They’ll Both Shorten Your Lifespan
Inside Heavy Metal’s Football Fandom
This piece originally ran in Stereogum’s The Black Market on November 2023. This is an annotated version.
With the storytelling acumen of an NFL Films production, Erik Rutan recites the time his passions for football and playing metal crashed together harder than a safety hitting a wide receiver over the middle.1 It was 2004, and the acclaimed guitarist, who has logged stints in Ripping Corpse, Morbid Angel, and Cannibal Corpse, was touring Europe with Hate Eternal. Halfway across the globe, his beloved Philadelphia Eagles were playing the Carolina Panthers in the NFC Championship game.
“I think I was in Austria, and I asked the bus driver, ‘Listen, man, tonight’s the NFC Championship game. Is there any way we can stay late or something?'” Rutan recalls. After the driver gave the green light, Rutan hashed out a post-gig watch party with the venue’s bartender. Everything seemed like it was going to plan, and the diehard football fan wouldn’t miss a snap. But, much like even the best-laid playcalling scheme on any given Sunday, those plans fell apart instantly. “So we’re watching the game, and it was in German, and I remember [Eagles star quarterback Donovan] McNabb [got injured] and the bartender shuts everything down. ‘Oh, it’s time to close.'”2
Disaster. Rutan knew he had to take action with the Eagles’ fortunes hanging in the balance. “I remember just thinking, Oh shit, this is crazy. We’re getting on the bus. We’re loading up. I was like, ‘We got to find a truck stop.'” By some blessing, the bus driver navigated Hate Eternal to a service station oasis where the attendants just happened to be watching the game. And it would be great to tell you that Erik Rutan witnessed his Eagles claw back a triumphant victory, beating the odds just like this death metal band beat the odds by finding a European TV tuned to American football in the deep of the night. But, of course, that’s not what happened.
“I go in there, and Koy Detmer was playing quarterback, not McNabb, and we’re losing,” Rutan remembers with a grim laugh.3 “And I sat there for another hour and watched us lose. It was the third NFC Championship in a row that we had lost. I was on a seven-week tour of Europe, and that was one of my top five moments of feeling away from home. I was so devastated.” And that is a feeling most football fanatics know, whether they’re a part of one of the world’s premiere death metal bands or not.
What is it about football that so ensorcells some members of American metal bands?4 After all, Erik Rutan isn’t alone in having the twin fixations of football and metal. In fact, it sometimes feels like you can’t windmill your hair around while headbanging without hitting a metalhead who is a pigskin obsessive. Crowbar’s Kirk Windstein has football stories. KK’s Priest’s Tim “Ripper” Owens has football stories. Pyrrhon’s Dylan DiLella and Doug Moore have football stories. So, why? Is it simply that humans contain multitudes, and the law of averages dictates that some of our fellow heshers will spend their Saturdays and Sundays immersed in gridiron battles — that between writing righteous riffs, they’ll also have thoughts about RPOs? Or is there a specific quality about America’s true pastime that makes it undeniably attractive to heavy metal musicians? And, to go deeper, in the case of a band like Obituary (whose title of their new album, Dying Of Everything, sounds like the credo of every long-suffering sports fan), how do you keep the peace when your members root for different teams?
Finding answers to those questions is why we’re here today. Instead of interviewing metalheads about metal, an audible was called, and we’re going deeper into football fandom than John Madden into a bucket’s genealogy. So, cue the Sam Spence score. It’s time to rear back, throw a Hail Mary, and ask some of metal’s most prominent players the tough stuff, like, for the sake of your sanity, why did you pledge your allegiance to that team?
Kirk Windstein, one of the most recognizable metal musicians in the NOLA scene, naturally pulls for the New Orleans Saints. “I never thought if I lived to be a hundred years old that the Saints would actually go much less win a Super Bowl,” the guitarist/vocalist who plays in Crowbar, Down, Kingdom Of Sorrow, and has new material on the way as part of the supergroup Eye Am, says over the phone about one of his favorite football memories, the Super Bowl XLIV victory over the Indianapolis Colts.
For Windstein, the chip was a long time coming. “The Saints started in 1967, and I was born in ’65, so all I ever remember as a little kid was the Saints.” Windstein’s father was at the first game and had season tickets, and thus, both Windsteins witnessed years of futility as it took the team until 1987 to achieve a winning record and reach the playoffs. (They wouldn’t win a playoff game until 2000.) But through it all, Windstein says his dad was an “eternal optimist,” even when the Saints challenged that optimism frequently.
