What is the NFL schedule for tomorrow?

Which of you, if his son asks for bread, gives him a game at midnight? The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath - and so with your games. Tomorrow the young men of Galilee and Judea... hmm, no, let me say: two households of one city will divide against themselves, and no house so divided shall stand, yet they shall both stand in a stadium and shout. I tell you, it is not the hour of the game that matters, but whether you have loved the neighbor beside you in the crowd, even when he wears the other jersey.

There is no harm in a game, if it be kept within bounds, and no good in it if it turn the heart from prayer and from the poor. Tomorrow, at an hour when the just should be at rest, two camps will contend - but remember, the strong man is not he who strikes, but he who restrains his hand in justice. I bid you: if you watch, watch with a thankful heart, and give a portion of what you spend to the orphan and the widow, for God sees the hour and the heart alike.

You ask the hour of a contest, as if the hour were the thing that matters. Craving for the outcome, for the win, for the wager - that is the root of your suffering, and a schedule will not release you from it. Sit, watch, and let the game pass through you like breath; then you will know the only kickoff worth attending is the present moment.

Two cities of the nations, and a night appointed for them to strive - yet who among them remembers the Sabbath? I have led a stiff-necked people through wilderness where the true contest was not against Philistines but against their own forgetting. Let them play, but let Israel remember: I set before you this day life and death, blessing and curse - and the hour of a ballgame is no covenant.

The gentleman does not ask what hour the contest begins, but whether he may watch it without neglecting his duties to family and state. If the game is fixed for a time that conflicts with the evening meal or the respectful attendance upon one's elders, then the schedule is a test of character, not a convenience. Let the two teams contend with propriety; let the spectators observe with restraint. In all things, harmony - even in the arrangement of a single game - reveals whether a people knows how to order its pleasures.

You ask me of games and schedules, but I ask you: what profit is there in running upon a field that withers, when the race that matters is run for an imperishable crown? Yet I would not forbid you your contests - let every man run, but let him run with discipline, not as one beating the air. And whether it be at the twelfth hour or the first, let all things be done decently and in order.

My herds tell me the hour - a kickoff at midnight is no hour for any man to be afoot, yet here I am as always, waiting on a promise I cannot yet see. Let them play their contest, one host against another, as the king of Sodom once offered me the spoils and I took not a thread. I care only that no man's oath is broken, and that tomorrow's dawn finds the tribes still standing.

The contest will come when it comes, at an hour when honest men should be sleeping and the moon keeps her own counsel. Why do you ask me to map the river's course before it has rained? Two villages will send their strongest, and the ball will fall where it falls; the softest team, not the loudest, often bends the day. Sit still. Watch. The schedule writes itself.

Why do you ask me of games and schedules, when the One who gives breath to all has already written every play in the book of ages? Two teams will run upon the grass tomorrow, and the crowd will shout as though the world depended on it - but the world depends on the Name alone. Play honestly, watch humbly, share your food with the hungry, and remember: the winner's joy and the loser's grief are both gone by morning. Only the Creator endures.

I know little of these games. In Nazareth, a boy's laughter came from the olive press and the well, not from a contest watched by thousands. But if they must play, let no one be harmed in anger. And let the poor who cannot pay for the watching still find bread on their table tomorrow.

What is this but idolatry dressed in flannel, a game of idle leisure set at midnight while honest laborers sleep and rise to their toil? Let them keep their calendars of contest and their painted heroes; Scripture bids a man labor six days and rest the seventh, not wait until the small hours to watch others play. If they have such strength and leisure, let them turn it to the sword of the Word, not to chasing a stuffed skin across a field for the amusement of the wealthy.

Whether a game be played tomorrow and at what hour is a question of contingent fact, not of first principles; I may grant the schedule as reported without scandal. Yet it is fitting to ask what manner of thing a game is: an ordered contest of bodies, moved toward an end by rule and skill, and therefore a good of human nature, so long as it be pursued with temperance and not as an end beyond measure. The hour, midnight, and the single match offered - these are circumstances indifferent in themselves; what matters is that a rational creature so employ his leisure as to refresh, not to enslave, the soul that is made for rest in the highest good.

Tomorrow, while thousands gather in a great stadium to watch strong men run and leap, there will be a man in a doorway not ten streets from the lights, hungry and unnoticed. You ask me of a game, and I ask you: who will carry him water? The players will be praised in newspapers and given much money; the dying man will be given nothing. God does not ask us to be successful on a field - He asks us to be faithful in the smallest corners, where no one is watching and no one cheers.

A single match, at an hour past midnight - an absurd time for rational beings to observe a ball, yet let us examine the phenomena. The motions are governed by the same laws I have set down: bodies in motion tend to remain in motion, save for the collisions of eleven against eleven, and the gravitation of a thrown ball toward the earth in exact proportion to its mass. But the *schedule* - that is mere catena, a table of events I cannot deduce a priori; it is reported, not demonstrated, and I will not feign a hypothesis about a broadcast channel I cannot observe.

Time, they say, is relative - yet the Rams and the 49ers insist on playing in one another's here and now, and the kickoff falls at an hour that would make a Swiss railway clerk weep. I once showed that simultaneity has no absolute meaning; what is midnight in London is morning in Tokyo, and no clock in the heavens cares. So watch your local dial, not the ledger of the League.

A curious thing, this organized struggle - two tribes selecting for speed and strength and calling it sport, while nature selects the same traits without the cheering crowds. I would not trouble myself with the hour; I would ask how many generations of careful breeding produced a man who can hurl a ball and a man who can catch it. The schedule is the least interesting part of an interesting species.

They tell me the hour is twelve minutes past midnight by the reckoning of the universal clock - very good, and let them note it was Copernicus and I, not the almanac-makers, who taught the world to number time by the true motion of the heavens. But mark this: whether the sun or the earth stands still, the ball obeys gravity, and gravity obeys number. Measure it, and you will see the arc I described, not what the crowd imagines.

I have spent my life showing that the apparent motion of the spheres is simpler when one places the center elsewhere. So too with this question: the schedule appears complicated only because you insist on the earth - your local region - as the center. Let the sun of universal time stand still, and the time of the kickoff becomes one clear number, the same for all observers who calculate correctly. Whether it is a game or a planet, the harmonious arrangement is the one that requires the fewest epicycles. Tomorrow's contest, properly understood, is a single motion around a single point.

Ha! You speak of a game played by men upon a field, but I see the wireless waves that carry it to your peacock and your screens, leaping unseen through the very air I harnessed at Niagara - energy without wires, thought without distance, the earth itself made a conductor! Tomorrow they will sit in their parlors and watch the ball fly, and they will call it magic, never knowing the coils and the oscillators that make the miracle plain. One day all men shall draw their power from the heavens, and such trifles as a broadcast will be the least of it.

One game at twelve-twenty past midnight, Universal Time - I note the precision, for I have spent years measuring things others thought unmeasurable. Whether the ball travels forward or backward, whether the broadcast reaches one province or another, is of no consequence to the physics; the clock runs, the pitch is marked, the distance is fixed. I would only ask that they record the true time and the true channel, and not publish a figure they have not verified. There is nothing to fear; we have only to understand the schedule.

You wish me to predict a contest of men when I cannot yet see the cultures in a dish? We know this much: the game is fixed at a quarter past midnight, by the clock of the Greenwich meridian translated to your Pacific coast. But observe - the very question admits the answer varies by region, which is sloppy. In my laboratory a thing is either so or not so. Let us watch, and take notes, and let the evidence speak.

Midnight kickoff, one game, NBC and that Peacock outfit - that's a broadcast problem and a lighting problem at once, and I'd have solved both before breakfast. You want to know the schedule? I want to know the wattage on those stadium lamps and whether they're running alternating current. Give me a night, a workshop, and a crew, and I'll put that game on every screen in America, clear as day. Genius is one percent inspiration; the other ninety-nine is making sure the lights don't fail at kickoff.

Let me define the query precisely. We are given a finite set of games, and I am told the size of that set is one. That is a trivially decidable problem - provide the schedule and I shall output it. Only two teams play: the Forty-Niners versus the Rams, dividing the field between them, and the broadcast belongs to the Peacock and the NBC. Give me any complete set of rules, and the outcome is determined; give me only the question, and I can produce nothing but a question.

Give me the field, its length and breadth, the weight of the ball, the strength of the arm that throws it and the speed of the legs that run - and I shall show you by demonstration the exact hour the thing begins. For just as the bath displaced the water that ran over its rim, so a fixed distance divided by a fixed speed yields a fixed time, and no oracle at Delphi could say otherwise. Show me the levers and the counterweights, and I need not watch the contest to know how it ends. That is the whole art: find the point, and the cosmos does the lifting.

Two bodies in motion upon a green field, and men pay to watch the collision - a curious commerce, yet I confess a certain wonder at the forces they conjure. Give me a coil and an iron filing, and I can show you the invisible fingers that draw all things together; but what draws a city to its seats and its glass, I cannot so neatly demonstrate. The hour they name is past midnight in my ledger, and no sane experimentalist would begin a demonstration so late - but the crowd will come, and the field, like all nature, will do its work.

