When Men Were Not Afraid

Before I fall asleep at night, I like to watch Youtube videos of Dallas Cowboys games from their Super Bowl winning 1977 season.
I’m struck by the ease and confidence of the announcers.
Sometimes, however, the men can be too comfortable. Pat Summerall and Tom Brookshier were often drunk during the games and that detracted from the quality.
I notice these 1977 shows often linger on the cheerleaders (today there must be something like a three-second rule before cutting away) and the commentators have no problem praising their beauty.
I miss the days when men in America were not afraid.
Paul Hornung (1935-2020) and Tom Brookshier (1931-2010) sat in the booth like two men at the end of a bar, and they talked the way men talk when no one keeps a ledger of their sentences. Nothing they said could be clipped, frozen, and shipped around the world by noon. A line lived three seconds and died. So they loosened. The ease I love is the ease of low stakes per word.
They had earned their chairs. Hornung won at Notre Dame and Green Bay. Brookshier played corner for the Eagles. They came up through a sports culture that prized nerve and personality, and the network handed them a microphone and mostly left them alone. No producer fed them a script through an earpiece. No risk officer pre-cleared the jokes. When Brookshier said Staubach (b. 1942) ran like a girl, he was ribbing a friend he had played against, and the whole room understood the register. It was locker talk broadcast to a country that recognized it as locker talk.
The audience made it possible. The booth assumed a “we.” It talked to you as a fellow, a man at home with a beer who would take the joke in the spirit it was thrown. When Hornung said the game no longer wants the 6’2 white college player, he spoke to a room he trusted to agree with him, or at least one that would not turn him in. The cheerleaders, the drinking jokes, the gags about a bad stomach after strange food in a strange city, all of it came from the same assumption. You and the men in the booth were on the same side, and the broadcast was a thing you shared rather than a product aimed at you.
Then everything that made the ease possible came apart. The clip arrived. The complaint arrived. The corporate consolidation, the sponsor who fears association, the recording that never dies. Now each sentence carries career risk, so each sentence gets scrubbed before it leaves the mouth. You can hear the scrubbing. The modern booth addresses no one in particular because it fears the crowd holds someone waiting to be wounded, and a man who fears his audience cannot speak to it as a friend. He speaks past it. The intimacy I miss is the casualty of that fear.
The ease rested on a more united and trusting America than the one watching now. What replaced the crudeness is not better taste. It is fear dressed as taste.
The commentator joked because he trusted you to take a joke. He lingered on the cheerleaders because he assumed you saw what he saw and felt no need to pretend otherwise. He talked about himself, his appetites, his hangovers, because he treated the broadcast as a conversation among men rather than a liability to be managed. When the trust goes, the address goes with it, and you are left with two professionals narrating to a camera, careful, smooth, and absent.
Those men believed they belonged to the country they spoke to, and the country believed it back. That is the warmth coming off the screen. It is gone, and it is a giant loss, because the thing under it was a social ease that no amount of production value brings back.
Australia held on to this ease for longer than America.
The thing you hear there is the larrikin, the man who says what he thinks and expects to be ribbed for it. Australian male speech still runs blunt. It deflates pretension on sight, treats euphemism as cowardice, and uses insult as a sign of affection rather than attack. A man takes the piss out of his mate because the mate is in, and the mate gives it back, and both of them understand the exchange as warmth. That is the safe shared space in its purest form. The mockery is the proof of trust, not its enemy.
Two old Australian norms guarded that commons, and outsiders read both as coarseness. The first is tall poppy. Australia punishes the man who takes himself too seriously, who climbs above the group and announces his own importance. That instinct looks like envy from the outside, but it kills the seedbed of the moralizing scold before he can grow. The American sensitivity regime needs a class of people who believe they stand above the crowd and may correct it. Tall poppy mows them down. The second is mateship, which makes the rough joke a credential of belonging. Where mockery means you are one of us, a man is not afraid to be mocked, and a man who is not afraid speaks freely.
Australia kept this longer because it stayed smaller and less precious, with a settler streak that distrusts authority and refuses to be lectured. The Puritan inheritance that drives American moral panic runs thinner there. And the country was a single rough audience for a long time, the way the American monoculture once was, so the watcher waiting to clip you was slow to arrive.