“One of the funniest things I can remember when my parents were still alive was the River City Relay,” Windstein says. In the dying seconds of a Jacksonville Jaguars matchup in late 2003, the Saints miraculously marched down the field thanks to three increasingly unlikely laterals. They scored a touchdown to put themselves within one point of a tie. “We went to kick the extra point, and my mom goes, ‘Oh my god, that’d be terrible if he missed the extra point.’ And me and my dad just freeze and look at each other.” John Carney, a kicker who would end his career with two Pro Bowl selections and a spot in the Saints Hall of Fame, would do precisely what mother Windstein feared, shanking the extra point wide right. Saints lose.
(Incidentally, Windstein’s wife, Robin, who is a blast to talk to, is also preternaturally gifted at picking winners based on uniforms and anecdotally nails 90% of potential comebacks.5 Besides the Saints, she’s picking the Eagles, Lions, and Seahawks this year. You know, just in case you’re heading to Vegas.)6
So, before salvation came in 2010, did rooting for the Saints during those lean years influence Windstein’s personality? “I guess in a weird subconscious way, it teaches you to accept negative things that happen,” Windstein says. “Fifteen, 20 years ago, if they lost a last-minute game, I was ruined till Wednesday, and then I could start looking forward to next week’s game.” Windstein later adds: “You have to realize that everything’s not easy and everything’s not always perfect, so you got just to learn to deal with it.”
Perhaps that’s some of his dad’s optimism and pragmatism shining through. And Windstein — who, by his admission, is more of a college football fan — pulls for two squads passed down by his father: Tulane and Notre Dame. Despite the traditional Battle of the Rag, Windstein, now playing out his role as a supportive father with aplomb, has added a new rooting interest to the stable. “Believe it or not, I’m an LSU fan now only because my daughter’s a junior at LSU.”
But if the game is good, Windstein will watch it, no matter the team. That’s exactly what happened during a past Crowbar gig. “We played some show, and it was somewhere in Pennsylvania,” Windstein recalls. “It was a Saturday night. It was one of these shows when they put a hundred local bands on, and they act like it’s a festival or some shit. Well, the crowd was pretty burned out. I walk over to [Crowbar guitarist] Matt [Brunson] during the set, and I’m just like, ‘Dude, the crowd is smoked. They’re not really getting into it that much.’ Of course, we’re doing our best to play. We’re professional. We want to give the people everything we’ve got. But there’s a gigantic, wall-sized TV in the back of this venue, and there’s a killer college game on.”
As the lead kept changing hands in the high-scoring matchup, Windstein and Brunson were enraptured. “We ended up getting so caught up,” Windstein says. And yet, Crowbar never dropped the ball. “We played everything perfect. I sang everything perfect.” But if anyone in the crowd knew what was happening on the screen behind them, they may have picked up on some tells. “One of the guys caught a touchdown pass. I quit singing. I looked over at Matt and gave him a thumbs up.”
Tim “Ripper” Owens has learned to avoid TVs in venues for that reason. “I hate TVs on during shows,” the singer says over Zoom while doing press for KK’s Priest’s new album, The Sinner Rides Again, out now on Napalm Records.7 Oh yes, he’s been caught scoping some Sunday Ticket. “I was doing this tour called Night of Metal. And we were touring through Canada. I remember being in Ottawa. There was a TV in the distance, and I just remember singing and trying to stare at it.”
As a dedicated Cleveland sports fan born in Akron, Ohio, who still lives in Akron, Ohio, Ripper also knows something about following teams with extended fallow periods. His fondest football memories encompass the era of Bernie Kosar, Kevin Mack, Earnest Byner, Webster Slaughter, and Reggie Langhorne, a real remember-some-guys reverie. But, as with all the teams in one of the most anguished sports cities in America, those glory days are peppered with downers.