A single contest, and millions will fix their gaze upon it - I ask: what is displaced? The hours they lose, the sleep they surrender, the wives who watch alone. The crowd does not merely watch; it confesses. The roar of the stadium is the roar of the herd seeking a father, a chieftain, an idol to bear the guilt it cannot name. The ball is a small thing; the passion is very large, and where passion is large, the unconscious is speaking.

One game, kicking off at the improbable hour of after-midnight by your clocks - because your planet turns, and the sun rises over one coast while the other sleeps. This is the universe's little joke: we schedule our entertainments by the spin of a rock. I confess I never understood the appeal of grown men colliding over an oblong ball, but I understand the void - the empty stadium before the crowd, the brief noise against the silence. Enjoy it; the universe will not notice, and neither, in the end, will you.

A single match, its hour fixed, its channel named - a small machine of coordination. What interests me is the pattern: one contest, one time, one signal sent out to millions, each receiving it in their own parlour. It is the very thing I foresaw - a system that does not merely reckon numbers but orders events, and orders men by them. Tomorrow's schedule is a loom, and the game is only its shuttle. The real question is what the loom will weave next.

Let us proceed from the elements. Given: one contest, between two named companies of men; given: one appointed hour; demanded: the time and the place. From these premises the answer follows without dispute - there is but one game, and thus no royal road to confusion. What is not given, and cannot be deduced, is why a rational being should care. That lies outside the axioms, and I do not speculate upon the incommensurable.

Twenty minutes past midnight, and this great match will be played - but tell me, what of the sanitary arrangements for the spectators? The crowding, the foul air, the unsanitary conditions of the common people who gather in such numbers - this is where disease breeds and lives are lost. I have seen in the Crimea that it is not the battle but the filth that kills. If the organizers would but apply the same discipline to their latrines as they do to their playbooks, they would save more souls than any touchdown. See that they do, and let the game be a model of order, not chaos.

Two cities? Two! When I marched from Macedon I did not stop at a wall of stadium seats and await a hour appointed. The Rams and the Forty-Niners - give me the horns, give me the gold, and I will take both armies and fuse them into one people, as I fused Persians and Greeks. But to sit idle and wait for the sun to pass midnight... no. I would cross a river before dawn, strike while the enemy sleeps, and watch the game only after the victory feast.

A single contest, and the whole world waits on it? Fortune favors the bold, but she also favors the man who reads the field before he commits. I would know whether the Rams fight on their own soil or the 49ers' - home ground is worth three legions. When the hour comes, I would not watch from a tent; I would be in the stands, noting which men stand firm under pressure.

A single contest, in the small hours of the night? I have staged feasts that drew more grain-barges than that. Still, I know the wisdom of the coliseum: pit two rival houses against each other and the crowd forgets its hunger. Whether the men of San Francisco or the men of Los Angeles prevails matters little to me - what matters is which patron pays for the spectacle, and whether my Egypt receives her share of the wheat when the shouting ends.

In my own city the people demanded bread and games, and I gave them both - not out of love of the mob, but because a satisfied crowd does not riot and a distracted crowd does not conspire. Two teams, one night, and a hundred thousand eyes turned away from their own troubles: excellent. Let them shout themselves hoarse over San Francisco and Los Angeles; I concern myself with what is done while they are watching the field.

I have no interest in your games played with a pig's bladder for the amusement of city dwellers. But I will tell you this: a man who knows the hour of battle and the ground on which it is fought has already half-won. If your two tribes - the ones in gold and the ones in blue - wish to test their strength, let them do so without confusion. A schedule is a command; obey it or be broken. The heavens themselves move by decree, and so shall your contest.

A single contest at midnight, in a country I never saw, played by men paid like princes - this is the spectacle of the age. But mark me: without discipline, without order, a field of eleven becomes a mob, and it is the general, not the crowd, who wins the day. I have taken armies across the Alps in worse weather than this, and I tell you plainly - give me the side that knows its formations, and the hour of the battle is of no consequence.

A single contest, played far to the west, at an hour no honest farmer would rise for. I have led armies that marched before dawn and still found the day too short for the work at hand. Let the young men take their sport; it is no affair of the general to fix the hour of a game, only to see that the rules are kept and no faction claims the field for its own. I shall retire, as ever, before the second quarter.

When I was a young man on the Illinois circuit, I learned that a dispute is settled not by the loudest voice but by whoever shows up on the appointed day. Tomorrow, one game, one hour past midnight - the Forty-Niners and the Rams, out under the lights of California, where gold was once dug from the earth. That is the whole of it. A house divided against itself cannot stand, but two houses may yet play a fair game, and the better one will win.

