Estimated read time: 5-6 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
The Super Bowl is one thing. Plenty of women who consider themselves football widows can make peace with the thought of spending a few hours once a year in front of a television for a game that itself transcends sports an American carnival, a spectacle of money and excess, held in festive locales, with rock stars performing at halftime and lots of color and pageantry.
The NFL draft is something else. Officially known as the National Football League's annual player selection meeting, the draft is basically a weekend where representatives from each professional football team gather in Manhattan and apportion the collegiate talent.
Like the Super Bowl, the draft comes once a year. Like the Super Bowl, it features football players. But that's about where the similarities end. Equal parts livestock auction and trade convention, the draft unfolds as slowly as a cricket match 17 hours over two days.
U.S. coverage of the event, held at Radio City Music Hall in New York, starts at noon Saturday, Eastern time, on ESPN, the sports network. It ends Sunday at 6 p.m. Much of the action consists of middle-aged men standing around in windowless rooms waiting for phones to ring. It's sports without the sports.
Yet for a large and growing subculture of American men, it is also a phenomenon, for some even rivaling the Super Bowl in importance. ESPN's Nielsen ratings for the first day of the draft, at 4.3 last year, have more than tripled since the mid-'80s.
The audience (each ratings point equals 1.1 million households) is 79 percent male, and seemingly about 97 percent obsessed. Normal life grinds to a halt during draft weekend. "The season ends in late January and starts in July, and between, there is a time lapse I call the 'desert,'" said Henry Browning, a pharmaceutical scientist who leaves his wife in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and travels to San Francisco this year with four old graduate school buddies for a two-day draft party. "I consider the draft the oasis."
For a growing subculture of American women, this is a weekend to endure.
"It's insane," said Mia Rosenwasser, a Spanish teacher in Atlanta who loses her fiance, Chad Kishel, for about 48 hours as he and his friends transfer their emotional commitment to the slick-haired ESPN draft analyst Mel Kiper Jr. "I think it's uniquely male."
"Last year, I was trying to be supportive, and I sat with my boyfriend for maybe an hour," she said. "Then I found out it went on all day. He was going to be spending seven and a half hours in the same room, without leaving."
Andrea Lavinthal, a magazine editor in Manhattan, said that she had reluctantly decided that draft mania must be some male equivalent to what the Oscars' red carpet show is for women.
"Guys can watch the actual Academy Awards show," she said, "but we need three hours of Joan Rivers beforehand. We need to know about the hair and makeup. It's the same thing. They need to be out in front with this knowledge." The growth of fantasy football can account for some of the increase in popularity of the draft. The draft is also the rare football event where half the audience does not go home miserable.
Fans of all 32 teams have a stake in the outcome. Because every team comes out of the weekend with new talent, every fan can imagine himself a winner. But that does not necessarily account for the passion many aficionados display.
Rosenwasser said that her fiance had a meticulous draft day regimen. He starts with a morning workout to get the juices flowing, fires up the barbecue grill around noon and spends every free minute beyond those chores reviewing the draft analysis he has been compiling for months. When his beloved Pittsburgh Steelers are about to make a selection, it is understood that everyone in the room is silent.
He does not want anything to "break his concentration, " Rosenwasser said. She said she planned to sit quietly beside him, working on plans for their wedding and honeymoon.
-
While several women interviewed insisted that they considered themselves fans, most said that the draft seemed to represent an insurmountable gender barrier.
"I used to try to make myself pass out," recalled a public relations executive in Washington who asked that her name not be used because she didn't want to embarrass her prominent foreign political family. A Washington Redskins fan herself, she nonetheless said that spending two days in a darkened studio apartment watching the draft with her ex-boyfriend was like being trapped in "a surreal bubble."
"I just wanted to lose consciousness, so I wouldn't have to watch," she said. She couldn't go out and do anything, she said, because if she left, her boyfriend would pout, as if she "didn't appreciate history in the making."
This year, she said, she has a new boyfriend, and she considers their first draft weekend together something of a test. "It could make or break the relationship," she said wearily.
Not all male fans are so obsessive. Will Leitch, editor of the sports blog Deadspin.com, said in an e-mail that he found "the notion of middle-aged balding men salivating over 20-year-old college men in their underwear on national television a bit creepy."
The male obsession with the draft does reveal tendencies about how each gender approaches sports fandom. Men tend to value clear- cut measurements of ability and achievement which is almost all the draft is more than female fans, who take greater interest in athletes' personality and character, said Steven Danish, a psychology professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. "Men want data and statistics," he said. "They don't care if athletes are nice people. But women are much more interested in the back story, whether they helped people out when they were growing up."
(C) 2006 International Herald Tribune. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved
