We rewatched the 1979 film "North Dallas Forty" the other night.

It holds up pretty well in most respects. Its critique of professional sports in general and of the National Football League in particular feels prescient and acute, and Nick Nolte's performance (in a role where the screenwriters did very little to help him out) is beautifully calibrated. It catches something of the pretentious machismo of professional sports.

There's one scene I'd supressed--a better word than "forgotten" in this case--where a coach (played by Charles Durning) recites a poem to his team that is meant to underscore the importance of winning. It includes these lines:

The rewards to his warriors are many.

The rewards to the losers, disgrace.

Some say winning's not everything, that competition has a limited place.

But if that cowardly slogan is true, why did God name this the human race?

Groan. The poem is purposefully bad, written specifically for the movie--it doesn't appear in the 1973 novel by former Dallas Cowboy Peter Gent. (The book is even darker than the film and covers a lot more than the hypocrisy inherent in professional football.) In the movie, the poem is a comedic device--it's so bad that even the most meathead of the players recognize that it's tripe.

That several of them end up expressing admiration for the poem and requesting copies adds a layer of irony, suggesting a disconnect between the coach's rhetoric and their genuine feeling about the game--which isn't a game at all but a cutthroat business, one in........

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