“I have a great story that when the Browns had The Fumble or The Drive, I can’t remember which one it was,” Ripper says about two of the notorious named disasters that befell Cleveland teams in the late ’80s. “I made the cover of the Akron Beacon Journal. I was young and at the bar. I was old enough to drink but obviously young. My picture was on the front page.” (Judging by Newspapers.com’s archives, it was probably following The Drive.)8
However, even though his head-in-hands heartbreak was immortalized, one of Ripper’s most brutal memories concerned Cleveland’s other vector for sports misery, the Guardians. Despite being outside of our football purview, the story is a fine example of how far we’ve come in being able to check scores in real-time. Things weren’t so easy during the baseball team’s 1997 playoff run that coincided with Ripper decamping for the UK so he could sing for Judas Priest. Let’s set the scene: World Series. Game 7. Bottom of the ninth. Cleveland was three outs away from its first championship since 1948.
“I remember going to sleep, and I thought they won,” Ripper laments. “They were leading at the end of the game. I was in London at the Royal Garden Hotel, and I remember waking up and picking up the phone and using my calling card and calling my brother. I said, ‘This is awesome!’ [Imitating a devastating deadpan] ‘They lost.’ I’m like, ‘What?’ He goes, ‘Yeah, they lost the game.'”
Ripper isn’t missing many games now. With a bevy of online options, from VPNs to streaming TV providers, gone are the days of calling home from the road to get the scores or scrutinizing newspapers in a different language to trawl for box scores. Now, the biggest obstacles to watching football on tour are the time zone difference and some modern, Black Mirror-esque knock-on effects.
“I was just in Australia,” Ripper explains. “Just trying to watch [football] there, it was like two in the morning or four in the morning. You’re trying to get up to watch the game. I missed so many of them from touring. Thank goodness you could have the ESPN app. At least you could check the gamecast live. There are so many times I have my phone on stage, and I’m going back to check the score during the set, during the guitar solo. I’m back there hitting refresh on my phone.”
Pyrrhon’s Dylan DiLella and Doug Moore, both Philadelphia Eagles superfans, have their own phone-on-stage moment. “There’s an epic photo of me watching an Eagles vs. Cowboys game in 2017 while we were performing in St. Louis,” DiLella writes in an email. “At this point in time, I’d probably wait until later to catch the highlights, but I was pretty depraved about my fandom.”9
Usually, though, Pyrrhon is a little more careful when building their tour agenda. “It’s not an exaggeration to say that we plan our fall tours around the Eagles’ schedule to a significant degree,” explains Moore (who, full disclosure, used to write this column). “We’ve done night drives to make sure we can catch a daytime game and listened to a number of games on the radio in the van. It can be a pretty fun distraction from the more dreary parts of touring, and at this point, even our bassist Erik [Malave] (who is a dyed-in-the-wool Jets fan from Yonkers) has become a casual Birds watcher, so it’s something we can all share as a group. Other bands are sometimes kinda weirded out by it, though.”
What could be weird about listening to a game in the van on the radio? “There was one where the Eagles were playing the Chargers, and the game was coming down to the wire,” DiLella writes. “Doug was driving at the time and kept screaming, ‘GIVE THE BALL TO [LEGARETTE] BLOUNT!!!!!!'”
As one can infer by (wholly justified) LeGarrette Blount blowups, football has affected both musicians. “Well, I’ve been an obsessive Eagles fan since I was a little kid, so I’d say it has shaped me tremendously, haha,” DiLella writes. “There’s something magical about having a passion like NFL fandom that has no strings attached to basically anything else going on in your life (aside from the fact that I grew up in Philly). And I wouldn’t say football has specifically impacted the music I’ve made, but the visceral energy and wild unpredictability of football is definitely something that I channel in Pyrrhon.”
Moore also channels that visceral energy while understanding band life as an extension of something he felt during his days in the football trenches. “Well, I took a lot of blows to the head playing football as a kid, and I’ve often wondered whether that gave me my taste for musical ultraviolence in some fashion. Aside from that, playing the game in school and then becoming an ardent fan as an adult helped me develop an appreciation for tightly choreographed teamwork among small units of guys. Playing in bands pretty much explicitly displaced team sports for me as a pursuit while I was in high school, so in a way, my ‘career’ as a musician developed directly out of my interest in games like football.”
