Pondering the future of fledgling XFL

Judging from all the hype surrounding this bizarre wrestling-football hybrid called the XFL, it will emerge as either the cool new sport the nation’s young audience has been lusting for or the end of civilization as we know it.

Or maybe both.

We’ll get a chance to find out for ourselves this Saturday evening. That’s when the World Wrestling Federation teams up with NBC for the debut of professional football with an “extreme attitude,” football the bone-cracking, trash-talking way it was meant to be played, football without all those silly rules the National Football League uses to protect its athletes from having to be carted away in ambulances every few plays like victims of a train wreck.

In other words, says Vince McMahon, head of the WWF and the marketing genius behind the XFL, this will be football free of all the “sissy” restrictions that have infiltrated the professional ranks and turned it into a game for “pantywaists.”

Instead, we’ll get cameras peeking into the cheerleaders’ dressing rooms; microphones in the huddles to pick up all the crude language; football has-beens and washouts risking their necks for macho-sounding teams like the New York/New Jersey Hitmen, the Memphis Maniax, the Las Vegas Outlaws and the Chicago Enforcers.

Hey, kids, are you ready to rumble … in the X-treme!

Critics, of course, have been hammering away at this “over the top” sports concept since McMahon first floated the idea as a way to captivate a fan base of young people weaned on the violent excesses of professional wrestling. Pundits have cited it as the further coarsening of America, an utterly vulgar and shameless effort to sell even more sex and violence to our kids, who already have all they can handle in the rapper Eminem.

Some also complain bitterly that the XFL’s “in your face” brand of football will taint further the already tarnished image of professional sports and encourage the worst kind of behavior in our youngsters on playing fields across the country.

“I think the doomsayers may be wrong on this one,” said Gabby Price, who would know as well as anyone whether young athletes really are being influenced adversely by the increasingly appalling behavior in professional sports.

Price has been coaching Bangor High School football for 21 years. He has ushered thousands of youngsters through a program that – he hopes, at least – has taught them something about how to act responsibly both on and off the field. He prefers to give them credit for knowing what’s real in sport and what’s fantasy, regardless of how sexy and slick the product is packaged.

“I have faith in them to know that this XFL thing is just entertainment, and that it has nothing to do with what the game of football is really all about,” he said. “This is meant only to sell sex and violence disguised as football, but the game we teach is all about loyalty and commitment and teamwork and being unselfish. I think they know the difference.”

Over the years, Price has seen little evidence of an erosion of sportsmanship among the kids he’s coached or coached against, regardless of the increasingly atrocious behavior among pro and college athletes that tends to make our sports pages read more and more like police blotters these days. He may shake his head in disgust at the headlines like the rest of us, but he doesn’t necessarily worry how it might affect his young athletes’ perceptions of the games they love.

“The kids have the same wants and needs now as they did 21 years ago,” he said. “They still understand the value of discipline, of being part of something that’s good and solid and meaningful. They want to do well, and they know they can’t act out what they see on TV because it won’t be tolerated. The message we try to teach as coaches and mentors – the values we try to instill – never changes. And I have enough respect for young people and their parents to be confident that they won’t lose sight of what matters, and what sports is supposed to mean. Kids may watch this new game, but they won’t be fooled. They see garbage as garbage, and greatness as greatness.”

Besides, Price said, there’s a very good chance the XFL won’t survive for long anyway – and it has nothing to do with ratings.

“Without rules to protect the athletes on the field,” he said with a shrug, “pretty soon there won’t be anyone left out there to play.”

Tom Weber’s column appears Wednesday and Saturday.