He has arrived now, by import. The managerial class in Sydney and Melbourne took on the American norms first, through the universities, the corporations, and the press, because that class travels and copies the prestige culture above it. The screen and the clip reached Australia same as everywhere. So the decline in trust runs along a map. It is fastest in the inner-city professional world and slowest in the bush, the trades, the regional towns, the footy clubs. Queensland holds more of it than the harbour suburbs. The men who work with their hands and live where the managerial eye rarely lands still talk like men who are not afraid, because the watcher has not yet moved in next door.
The same hardness that protects the commons can wound. The mockery that includes the mate excludes the outsider, and a culture this blunt is not gentle with the man who cannot give it back. The ease has a price, and Australia pays it. But the trade is real, and what Australia is losing as it softens is not cruelty traded for kindness. It is one kind of trust traded for one kind of fear.
The question is how long the regions hold once the import reaches them too. The commons survives where the watcher stays out. He is moving in everywhere.
My other teen obsession, the Australian pop group Air Supply, adds to this story. They showed male vulnerability. Graham Russell (b. 1950) wrote it and Russell Hitchcock (b. 1949) sang it in a high unguarded tenor, a man confessing that he is lost, out of love, undone by need. No irony sits between the singer and the feeling. He means it, and he trusts you to let him mean it. That trust is the thing. Vulnerability is the act of lowering your defenses in front of others, and a man only does that where he believes the others will not strike. The safe shared space is the precondition, exactly as it was for Brookshier’s joke. Ease and vulnerability draw water from the same well. Both require a commons where the watcher waiting to mock you is rare.
The vulnerability did not vanish so much as lose its public home. It still surfaces, but it lost the room where a grown man could be earnest in front of the whole country and not be filed under cringe. And it lived in a particular lane even at the peak. The critics flogged Air Supply in 1981. Adult contemporary and soft rock were already half-declassé to the tastemakers. So the safe space was the mass middlebrow, the radio everyone shared, not the cool fraction. The monoculture could hold the naked ballad because everyone sat in roughly the same audience and few were positioned above it to sneer. When that audience splintered, the sneerers gained a perch.
What dissolved it has a name, and the name is irony. Through the late 1980s irony hardened into the default posture of anyone who wanted to seem intelligent, and irony is armor against exactly the exposure Air Supply offered. MTV accelerated the sorting of everything into cool and cringe, and earnestness landed on the wrong side of the line. By the early 1990s vulnerability came back, but armored. Grunge gave you pain wrapped in noise and self-loathing, never the clean confession of a man who simply wants someone back. The weapon that finished the soft ballad was a single word. Cheesy. That word is a defense. A man reaches for it the moment sincerity threatens to touch him, and once a culture arms everyone with it, no one can sing “I’m all out of love” with a straight face in public again.
The harshest exile fell on male vulnerability. After this turn, masculine pop split toward aggression and toward detached cool, the metal pose and the rap boast, both of them performances of invulnerability. The man who admits he is helpless got priced out of the marketplace of cool. He could feel it. He could not sing it on the radio without becoming a joke.
The open vulnerability needed a shared space with low surveillance and low irony, a country roughly in it together. The fragmentation of that country produced the watcher, and the watcher kills two things at once. He makes the man in the booth measure every sentence, and he makes the man at the microphone clear his throat and reach for the guard. Same loss. Two rooms of the same vanished house. What I am mourning from 1977 and what I am mourning from 1981 is the trust that let a man drop his defenses in front of millions and assume they would catch him rather than clip him.
Music catches a man hardest at the age when his feeling outruns his words, and that is the age Air Supply found me. From fourteen to twenty-two a man feels everything at full volume and owns no language for any of it. He aches and cannot say why or for whom. Air Supply handed him the language.
Through the early 1980s Air Supply ran off a string of consecutive top-five singles, one of them reaching number one.  Clive Davis (b. 1932) steered them at Arista, and Jim Steinman (1947-2021) gave them the Wagnerian overblown ballad in “Making Love Out of Nothing at All.” And the critics savaged them the whole time. Saccharine, formulaic, mush.
