Until the 1960s, when American presidents referred to football, they meant the lessons learned by playing college football, a crucible that taught young men leadership and fair play by burning away laziness and self-indulgence. The backbone to brave the struggle for dominance, the readiness to accept winning and losing as a team, was what counted. Theodore Roosevelt predicted that the American boy afforded himself the best chance of becoming the “good American man” if he grew up “clean-minded and clean-lived, and able to hold his own under all circumstances … In life, as in a football game, the principle to follow is: Hit the line hard; don’t foul and don’t shirk.” Football dramatized Roosevelt’s Strenuous Life, demanded that a boy steel himself to do “work that counts when the time arises.”

Roosevelt denounced anything smacking of fandom, frowning that “it is a very bad thing if, twenty years afterward, all that can be said of [a former team captain] is that he has continued to take an interest in football.” Decades later, Richard Nixon made it a habit to take an interest. Nixon had played football and often drew on lessons he learned standing on the sideline. Far more influentially, however, he was the first president to make a point of watching and thinking seriously about sports. The Rooseveltian tenor of his rhetoric remained remarkably consistent; what changed was how he balanced traditional celebrations of football’s characterbuilding qualities with his passions as a fan, and how consciously he put that fandom to use. In the 1950s, football connected him to his audience; in the 1960s, it drew lines between all-Americans who loved the sport and anti-Americans whose dislike of football signaled what he called “contempt for those elemental decencies on which a free society rests.”

The most valuable All-Star: Nixon learns to talk football

Nixon began to establish his public authority as a fan by the late 1950s. In 1959, he told the Football Writers’ Association of America that “if I had the choice, and I had the ability, there is nothing I would rather do than write sports.” He was the only president ever to attend an American Football League (AFL) game, the first to attend a regular season National Football League (NFL) game, and the first to congratulate the winning Super Bowl team.