They played a football game fifty years ago today, on December 28, 1958: Colts-Giants, at Yankee Stadium, for the “championship of professional football.” It’s often referred to as The Greatest Game Ever Played. Maybe so, maybe not. But if you watch it now, I guarantee that something’s going to jump out at you: not a single player celebrated after they’d made a great play. This was because, as Frank Gifford put it on our book, The Glory Game, “Your teammates would have thought you were a jerk.”

Of course today, just about every football player celebrates on the field. Some pump their chests. Some perform painful-to-watch dances that they’ve obviously spent hours, if not, days, rehearsing in their heads. Some point to the sky, apparently to thank a deity. (Why anyone would think that a god has to reside somewhere “up,” in a universe that has no “up,” still eludes me. My own personal god, Bast the ancient Egyptian cat goddess, does not reside in the sky; she dozes eternally in a pool of sunlight on a very large bed in a very large cosmic bedroom.)

But here’s the thing: for every football players who does a dance after he makes a routine tackle, there are a million fans who bemoan this behavior, wishing for the good old days when men were men, all of them modest and humble and selfless, and they wore hats. I humbly submit: Get over it. Today’s NFL celebrants, like the non-celebrants of two generations ago, are just acting the way they think they’re supposed to.

Consider: Fifty years ago today, most of the players in that game earned about as much money as a teacher or a plumber (or less). Their salaries reflected their value to the culture at large: some guys drove trucks, and some guys played games. The games were on TV because they were more exciting than watching someone drive a truck. Nearly to a man, the players in the ’58 game did not think of themselves as special, and they behaved accordingly.

Today’s player happens to be plying his trade in a society that treats him as an entertainer and happily pays him like an entertainer, and has given him a stage so large, lights so bright, and a salary so absurd that strutting around the field is more or less a job requirement. His teammates expect him to strut. Think about it: if you were paid $12 million a year to teach a class, or assemble an engine, or take tolls on the Garden State, and you did so in front of 30 million people every day, wouldn’t you assume that we all wanted to be entertained by you? Why else would we be paying you 250 times what a teacher makes?

Parting thought: 153 years ago, when Walt Whitman’s poem Song of Myself was first published, the famous line “I celebrate myself” probably didn’t strike anyone as an expression of me-first selfishness. It was probably taken in the context I’d like to think the poet meant it to be taken in: “Life itself is pretty glorious, and I can’t believe that I exist – as me – on its stage. How cool! I’m me!” Walt seemed pretty exuberant, didn’t he? Then, I’m no Whitman scholar. But I like watching football, and I’m more than willing to allow the NFL’s athletes some ego-excess if they’ll keep playing the game I love to watch them play.