who had vital attachments to watching football on television. I recalled the sound of those games, and moreover the swings between my mother's jubilation and vituperation over what her favorite teams had done.I thought as well about my late brother Paul's participation in football. Paul was a big powerful boy for his age, and he played very well in defensive positions on the middle school varsity team. But Paul decided that the game itself was too mean and brutal, and that playing it well would have diminished his own character, so he didn't go on to play in high school.
I played flag football myself for 10 years, from first grade in 1970, when my family moved from New Jersey back down to Texas, up to my freshman year at Rice, when we had obligatory Phys Ed. I had a few years break from that in high school, when I played alto sax in band. I still marched and played at every Klein High School football game - [go Bearkats!]
I love music, but I couldn't stand Band, where you were compelled to service the Texas cult of football, and work on all sorts of complicated music and routines for the entertainment of the few spectators who didn't have to either pee, or go get food, or make out with their squeezes, or jabber with their respective cliques. Basically we were entertainment for the singletons and misfits, and a few touchingly devoted Band parents.

I hated Band so much that I decided to go back to taking the otherwise obligatory PE. That decision was fraught with all sorts of anxiety for a gay teenager.
Phys Ed was adminstered by petty bullying coaches, each embittered in varying degrees from their distance from the head football coach job. Luckily I scheduled gym for the lunch period, which had only one coach working, who coached the diving team. Tthe handful of PE students got to swim around half of the pool, doing half laps and playing Marco Polo while the coach worked with the divers. So I escaped most of the football cult for a couple of years.

When I held this football again after almost 20 years, it certainly was symbolic and meaningful. The object itself was so beautiful, and pleasant to grasp. Footballs have an almost feminine form, like a vessel, like a ritual object,. I couldn't think of cutting that swelling shape into strips.
With all my ambivalence about football, I didn't want to desecrate it. There is beauty in the sportl, and I wanted to use the actual football to show that. The physiques of the players, their heroic proportions, their muscles, their size, are what I chose to emphasize.. They're what all football fans admire, whether they admit it or not.

The two sides of the football are painted with images of the Farnese Hercules, a statue attributed to the Greek sculptor Lysippos in the 4th century B.C.E. A marble copy of the original lost bronze statue, was excavated from the ruined Baths of Caracalla in Rome in 1546. It shows Hercules leaning on his club, with the skin of the Nemean Lion, the killing of which was one of his Twelve Labors.
The original lost bronze statue of Hercules was a product of a glorious and militaristic age and an imperialistic sensibility. It was sculpted in the dramatic and robust Hellenistic style, an aesthetic that had been disseminated by the entourage of Alexander the Great throughout the eastern Mediterranean and Asia Minor.
When the marble copy of that bronze was produced 500 years later, it was installed in the Baths dedicated by the Roman emperor Caracalla, a brutal man who killed his own brother to gain the throne. Caracalla's own statues depicted him with a Herculean physique. He ruled less than 6 years before he was assassinated.
Thirteen centuries later, the Farnese Hercules was rediscovered in another militaristic and imperialist age, the Counter Reformation. The statue has the title Farnese because it was owned by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, the nephew of Pope Paul III. It was Alessandro who negotiated an alliance of the Papal armies those of with Holy Roman Charles V to wage war against the Protestants.
The unearthed statue caused a sensation. It was a major inspiration to artists who had never yet seen such powerful muscularity depicted in a classical Roman statue. Antique statues were subject to a collecting frenzy at the time.