? maybe they go on to become well mannered college professors like me for actuarial sublayers, but maybe they decided it's necessary to express themselves by going out of punching somebody sites out of the express themselves by sitting at the end of the bar and drinking until they can see the wall anymore. or maybe they decide depression is the name of the game. people have this urge and it's a question. i think it's a valid question. how much of the expression we want to forget it. i know there's a lot of nfl players in very bad shape indeed. we assume they are the bad shape because of the traumas they've

undergone. when i was a boy, my dad said to me, you can hurt yourself badly when you go out there and that was in 1968. everybody knows. everybody knows. i wonder how much i'll call has to do with it. i wonder how much certain modes on self-aware behavior has to do with it. i'm distressed about it and they may reach a tipping point. we may reach a tipping point where we say culturally enough. i am personally not care. i like people to have the choice, have the chance to make choices that are not reckless, at least dangerous and tell dangerous and fill them with exhilaration and fill their lives with some kind of meeting him when i see them do it, i see them and in an aberration or what they've done. i recognize there's a recognize there's a side to it in months per annum. >> i wonder if football has

become more popular in television technology has improved in the can cnn that you should be invisible watching on this blurry black and white screen. the use of the two guys running against each other. you see up close and sometimes frightening brutality and the heart stopping an advert in acrobatics that result was someone gets knocked out, has his leg twisted. forget it in the small the back and his wife is never the same again. this is what we want to see. >> this is what we want to see ms brings up questions of fans and fan base. t. know what i mean? i think there are lots of different registers of watching

football. defeo shakespeare, the groundlings only got the jokes coming from the class got the plot. the refined manner so the poetry and the other poets in the audience stood there with their mouths agape because of how amazing it was. i am not comparing without remainder shakespeare and football. but i think people get different kinds of pleasure from watching that game. some of it is the pleasure of seeing people do brave and beautiful things and taking risks. i don't see much courage on in the world and doing things that are extremely brave. maybe they will find them to be foolhardy. but the people out there if you

read nate jackson spoke, he centered all the time. people tell you page after page she's never been so happy. he's never been more exhilarated. there's never been so much joy in his existence. some people see that and they say how could i do something like that? how could i be worthy of that kind of spectatorship? the kind of viewership when people watch shakespeare they come back and say maybe i better be right back page. you know, whatever i do and good enough because there's something really wonderful. that's not completely metaphors don't go on all fours with each other necessarily. shakespeare football, i infinitely prefer shakespeare. but they do eliminate each other. i'm distressed by football, but overall the swearing-in.

yes. [inaudible] [inaudible] >> you know, which ever since they? anything and everything. what did henry james senior say about emerson, man of many handles. is that interesting? close. >> but if we do if we do forever, there would be flattering remarks about the iroquois and lacrosse or something. i don't know what our founder would say.

i think he would say to be honest that the business of the university was preparing young men and not get women to a life of scholarship and commerce in law and medicine and it should be pushed to the side. i'll be honest with you, if by going like this i could transform division i college at headaches and make it all in true mero, i it in a second. i can't do it, so i go to the games and watch them. if i could haywood. i would go like this and i'm still not going to do it. the idea that a college becomes an entertainment mecca. football, basketball is not something i'm comfortable with. i think jefferson would be coachable with it. he was a fairly austere person in one dimension of his life nns a transgressive racially really

strange, henry starts about 10. he's just too complicated. the official face of jefferson is a sober and enlightening individual to make sure in the athletic activity was subordinate to any kind to her intellectual activities here. but we've got it. it's here. we've got to learn to think about it and we've got to have some kind of essay. >> we have some more to fill out. anybody else? all quiet on the football friend. yes, all right. what would you say is the conversation? what do you say about the players who really have no other choice in life to play a game

they may enjoy it, but they know darn well they could get very hurt because it's one way out of their life circumstance to maybe make a stand and make a living in a profession or career. but it's a very filing game. is that so fair? >> i don't think it is. it's also a matter for social policy. i admire many things that our president but i wish you would say the word poverty more to talk more about the relationship between education and poverty and building related schools in really challenging neighborhoods. i wish that there was more of a sense amongst our minority communities that the layout can be through education if you strive for it. but if the school down the

street is inadequate, that's difficult. also i that's a question for social policy and i obviously support the policy that brings the best possible education into every neighborhood in boston all our neighborhood to be spent on the enjoyment of the 1% just to pay 15% tax. we could just our little of that and make it a good school so there could be better. there's also a cultural world, particularly in certain groups, basketball is the best thing to be. baseball is the best thing to be. they say you know, phd in english is not bad either. medical degree. that's pretty great. you can do some great things there. football, basketball, i don't think that's a good bei