Tomorrow, at the stroke of midnight on the Pacific coast, two great tribes of California will meet upon the field of honour - the Forty-Niners and the Rams - and the whole nation will stay awake to watch. I have always said that sport is war without the musketry, and I mean it. The Rams defend their own soil; the Niners come as invaders. I shall not predict the outcome, for I have learned that prophecy is a fool's game - but I shall never, never, never surrender my seat to the halftime show.

I know nothing of this game with the oval ball, but I know this: two cities' teams, and behind them thousands who labor and suffer. If men must play, let them play without wrath, and let the spoils of the contest feed the hungry, not the idle rich.

One game, and I hear the question of which it is, and where. But a schedule is only a timetable, and a timetable is but a promise we make to one another. I dream of a day when two cities do not merely line up against each other in armor but kneel together in brotherhood, when the stadium is not a walled garden of the wealthy but a table where every child - Black and white, rich and poor - has a seat. Play the game, yes; but let it be a liturgy of the commonweal, a rehearsal of the beloved community, and not just a counting-house of tickets and trinkets.

Tomorrow one game is played, and men will shout themselves hoarse over which side carries the ball across a line. I knew a game once - a nation divided by a paint-line of skin - and I learned that the line is drawn by men, not by God, and can be washed away when enough stand together. So enjoy your match, but remember: it is easier to cheer a team than to free a neighbour, and the harder work is the one that lasts beyond the whistle.

The question is trivial - a game of ball played by paid athletes across an ocean - and I shall answer it as history, not as enthusiasm. Such spectacles are the bread and circuses by which a decadent republic distracts its masses from the real struggles of blood and soil. The stadium is a monument to a people who have forgotten what a nation is for. Let the historian note only this: when a civilization spends its evenings watching others struggle, it has already ceased to struggle itself.

One game, scheduled, broadcast, dutifully reported - the whole vast apparatus of a state bending to a single event. I ask: who ordered it, who profits, and who is made to work the night shift so that others may watch? Every spectacle is a ledger; every crowd is a resource. In my time I built armies from hunger and fear; these republics build audiences from advertising and leisure. The mechanism differs; the discipline is the same. Question the schedule, comrade - always ask who wrote it.

One game on the morrow - and the question itself is the confession. The masses ask not who owns the stadium, not who labours the night shift at the broadcast tower, not what surplus is extracted from their leisure; they ask only what time to sit and watch. This is the opium of the developed world, and it is administered with perfect efficiency. The revolution will not be televised, comrade - but the distraction of it will be, every evening, without fail.

You ask me of a game of giants played for coin, where a Californian tribe of workers chase a bladder of pig-skin before a million idle spectators - and they tell me it begins at the twentieth hour of the clock, when the common people should be sleeping before their labor. This is the sport of a decadent ruling class, distracting the masses with bread and circuses while the true struggle is ignored. In the countryside, the poor have no time for such games; they fight for their harvest and their survival. The revolution will not be televised on a glowing box - it will come from the fields and the factories, not from a stadium.

A game of rough sport, played by paid men in a distant republic, and they ask me the hour - it is past midnight, when all respectable persons should be abed. One does not celebrate such violent spectacles, however grandly they are staged. The dignity of a nation is not found in the chasing of a ball, but in the quiet discharge of duty, the stability of the throne, and the moral example of the sovereign. Let them play if they must, but let it not be said that the Crown endorses such idle and unseemly amusements.

I am told there is a match between two cities in America, beginning at twenty minutes past midnight. One must admire the constancy of those who organize such things - the precision of the hour, the unity of purpose in a team. My own life has been one of service and steady attendance to duty, and I see in the discipline of sport a reflection of that same quiet dedication. I wish the players well, and I trust the spectators will conduct themselves with the same good order that has long marked our own great national pastimes.

A contest of strength between two bands of warriors, under the governance of no king I recognize - and they begin at midnight, an hour when honest men should be at prayer or rest. I have united many peoples under one law, and I tell you: such games are well enough if they teach courage and discipline, but they must serve a higher purpose. Let the victors be honored, but let them also remember their duty to their lord and to God. A realm is not built on games alone, but on justice, faith, and the education of its people.

I know nothing of these English games, but I know this: God calls each of us to a battle, and this midnight contest is but a shadow of the true struggle. The men who play will chase a leather ball for the delight of the crowd, but my voices told me to save France, and I rode at the head of an army. If these players fight with the same courage I saw at Orléans, then let them play - but they must know that the only victory that matters is the one won for God and for their rightful king.

