This is the fifth in a series of weekly articles designed to introduce readers to sports which may be unfamiliar to them.


When the Americans turned European football into American football, they pulled out all the stops. At least European football's other offspring, rugby, came up with a new name. Not satisfied with that, the Americans kept the name football and gave the older game a new name, soccer, that its own fans don't even recognize.


Basically, they did to European football what the Sex Pistols would have done to Ave Maria.


They took a sport that had been carefully refined for centuries, destroyed it and then trampled on its remains. Then they created a completely new football in their own national image which left them smacking with pride as it evolved into a living, breathing testament to aggression that was, by the end of the 20th century, by far the most popular sport in the country.


The first organized American football game was played in 1869 between two of America's most prestigious universities, Princeton and Rutgers. The sport had evolved among university students as an alternative to dueling, which had been outlawed by most schools in the 1820s. It was loosely based on European football, in the sense that it involved two teams trying to kick a ball through a goal on the opponent's side of the field.


But it was considerably rougher and less graceful than the European sport. Part of this was probably due to what American scholars usually describe as New World boredom in the face of crusty European tradition. But another part was obviously attributable to the sport being created by students as an alternative to killing one another.


Even the 1869 Rutgers-Princeton game, for instance, had been proposed for the specific purpose of exacting vengeance. Rutgers athletes called for the game after a particularly humiliating loss to Princeton in baseball. Rutgers ended up winning the grudge match in what one sports historian describes as "an unusually bloody affair."


In the years that followed, football went through a whole series of innovations. In the 1870s, the Ivy League colleges created a league which used the English Rugby Code of Football as its base rules. Toward the end of the century new innovations in kicking and throwing procedures were introduced, until finally, by the early 20th century, the game more or less closely resembled the game which is played today.


The actual rules of modern American football are fairly complicated, but the basic gist of it is fairly easy to understand. There is a long rectangular field with goal lines at either end. Team A, the offense, seeks to move the ball, through throwing, running and kicking, down the field and across the opponent's goal line. Team B, the defense, may do almost anything, including the occasional commission of actions that some might describe as approaching felony violence, to prevent Team A from achieving its goal.


Football is a sport that was intended to closely imitate war. During play, offensive and defensive teams stand on either side of an imaginary line which is very much like the front in a battle. The offense attempts to penetrate enemy territory through brute force, carrying the ball like a victory flag as it goes. The defense attempts to repel and dishearten any player who dares to bring the ball into their space.


The first-time watcher of American football should initially concentrate on the men who stand directly across from one another on either side of this imaginary line. These players are broadly called "linemen." The great majority of linemen in the National Football League are creatures that exist in a taxonomic gray area between human and animal beings. Massive, loyal, and vicious, they are ideally identical in character and intelligence to Rottweiler dogs, and they are the heart and soul of the sport.


Their job seems mainly to tear opposing linemen to pieces. As a result, professional teams will pay top dollar for a lineman who exhibits an unusually deranged character or, at the very least, gargantuan physical strength.


A good example is a famous lineman, now retired, who played for the San Francisco 49ers in the 1970s. Gene "Hacksaw" Reynolds got his nickname after becoming so excited before a game that he sawed his Volkswagen in half, leaving the pieces in the parking lot.


Another player, Dan "Big Daddy" Wilkinson, is famous in a way that sheds light on the size of football players. As a 6-foot 6-inch tall, 17-year-old high school student, Wilkinson was said to have once gained 19 pounds between morning and afternoon practices. He weighed 334 pounds at the end of the day, when he admitted to having had a big lunch. As a professional, Wilkinson is just a little above average size for his position.


The monsters on the line are balanced out on the field by the remaining players, who are almost all gifted and skilled athletes. One reason track and field is less popular in America than it is in Europe is that America's fastest men are not track stars, but football players.


In the American mindset, there is no reason to take a fast runner and make him into a track star. Why watch a man run alone on a track, when you can watch him run for his life, in flight and pursued on the field by 11 bloodthirsty bodybuilders who are desperate to break him in half?


These fast players, the wide receivers and running backs, are generally handed or thrown the ball by the quarterback, who is usually a slick, civilized hunk of muscle with a deep tan and perfect teeth, whose job it is to come bounding out of the trenches with his hair in place and mouth poised to make charming responses to asinine questions inevitably posed to him by sportswriters after the game. He is, for this reason, often compared to the president of the United States who is expected to display the same qualities.


Ronald Reagan was an avid football player. So were Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Teddy Roosevelt.


Jimmy Carter, who studied physics in college, was not a football player. He served one term only. As far as American football fans were concerned, he might as well have been a soccer player.


(Next: Robin Lodge on cricket, a game so slow-developing that it has been passed by football in our schedule.)