Only in America do they look at rugby and say, fuck it, why don’t you just throw the ball all the way across the damn field?

They call the game american football, but it’s not a descriptor of where the game originated; it’s not a modifier like australian rules is to explain that the game features a variation on the traditional, non-denominational rules. The game is American Football, and the american part of it is an adjective that describes the style of the game being played. It’s American Football, because it’s a game that exists because Americans like to take concepts that are brought to our shores and warp them into unrecognizable shapes, until they look like things that resemble what we see when we look in the mirror. Football is no exception.

It used to just be rugby , of course, even in America. In the 1880’s, it started to change, because they wanted a higher-scoring, speed-based game, instead of a low-scoring game based on brute strength. This is when the line of scrimmage and snap were introduced, when you started having to work for a first down. Before the down-and-distance entered the game, it was possible to hold the ball by running for a few yards at a time and, after scoring, never give the opponent a chance to play. The rules were hammered out of failures- Teddy Roosevelt had to introduce the forward pass to keep people from dying on the field, because it kept happening and the alternative was to ban the game entirely, which was politically unviable. The game and Presidential politics have always been intertwined.

American Football exists in its form because Americans like wars, always have, but didn’t get to an early jump on them from the late 1800’s until the 1950’s. Fifty years without a war that wasn’t long-brewing and that we weren’t a late entry into led to a game with rules like the rules of warfare, with off-field generals making the calls for on-field actors to carry out. The game is about holding and maintaining territory, about aerial assault and ground attacks. It is a metaphor that only works properly in a country that has never been threatened by a foreign power the way that most of Europe has. The forward pass was introduced to the game under the first Roosevelt, but it didn’t start being an effective way to play the game until the 1920’s, after World War I started and warfare started taking place in the skies. American football is football, yeah, if you define football as whatever game is the most popular one among any given national identity- the Australians favor the game they call football, same as in South America and China and England. Pretty much everywhere but Canada, football can consistently be defined as the game everyone cares about. In America, the game doesn’t matter to anyone anywhere else, but that’s part of its charm. It’s not for anyone else. They’re welcome to it, but that’s not the point- it was devised by people looking to break apart something that worked for everybody else, just to see what would happen. It’s like jazz, like Coltrane busting through the confines of “My Favorite Things” to a new form of expression.

But that’s a lot of weighty talk for a game, even one I like as much as American Football. It’s defined by the people who play it, and today that’s Eli Manning and Tom Brady, people whose names I’ve mentioned enough. It’s defined by Coughlin and Bellichick today, by Moss and Burress. I’ve suddenly found myself a Giants die-hard, which is fucked up- they’re an NFC team, and usually my loyalties within the conference are so strongly skewed toward the Bears that every other team is an enemy, a potential threat. But how can a man who wasn’t born in Foxborough, Massachussetts proper root for New England? It’s impossible. The only thing that makes any sense is to wish smallpox on Randy Moss and Tom Brady and Junior Seau, which I do, fiercely.

We’re a Super Bowl culture, in America. The Premier League of Association Football in the UK doesn’t have a championship game, or even playoffs, and they are passionately disinterested in an American’s opinion as to why those rules might be changed. But we need a major contest to determine victory- if it happens gradually, we don’t see the victor as a Winner, and Winners and Losers are figures of great import in the country of my birth. We need a Super Bowl, a Super Tuesday, a head-to-head match and a major contest all to determine which figure emerges as a Winner and can strut casually through commercials and saturday night live guest hosting spots.

It’s a terrible thing for a political process, if you want to see things emerge organically and find a leader who is best qualified to lead, but that has never really been our bag. We would rather have a Winner running the show, and in all cases that is how things have shaken out. Reagan was a Winner, certainly when compared to Carter or Mondale; Michael Dukakis was enough of a Loser to make George Herbert Walker Bush look like a Winner. Clinton was one in the classical sense, especially over the decrepit old men who wanted his job. George W Bush, meanwhile, was a King Winner, something that would make even such avowed members of that club as Bill Belichick and Tom Brady quake in their boots. George W Bush was enough of a Winner that he managed to win even when he lost, and Al Gore had too much of the Loser in him to fight it.

The Republicans have no Winners among them in 2008. Mitt Romney looks like an overbred cocker spaniel being walked by a teenage girl past Michael Vick’s house these days, having had his Winner’s confidence shaken by major losses to John McCain, who everyone in America already knows is a Loser. Meanwhile, Obama and Clinton are both Winners, and the question now is simply which one is more so.

And so Super Tuesday is a Super Bowl of its own, and while it does bode poorly for the success of the American democracy, it’s terrific for those of us who watch Presidential Politics like sports. The excitement is up, and the game is fun to watch. These are the things we want in our entertainment, and what we want out of our politics are the same things we wanted out of our football, which is a speed-based, high-scoring game rooted in strategy. It may not make sense to the rest of the world, but it’s not for them, either.