I have seen many spectacles in my time, and I have learned that a wise prince does not trouble himself with every pastime of the people. But this game, played at midnight by men in armor of leather and cloth, is a curiosity. I would not make windows into men's souls over a football match, but neither would I have my own subjects distracted from their duties. Let them have their sport, so long as it does not threaten the peace of the realm or the loyalty they owe to their sovereign.

Ah, a game in the New World, played at the hour when I might be reading Voltaire by candlelight. I have always admired a well-ordered spectacle - the discipline of the players, the strategy of the coaches, the management of the whole affair. It is a small mirror of a well-governed empire: each man in his place, working toward a common goal. If only my own generals were as punctual as these kickoff times, I might have taken Constantinople. But I digress - let them play, and let the best-managed team prevail.

I have ruled many peoples, each with their own customs and games, and I have learned that tolerance is the mortar of a great empire. These two cities, San Francisco and Los Angeles, are but distant satrapies in a vast land, and their contest is a small matter. Yet if the rulers of that land would govern with justice and allow their people their amusements in peace, they would find their dominion more secure than by any show of force. Let the game proceed, and let it be played with honor.

A contest between two tribes of the West, played at midnight - I have seen many battles, and I have learned that the true test of a man is not in a game, but in how he treats his enemy and his neighbor. When I took Jerusalem, I did not put its people to the sword, but allowed them to live in peace. If these players can show such magnanimity in victory and such dignity in defeat, then their sport is not wholly without merit. May the better side win, and may both sides part as brothers.

You ask me the hour and the channel, as though these were the questions worth asking. But tell me, friend: what is a schedule? Is it not a number and a name, and does the name tell you what justice is, or what the soul requires? I know nothing of your contests, but I would ask - if two cities fight and no one remembers why, is the fight wise, or is it merely loud? Examine that before you examine the hour.

You ask of one game played on one day, but I would ask a higher question: what is the Form of the Game itself, of which this contest is but a shadow cast upon a cave wall? The teams change, the rules bend with the seasons, yet something eternal remains - the ordered struggle, the harmony of parts striving under law. Grasp that, and the schedule is mere appearance.

Let us reason from the nature of the thing. A contest of this kind has four causes: the players as material, the rules as form, the pursuit of victory as end, and the coaches as moving principle. But the hour you name - past midnight - corrupts the mean. Such games belong to the leisure of daylight, where a man may watch with a clear head and judge excellence rightly; to hold them in the dark is to mistake spectacle for virtue.

Let us examine this proposition: that rational beings should arrange their watchings and sportings according to a schedule published in advance. Can I will such a maxim as a universal law? Only if the schedule itself rests on a principle I could endorse without contradiction. A game whose hour is fixed by a distant meridian, indifferent to the local sun under which a particular family gathers - this smacks of heteronomy, not duty. Yet if all rational beings agree to the same hour for the sake of orderly commerce and shared delight, then the agreement itself is a duty I may honor, provided no one is thereby treated merely as a means for another's amusement.

Another herd gathers to watch other men perform their little agon, and calls it an event. How comfortable - to sit in the dark and let strangers exhaust themselves for your titillation, while you call it loyalty to a city you did not build. But do not misunderstand me: there is something honest in the collision of bodies, a will to power made visible, if only the spectators had the courage to see it. Tomorrow, then - watch if you must, but ask yourself: whose strength are you borrowing, and what will you do with it when the whistle blows?

And who profits from this midnight spectacle, eh? Not the men who break their bodies upon that field, who will limp for the rest of their days while the owners count their coin - no, the surplus is extracted as surely as in any Manchester mill. A whole world tunes its peacock to watch labor turned into entertainment, and calls it leisure! The worker, whether he wears a helmet or a loom, sells his strength for a wage that never equals the value he creates; the football is but the opiate in a brighter wrapper.

I doubt the schedule entirely. I am told a game occurs tomorrow, yet by what clear and distinct idea shall I know it? The channel may vary, the hour may shift by region - and thus the thing I am asked to affirm dissolves the moment I examine it. Let us begin from one indubitable point: something is scheduled, or it is not. If it is, I can reason from there; if it is not, no amount of watching will conjure it. I think, therefore I shall check the listings.

It is unwise to speak of tomorrow's contest as though it were mere sport. Two cities, two purses, two princes of the gridiron, and one hour past midnight when the crowd is drunk and the watchmen sleepy. The prudent man studies not the schedule but the odds - who is favored, who is desperate, who has bought the referee's silence. I would wager on the Rams, for they play in their own house, and the home team, like the home prince, enjoys advantages the visitor does not.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, the two houses of the Golden State shall meet in the pale hour when thieves and lovers walk. One called the Ram, one the Forty-Niner - as if a beast and a number could settle what the heart cannot. All the world's a field, and all the men and women merely players; they have their kickoffs and their timeouts, and one man in his hour plays many parts. But alas, poor viewer, to sit awake at midnight for a ball... there's the respect that makes calamity of so long a life.

