NPR cogitates lamely about football songs, and I have to wonder whatever happened to heroes and what was Olive Oyl's game?

An emailer wrote to NPR's Stephen Thompson ("the good listener") about the dearth of football songs: "While drafting our fantasy football teams last week, my friends and I were trying to brainstorm great songs about football — and mostly coming up empty." And Stephen Thompson experienced some emptiness of his own:

For some reason, most of the football-specific songs I've encountered have succumbed to at least one of three temptations: to pledge allegiance to a specific team, to mirror the speed and brutality of the game, or to use football as a mechanism for marketing a product. All three approaches stand in the way of a unifying anthem, especially now that the modified "All My Rowdy Friends" — with its immortal chorus of, "Are you ready for some football?!" — has been largely removed from popular circulation.

Why is "All My Rowdy Friends" out of circulation? According to Thompson: "ESPN pulled "All My Rowdy Friends" off its football telecasts back in 2011, due to some controversial statements [Hank Williams Jr.] had just made in an interview." What awful thing did Williams say? At the link, I see that he used hyperbole in a comic analogy: Obama playing golf with John Boehner would be "like Hitler playing golf with Netanyahu." We've forgotten it now, but at the time, we just couldn't let it go, apparently. And now football has no song.

In the old days, everyone knew the song that even without the lyrics meant football. It was the 1933 song "You Gotta Be a Football Hero." Here it is by Ben Bernie & All The Lads. And here it is in the Popeye cartoon:



The NPR writer, who has the sads about "the speed and brutality of the game" and can only gesture at The Terrible Hitler Analogy of 2011, lamely gravitates to football song to about watching football on television. He thinks he has a good idea: Replace "All My Rowdy Friends," with its TV-watching theme, with "It's Time To Party," but with new lyrics "It's Time for Football." In the old days, you were pressured to play football yourself:

You got to be a football hero
To get along with the beautiful girls
You got to be a touchdown-getter, you bet
If you want to get somebody to pet

You — and the "you" meant you young men — were told to play football, not watch it on TV, and it was assumed that you were eager to get to "pet" "beautiful girls." Apparently, these days, you're just excited that a football game is on television and you have some male friends who will watch TV with you. That's your "rowdy" "party," sitting around with men, and watching other men play the game is the end in itself. And you write letters to a man at NPR to help you think of a song and he can't even think of that song from the time when the men not only needed to play football, but playing football was not the end in itself — there was a further end, the petting of beautiful girls.

But I suppose these "rowdy" TV-watching males still get their beautiful girls, and these girls go far beyond petting. Yes, yes, I know some of the girls — we don't say "girls" anymore (except when referring to that TV show "Girls") — some of the young woman put earnest effort into decrying the way these young males today grasp after sex, the speed and brutality of the game.

What happened to all the heroes? What happened to the demand for a hero? Are we even capable anymore of understanding a Popeye cartoon? Who the hell was Olive Oyl and why was she able to command heroics? It is a mystery long forgotten.