ON THREE I was on an airplane watching television, which is not a statement that would have made sense even ten years ago, but there you go. Thank you, America. Among the suite of channels was the NFL Network, which I predict will soon be the world’s most popular cable channel and will spawn a second and third channel, if it hasn’t already. I wasn’t supposed to be watching football, but they were showing the NFL Combine, where the league gathers top college prospects to put them through their paces. I couldn’t resist. The drill I happened to see was for defensive backs. They had to backpedal then whirl around and catch a ball fired at them at about 200 mph. Afterward, a gentleman named Peter Giunta, the secondary coach for the New York Giants, called the prospects together to give them an inspirational speech. Giunta was bald and intense. His rhetorical style fell somewhere between General Patton and Tony Soprano. “It is a privilege to play in the National Football League,”