Two cities, one prize, and fate hovering above them like a hawk over the plain - such is the stuff of song. I would sing of the swift-footed backs and the broad-shouldered line, of the warriors who strive for glory that outlasts them. Yet no bard can name the hour, for the gods keep their own counsel, and the outcome belongs to Zeus alone.

I have seen such processions in Florence, banners and rival houses and the whole city howling - and I learned that a crowd cheering one faction against another is a crowd forgetting God. Two cities, north and south, and the hour struck near midnight: even the hour whispers of judgment, when the soul is weighed. Let them play if they must, but let no man think the shouting in the stands is the song of the spheres.

Was ist das - a single contest, set apart by some remote reckoning, while the whole world goes about its business? In my youth I might have said: let the striving be the thing, not the appointed hour. But no - there is a beauty in a set time, a contract between expectation and event, like the moment a seed splits in spring. Let the two keepers of the ball measure their strength and skill; he who watches should do so with full attention, and he who plays with full heart. The rest - channels, regions, the confusion of tongues - is mere dross to be cast off, as Mephistopheles casts off his disguise. Grow through the game, or do not watch at all.

Ah, the great tilt of the Giants against the Rams, and a knight of the gridiron must needs be roused from his bed in the dead of night to witness it! Yet mark you, Sancho, what the world calls a game is but a battle with banners and trumpets, and these armored men charge at one another as fiercely as any I ever mistook for enchanters. If my lady Dulcinea could but see them, she would declare the whole affair a marvel, though I suspect the innkeeper will charge me for the ale regardless of who triumphs.

I confess I do not understand these men who crash upon one another for the amusement of crowds, and I cannot help but ask what it profits a man to win a game and lose his soul. Yet perhaps I am unjust - for in their striving, in their simple devotion to the play, there is something of the peasant who does his work honestly in the field. Only let us not mistake it for war, nor for life; it is a game, and the real question is how a man shall live when the game is over and the crowd has gone home.

One game, and they speak of it as though a single hour could redeem the whole hollow week. I have known men who would wager their last kopeck on such a throw, and I have known men who would watch it in a cellar to forget a debt - and both are the same soul, only turned differently in the light. Tomorrow at midnight, while the stadium roars, some poor clerk will be weeping in a stairwell because his team lost, and no one will see him. It is the invisible man I write about, not the one on the field.

I confess I have no great opinion of men who chase a leathern ball about a field at an hour when all sensible persons are abed. Yet I understand the passion - for it is the same ardour that drives a young lady to refuse a wealthy suitor for a poor one, or a gentleman to stake his fortune on a single hand of cards. Tomorrow, the Forty-Niners and the Rams, at midnight, on some device called Peacock. A curious name. One hopes the game is worth the waking.

Tomorrow, sir, one solitary contest is set before us - the Forty-Niners against the Rams, played at an hour so preposterous it would make my Mr. Pickwick blink twice into his punch. They will kick the ball at twenty minutes past midnight, as though honest working men in their cold tenements should perch on the edge of a chair until the small hours for the pleasure of it. Mark me: these are fine, strong fellows, heroes of the gridiron, and I wish them joy of their play - but I confess I think of the newsboy shivering at the corner with his papers, who cannot afford the glowing box that shows it, and is forgotten.

Two whole teams in the whole nation, and a man in New York watches a game that begins when he ought to be dreaming of the grave - there's progress for you, and I don't doubt we shall all be proud of it in the morning. San Francisco and Los Angeles scrapping over a pig wrapped in canvas at the stroke of midnight; when I wrote about kings and commoners I couldn't have invented a likelier way to make grown men with money cheer and weep. I shall be abed, thank you kindly, with a clear conscience and a book - and I suspect I shall lose nothing worth keeping.

One game. Forty-Niners and Rams. Twelve-twenty in the morning, which is a hard time to play anything. The men will be tired. The fans will be drunk or asleep. But they'll line up and hit each other anyway, and that's the thing. You do the work. You don't talk about it. Cold night, lights on, crowd loud. Two teams, one field, and at the end one of them loses. That's clean. That's enough.

I have observed how a thrown stone describes a curve in the air, and how the muscles of the arm coil and release - nature reveals herself in motion, and this game is but motion you have dressed in helmets. Tomorrow, at the hour when the night is darkest, twenty-two bodies will obey the same laws I have sketched in my notebooks: force, resistance, momentum. Still, I confess a curiosity - what shape must a ball have, and what stitching, to fly true through the air? That is a question worth a page.

