THE GOOD BOOK

One intrepid reader tackles the NFL'sOFFICIAL PLAYING RULES,that densely packed volume of gridiron gospel, to plumb the essence of pro football

WHAT'S THE most boring book ever written? Mark Twain didn't care for the Book of Mormon. "It is chloroform in print," he wrote. "If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle—keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate." The New York Times thought Herbert Hoover: American Quaker ascended to "a rare peak of dull sublimity." And indeed, that colon between Hoover and American serves as a necessary rest stop for anyone struggling even to make it through the title.

In a 2010 study on the health of civil servants, researchers at University College London concluded that human beings working tedious jobs can, through stress and heart disease, be literally bored to death. So it was with some trepidation, and not a few Red Bulls, that I opened another foundational text of American religion. It looms on the literary landscape as the tallest peak of dull sublimity, the Everest of ennui. But because it is there, I set out to summit the 2016 Official Playing Rules of the National Football League.

Few have read the NFL rule book, though many have read of it. The Rules is like Ulysses in that way. It has a cultural presence in inverse proportion to its readership. This slim volume runs to a mere 88 printed pages, but each sentence is so densely packed as to be—with apologies to Twain—literary Lunesta.

Once, the gold standard of tedium was watching paint dry. But in the Rules, that standard is exceeded almost from the opening pages, where we find ourselves reading about paint drying.

But look more closely at those directives for dried paint. Rule 1, Section 2, Article 3 states: "All lines are to be marked with a material that is not injurious to eyes or skin." In a violent game that leaves many of its participants physically enfeebled, it's a quaint touch ensuring that the yard lines aren't skin irritants—like making sure the condemned man's last meal is gluten-free.

After only a few pages the careful reader enters the realm of magical realism, a vividly wrought setting that borrows equally from DC Comics' Bizarro World and George Orwell's 1984. From the preface to the Rules: "Where the word 'illegal' appears in this rule book, it is an institutional term of art pertaining strictly to actions that violate NFL playing rules. It is not meant to connote illegality under any public law."

The irony is that almost everything that is illegal in pro football (illegal formation, illegal use of hands, intentional grounding) is perfectly legal under public law, and almost everything that is legal in pro football (tackling, blocking, slapping a coworker on the bottom) is patently illegal under public law.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. First, readers of the Rules must be wondering: What is a football? and Where does one play football? The answers—for the visitor from Venus, having picked up this page-turner on arrival at O'Hare—come in the first three pages, which set the tone for everything to come: "The ball ... shall have the form of a prolate spheroid." And: "The game shall be played upon a rectangular field." Also: "The surface of the entire Field of Play must be a League-approved shade of green." With its random capitalizations, the Rules owe a literary debt to Emily Dickinson, so that it is sometimes difficult to tell the poet ("He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust....") from the anonymous bard of the Rules ("The End Zone is the rectangle formed by the Goal Line, the End Line, and the Sidelines.")

Dickinson: Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul/And sings the tune without the words/And never stops at all.

The Rules (minimally paraphrased): The ball is a prolate spheroid/Enclosed in pebble grain/Its weight shall be fourteen ounces/Its bladder, urethane.

AS WITH most religious texts, there is a metaphysical question at the heart of the Rules: Not, "Why are we here?" but something more confounding still: "What is a catch?"

The answer is an article of faith, requiring recitation of chapter and verse, in this case Rule 8, Section 1, Article 3, Seat 14:

"A forward pass is complete (by the offense) or intercepted (by the defense) if a player, who is inbounds:

(a) secures control of the ball in his hands or arms prior to the ball touching the ground; and

(b) touches the ground inbounds with both feet or with any part of his body other than his hands; and

(c) maintains control of the ball after (a) and (b) have been fulfilled, until he has the ball long enough to clearly become a runner. A player has the ball long enough to become a runner when, after his second foot is on the ground, he is capable of avoiding or warding off impending contact of an opponent, tucking the ball away, turning up field, or taking additional steps...."

The definition goes on for another 519 words, at once exhaustive and inadequate, governing Simultaneous Catches, Sideline Catches, End Zone Catches and So On. But even the definition of a catch has a catch: "Note 1: If there is any question by the covering official(s) as to whether a forward pass is complete, intercepted, or incomplete, it always will be ruled incomplete."

Thus the answer to our question is also ruled incomplete. It eludes our grasp, a word that recurs throughout the Rules, as in: "The Referee must blow the play dead as soon as the passer is clearly in the grasp." As in any good potboiler, Death hangs over these pages. It is delivered in multiple verbs, to multiple victims. Balls and plays alike are blown dead, whistled dead, declared dead. There is a list of protocols and contingencies in the event of Sudden Death.

The forestalling of physical death—and its near relation, mortal danger—is enshrined throughout the Rules, which require NFL players to remain in control during the commission of their violent acts. "A player who initiates contact against a passer is responsible for avoiding an illegal act," as one note puts it. "This includes illegal contact that may occur during the process of attempting to dislodge the ball."

The process of attempting to dislodge the ball—by pancaking its carrier into the FieldTurf, or striking the prolate spheroid with a fist—calls to mind the strangely sanitized bureaucratic language of police reports: "The perpetrator then proceeded to dislodge the molars from the oral cavity of the accuser...."