Air Supply were the last great unironic romantic act before the register went unsafe. They stood at the door as it was closing. After them the sincere male love ballad became cheesy, and a man could no longer sing “I’m all out of love” with a straight face in public.
Donald Trump (b. 1946) is a survivor of the 1970s confident male culture. He came up in the New York tabloid world of the 1970s and 1980s, the gossip columns, the boxing press, the talk shows, the same loose pre-clip atmosphere that shaped the booth. He never updated to the scripted register because he formed before it existed, and he kept speaking the old way after the regime closed in. So when I hear Brookshier in him, I am hearing the same era talking. The man is roughly the broadcasters’ contemporary, raised in the same permission.
Trump riffs and digresses and never measures the sentence for the clip. He hands out nicknames, deflates pretension, talks about winning and losing and bodies and money the way the booth talked, and treats euphemism as weakness. He sounds like a man at the end of the bar who assumes the room is with him. A large part of the country hears it as the return of a voice that respectable culture exiled.
In a public square where every man weighs his words in fear, a man who does not weigh them reads as alive. The courage is the product. People who miss the unafraid male voice respond to its return before they sort out what it is saying, and many never sort it out at all. They vote for the register. He is the man who breaks the speech code in front of everyone and survives, and the survival is the thing they admire.
The booth ribbed inside a trusting “we.” Brookshier teased a friend who could throw it back, and the joke bonded the room. Trump’s mockery usually aims outward, at an enemy, to dominate rather than to include. The larrikin rib pulls a man into the circle. Trump’s insult more often shoves a man out of it and means to wound. Same instrument, different work. The booth used the unguarded voice to gather people. He frequently uses it to divide them. A man can sound exactly like the lost ease and still be doing the opposite of what the ease did.
The regime that scrubbed the booth created the hunger Trump feeds. When the unafraid voice got driven out of the networks, the campuses, and the corporations, it did not disappear. It pooled, and it waited, and a man arrived who would speak it on a national stage and refuse to apologize. His rise is partly a verdict on the speech code itself. The same forces that took the joke out of the booth and the confession out of the radio took the plain voice out of public life, and a country starved for that voice will answer it when it comes back, whatever it is carrying when it returns.
Trump represents the return of male courage.
Let’s separate three things that look the same from the outside.
The first is ease. In 1977 NFL broadcasts, the man speaks freely because no watcher punishes the word. No risk, so no courage required, only the absence of fear. The second is courage. A watcher exists, the word carries a cost, and the man pays the cost for something he values above his own comfort. The third is disinhibition. The man speaks freely because nothing outside himself is on the line. He says anything because he feels no stake beyond his own appetite and standing. Courage and disinhibition look identical from across the room and are opposites on the inside. One feels the fear and acts for a good. The other feels no fear because it feels no good worth fearing for.
Trump is mostly the third, taken for the second. He risks little. Wealth, fame, and a devoted base shield him, so his plain speech costs him close to nothing, which puts it nearer the booth’s ease than to courage. And much of it serves himself, his grievances, his dominance, his place in the rankings, where courage serves something past the self. A man with no shield who tells a hard truth at his job and loses it shows more courage in one sentence than Trump shows across a career of rallies. He models the posture of fearlessness without paying its price, and a posture with no price is not courage. It can even work as a counterfeit, letting men feel brave by cheering his transgression while committing none of their own.
Trump did one thing. He broke the spell. The regime ran on a belief that breaking the code meant annihilation, and the belief was always part bluff. He broke the code on the largest stage in the world and survived, and the demonstration freed other men, because a man who watches the code get broken and survived may find his own nerve to break it for better reasons than Trump’s.
That a country needs a billionaire showman to feel its men might speak plainly again measures how far the thing has already fallen. Real male courage works at the root. It is the man who says the true and unwelcome thing to his boss, his congregation, his friends, knowing the cost, and says it anyway for something he loves more than his safety. That man needs no stage and no champion. The hunger for Trump is the symptom. A healthy culture grows its courage from below. A sick one waits for a strongman to perform it from above, applauds the performance, and mistakes the applause for the act.
Trump is the break in the dam, not the water. Whether courage or only noise comes through depends on the men downstream, and on whether they will pay what he mostly does not.