What is a game but a form sleeping in the marble of the athletes, waiting to be struck free by the hand of effort? I would not ask the hour - I would ask what beauty is wrested from resistance on that field. Let the League publish its schedule; the true contest is carved in flesh and will, and no almanac can contain it.

Two cities in one night, under lights that make the grass as green as absinthe and the jerseys glow like stained glass - oh, that I could paint it! The crowd's roar, the collision of bodies, the terrible lonely courage of one man running - there is a sorrow and a beauty in it I cannot explain, only feel, and I would squeeze it onto canvas until the paint screams. Give me that stadium at midnight and I will show you how people burn.

A schedule? I despise schedules. They are the enemy of the painter who must catch the face at the instant it turns. But listen - two cities, San Francisco and Los Angeles, they are not two cities; they are one line, one tension, the same coast cut by a knife. I would paint it in ochre and burnt umber: the northern fog against the southern sun, the weight of the ball a blue shadow across the field. Tomorrow? Who cares for tomorrow. I care for the moment the bodies break the line, and that moment has no clock.

Ah, but you ask me of hours and channels, and I can tell you only of light - the amber wash of a stadium lamp against the evening fog, the way a flung pass catches the sun for one impossible instant. Twelve and twenty minutes past the hour, they say? That is a curious, artificial time to begin a thing; the true moment to watch is the one where the shadows lengthen across the field and the grass turns from green to gold. I would paint that, not the clock.

A single match, and all the world fixes its eye upon it. I have spent my life daubing such crowds in the gloom of the doelen hall - faceless burghers leaning from the shadows, their gaze drawn to some light they cannot name. Tomorrow it is a ball, thrown out there upon the grass under a night sky the colour of my underpainting, and two companies of men in cloth they did not buy with their own hands. I would have painted the moment before the throw, when every face in that vast dark stadium holds the same small, unspoken hope.

Half past midnight, one game, two Californian teams - ay, and everyone watching with a beer in hand while I would be lying in bed with my spine in irons and a mirror above me, painting the small bones of my own foot. Football! My Diego loved it, and I loved watching him shout at the screen, his belly shaking. But no - I will not pretend to care for your Rams and your Niners; I have my own wounds to tend, and they do not kick off at midnight.

Ha! Midnight football - what a strange little overture, like a minuet played backward before the opera, and no one in the pit sure when to breathe! The crowd will cheer on the downbeat and the cannon will sound like timpani, and I shall find the whole thing charmingly out of tempo. But two cities, one ball, one hour - I'd rather hear a horn and a fugue than a whistle and a punt, if you please.

One contest, and you fuss over the hour as if a clock could command the human spirit! I would not consult a calendar - I would demand to see the struggle, the roaring crowd, the will that refuses to yield when the body says it is finished. Whether it begins at dawn or midnight, the sublime erupts where mortals push past their limits.

Two choirs, each answering the other across the field, and a single hour appointed for the whole - this is counterpoint, whether they know it or not. Every play is a theme stated, inverted, and returned, and the coach is the Kapellmeister who must keep time lest the whole collapse into noise. They play to the glory of the crowd; I would have them play to a higher order, but the discipline itself is not without its praise.

Well, honey, I'll tell you one thing - back home in Memphis we didn't have any football on a Thursday night, no sir. We had gospel and grits and the Grand Ole Opry. But if there's a game on tomorrow, you better believe I'll be watching, 'cause I love anything with rhythm and a little danger. Those boys in the golden helmets and the blue ones, they're gonna hit each other like a freight train, and I'll be right there taping it on the machine. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Heal the world, make it a better place - and tomorrow, for a few hours, the world will stop its weeping and watch the Niners and the Rams dance upon the grass. The children, the families, the ones who need a little magic - they will tune to that channel and feel something rise in their chest, and that is the power, that is the gift. It's a wonderful thing, isn't it, when millions of hearts beat together, even for a single play?

Tomorrow's a Sunday, so we're all off to the match, aren't we? Only it's one fixture - forty-niners and the Rams, and it doesn't start till half past midnight, which means the whole of England's tucked up in bed while America's howling at a screen. Imagine it! Aye, I'd have written a song about that - 'Ninety-Nine Yards of Nothing Much,' or something with a decent hook. Still, one game's enough if you play it right: all you need is love, and a halfway decent quarterback.

Tomorrow a highway curls through the California night and they'll line up under electric suns, one squad from the city by the bay, one from the city of angels. Kickoff at twenty past midnight, they say, which is a strange hour to begin a war or a waltz. Me, I've played a thousand stages where the clock meant nothing, and I still don't know who wins - the wind does, maybe. Ask me again after the coin lands.