The league places the onus on the players for any violence committed on the field. Rule 12, Section 2, Article 9, Paragraph (h): "A standard of strict liability applies for any contact against a passer, irrespective of any acts by the passer, such as ducking his head or curling up his body in anticipation of contact."

On the title page, where the author's name would go, is the boldfaced imprimatur of ROGER GOODELL, COMMISSIONER. But these pages bear the unmistakable whiff of many ghostwriters, among them perhaps an actual apparition who (unlike Joseph Smith) did not survive the exercise of authorship.

Further, those ghostwriters were clearly influenced by, in addition to Dickinson's poetry, the lawyerly-but-still-literary stylings of the late attorney Johnnie Cochran, whose voice resounds when the league defines flagrant as "extremely objectionable, conspicuous, unnecessary, avoidable, or gratuitous."

Upon further review, I wondered if the anonymous authors hadn't constructed the entire work as an artful and elaborate deception. When making maps, cartographers often include fictitious "trap streets" to identify copyright violators. ("Moat Lane" exists on some London maps, but not in London itself.) Some of the rules read like the regulatory equivalent of trap streets—wholly invented to sabotage publishers of bootlegged rule books. Rule 1, Section 2, Article 3, for instance, states that "No benches or rigid fixtures should be nearer than 10 yards from sidelines," without ever explaining Patriots coach Bill Belichick, the league's biggest fixture, and its most rigid.

Likewise, Rule 12, Section 4, Article 1, Paragraph (c) specifically forbids "words that engender ill will between teams." Anyone who has ever heard a player or coach hot miked by NFL Films knows this rule is often unenforced. It was presumably put in place to see if anyone is still reading the Rules.

According to publishing legend, a man visited bookstores to hide postcards between the middle pages of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time—reputedly the most unread best seller of all time—offering $100 to anyone who made it that far and discovered the postcard.

Not a single reader ever did.

IN FAIRNESS, the Official Rules is not as tedious as—and only marginally more complicated than—theoretical physics. But is it any less important? What appears at first to be no fun at all appears on second reading to be a practical joke, an effort at farce. How else to explain the straight-faced explication of when NFL officials' absolute powers begin and end: "The officials' jurisdiction begins 100 minutes before the scheduled kickoff and ends when the Referee declares the final score." An NFL Side Judge, in other words, has no legal authority to pull a team bus over on the interstate and cite it for a missing taillight.

For its first several seasons the NFL used the same rules as college football, but it began to establish its own set of regulations in 1932. By the end of that benighted decade the league was publishing its own rule book, a brief treatise eventually made available to the public for 50 cents from C.C. Spink & Son. The list of rules has been growing ever since. The three-volume Internal Revenue Code is 7,942 pages and endlessly expanding like the universe. It now occupies a horizontal foot of shelf space. At roughly 20 pounds the tax code could kill a reader, either by falling on him or falling open to any one of its stultifying pages.

The same might one day be true of the Rules, in which Death, as we've noted, is a constant presence. In all, the word dead appears 184 times in the Rules, and death three more times. Live appears a mere 16 times, and life not at all.

And yet there is life here, and the careful rereader will know where to find the good bits. As the book builds to its shattering climax, the reader fears that he might do the same. For the Rules are unexpectedly erotic. Rule 3, Section 2, Article 6, Paragraph (f) governs "Simultaneous touching by two opponents." Rule 3, Section 19, Article 3, Item 2 reads like a come-on buried in an Ikea instruction sheet: "Note: Interlocking of legs is permissible." (Mr. Goodell, you're trying to seduce me.) When riding on the subway I took to hiding the Official Rules behind a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey, so as not to appear pervy.

Still, for all its talk of neutral-zone penetration, the rule book remains mostly impenetrable. Like the Torah itself, the Rules is open to endless interpretation by Talmudic scholars like Clete Blakeman, Ed Hochuli and Gene Steratore. In apparent homage to another ancient text, the Rules concludes with a Kama Sutra of "Official Signals," 36 illustrations of the various contortions that might be required of a Referee when signaling the game's manifold infractions.

One of these Signals—officially number 7, a windmilling of the right arm in a clockwise direction—reminds the players (and fans) that time is back in: The clock is running, the sand is swiftly passing through the hourglass, and we had best get on with the business at hand.

It's a chilling reminder of life's brevity, especially to anyone who just passed several of his allotted Earthly hours reading (and rereading) the 2016 Official Playing Rules of the National Football League.

When he has finished, and the A-frame roof of the open Rules gently rises and falls on his chest, the sleeping reader has no better understanding of what constitutes a catch. But the meaning of life is, unexpectedly, somehow nearer his grasp. The very act of reading the Rules brings one incrementally closer to his own two-minute warning and to the knowledge that each of us shall someday be—like that prolate spheroid itself—irreversibly whistled dead.

AFTER ONLY A FEW PAGES THE READER ENTERS A REALM OF MAGICAL REALISM THAT BORROWS EQUALLY FROM DC COMICS' BIZARRO WORLD AND GEORGE ORWELL'S 1984.

LIKE THE TORAH ITSELF, THE RULES IS OPEN TO ENDLESS INTERPRETATION BY TALMUDIC SCHOLARS LIKE CLETE BLAKEMAN, ED HOCHULI AND GENE STERATORE.