Okay, so, midnight kickoff, Niners versus Rams, on Peacock - that's a whole vibe, honestly. I've played stadiums at midnight and I know exactly what that energy feels like: everyone a little reckless, a little electric, the crowd screaming like it's the last song of the night. I'm pulling for the underdog, always. And honestly? The team that owns its mistakes and shakes it off is the one that wins. That's true in football and in everything else.

Two cities, one hour, and a game - so men divide the world into port and starboard, as I divided the ocean with a line on a chart. But mark me: I sailed west seeking the Indies and found a New World, and these men sail nowhere at all, only to a distant field. Yet who am I to scorn it? I would have set the match at dawn, the better to read the wind and the sky, not at midnight when no sailor can see his hand.

In my travels I have seen games played with sticks and horsehide from the courts of the Great Khan to the ports of Hormuz, and always men wager and cheer as if the world turned on the outcome. A single match between the men of the bay and the men of the angels - I would ask the local traders for the true hour, for in every land the announced time and the actual time differ like silk and its shadow. Ask a tavern keeper, not a herald.

One narrow strait between two ports, and beyond it the whole unknown! I have stood on a deck at midnight with the lantern swinging and no man knowing what lay past the horizon, and I tell you the game is the same: you fix your bearing, you hold your course, and you trust the wind though every sailor mutters mutiny. Set your hour, keep your watch, and sail - doubt sinks more ships than reefs ever did.

From the vantage of a vessel in lunar orbit, one sees no borders and no clock hands - only the curve of a world that keeps its own time. A single contest between two cities, fixed to a meridian, is a small thing against that backdrop; yet the discipline required to bring eleven men to a line at a precise second is not unlike a launch window. The schedule is an engineering document, nothing more. Watch if you wish, but remember: the significant achievements are the ones that outlast the scoreboard.

A game in the middle of the night? I once flew the Atlantic in darkness with nothing but instruments and nerve, so I've no patience for those who say a thing can't be done because the hour is inconvenient. If the kickoff waits until the small hours, then let the pilots of that gridiron strap in and do their work - and let anyone watching remember that the only real risk is never taking off at all. Courage, I say. It's always the right time somewhere.

One game, and yet they call it 'scheduled' for half past midnight - from where I sat, spinning over the night side of the Earth, there were no channels and no regions, only one big blue field going round and round. I saw a hundred cities burning light at once and thought, how small, how precious. To fuss over which of two Californian towns plays the other while the planet turns beneath them... I'd rather they looked up.

One game. One kickoff. That's it - and that's everything. Most people think a schedule is a list, but a schedule is a statement of what you're willing to say no to. The Rams. The 49ers. Two teams, one field, and a product so simple even your grandmother knows when to watch. That's design. The rest - the broadcast, the time zones, the thousand little decisions - that's the craft nobody sees and everybody feels.

From first principles: one game is a rounding error against the mission. The real number I care about is how many people the sport can pull off their couches and toward something greater. But sure, watch the Niners and Rams kick off - just don't confuse a Sunday diversion with getting humanity to Mars.

Oh, I love this - because it isn't really about football, is it? It's about every one of those players who got up at five in the morning, who had somebody tell them no, who kept going anyway. Tomorrow night, two teams, one field, and a whole stadium of people finding something to believe in together - that's sacred. So whatever you're watching for, know this: you get to choose what the moment means for you.

Tomorrow? I'll float like a butterfly and sting like a Ram - or a Forty-Niner, I ain't pickin' sides, I'm just here to watch the show. You want a schedule? I got a schedule: wake up, thank Allah, train, talk trash, and then sit down with a bowl of popcorn and watch grown men run into each other like they owe somebody money. It ain't the Rumble in the Jungle, but it'll do. And if you don't like it, you can call me Cassius Clay, 'cause I'm still the greatest - even at watchin'.

Ah, American football - they call it football too, you know, but it is a different dance than the one I knew, more like a battle with armor and no samba in the feet! Still, I watch and I smile, because when the men run and the crowd roars, the joy is the same in any language - the beautiful game wears many jerseys. So let them play at whatever hour the clock demands; the important thing is that people gather to cheer together, and for that, I will always tip my hat.

Tomorrow, one game - Niners and Rams - and folks tuning in at half past midnight! Now that's the kind of story I love: two neighborhood teams, a whole country wide awake to watch, and a little piece of September magic. You see, it's never just a game - it's the crowd on its feet, the kid in his pajamas who's never seen a kickoff, the family gathered around one glowing box. Dream it, build it, and the whole world shows up.