The question, then, is if DiLella and Moore are this into football, have they ever thought about writing a football-centric song? “I’ll let Doug elaborate on this one, but the new Pyrrhon album may or may not have our first football-related lyrical content (not in an obvious way, though),” DiLella admits. “Yeah, there’s a song inspired by (but not really based on) a football great on the new album,” Moore confirms. “Don’t wanna give away too much, so I’ll leave it at that!”10
While Erik Rutan hasn’t pitched a band on a football song, he has covered one of the most essential songs in Eagles fandom. “I would tell [Hate Eternal bassist] J.J. [Hrubovcak] for years that if we ever win the Super Bowl, I’m going to do my own version of ‘Fly, Eagles Fly,'” Rutan says over the phone, fresh off of the tour supporting Cannibal Corpse’s new album, Chaos Horrific.11 “And sure enough, when we won the Super Bowl, I told him, ‘I’m going to put this little medley together.'”
In typical Rutan fashion, he didn’t just put a little medley together. He studied the song and flipped it into a thrashy ripper. And he’s in every nook and cranny of the final product.
“I went in there, and I played the snare. I did the military roll. I did the guitars and played the bass and just winged it together. And then I found some online footage of, I believe it was the NFC Championship game with the crowd singing ‘Fly, Eagles Fly,’ and then also from the [Super Bowl] parade ‘Fly, Eagles Fly,’ and used that in the background, and lined it all up.”
Considering this person’s past creative output, this level of attention to detail is, of course, the most Erik Rutan thing one can learn. “I guess I’ve kind of approached my whole musical career in that same fashion,” Rutan says, “that I always feel like I can write a better record, produce a better album, play better, and do better. And so with the Eagles song, I was like, man, I spent a good amount of time on it. But I got to tell you, it was just me in there in the studio recording myself and doing all this stuff. So, I definitely had a big grin while working on it. It was super fun to do.”
Rutan, an absurdly knowledgeable lifelong Eagles fan who cracks that the NFL Network is his CNN, talks a lot about the parallels between football and music. “Anybody who knows me knows I love football. I love the Eagles. There’s been so many parallels to the team in the sense that I’ve had a lot of challenges in my life and things I’ve had to overcome to get to where I’m at. The Eagles have as well.”
These pigskin parallels are everywhere, according to Rutan. As stated above, iron sharpens iron: Bad seasons make you more resilient. Another one: Legendary Eagles center (and nascent recording artist) Jason Kelce reminds him of the old dogs in the metal game that are still performing at a high level. And Rutan’s own unwavering pursuit of his goals can be connected to how a franchise navigates the ebb and flow of operational chaos to win a Super Bowl.
“It’s like when I think about all that I’m doing now in my life, being in Cannibal Corpse and being in Hate Eternal and having a studio and producing records,” Rutan says. “Well, these are things that when I was a teenager, I knew in my heart this is what I want to do. And that was 35-plus years ago. I want to play music. I want to write my own music. I want to tour the world. I want to have my own band. Then, I had the fortune of doing demos and recording my first album with Ripping Corpse at 19. I was doing shows as a teenager in high school and all that. I just knew from such a young age that this is what I wanted to do. And I never really contemplated the opposite. There are hills and valleys and times where I thought, Oh man, you have to dig yourself up from the pit to get to the peak.”
When the Eagles finally reached the peak and won a Super Bowl in the 2017 season, that was a feeling Rutan had felt professionally, too. “Another parallel with football in my music career is I feel like I’ve won multiple Super Bowl rings in my career. I’m so fortunate and grateful to have so many people who have followed my career and supported me and my family through this.”
Of course, the 2017 season felt different in another way. Thanks to writing and recording Hate Eternal’s masterful Upon Desolate Sands, Rutan wasn’t touring. (Rutan guesstimates that 75 percent of his touring takes place during football season.) So, relatively free, he watched every playoff game. And when the Birds sealed the deal, he and Hrubovcak flew from Florida to Philadelphia to catch the parade. You had to do it if you were an Eagles fan.
“I know it’s amazing being an Eagles fan,” Rutan says in between stretches of brilliantly detailed football minutia concerning the ins and outs of the team, something that rivals the complex construction of his death metal songs.12 “We’re the best fans in the world, man. I know I’m partial. And some people will probably say, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ But guess what? If you’re an Eagles fan, you know what the hell I’m talking about. We live and breathe this stuff.”
One wonders what Cannibal Corpse thinks of this living and breathing Eagles fan now in their ranks. Turns out, as George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher is a Denver Broncos fan and the rest of the group roots for the Buffalo Bills, there’s not much consternation. “We’re not even in the same conference,” Rutan points out. “So it’s not like if I was in a band with a Cowboys fan or a Giants fan or something.”
In fact, Rutan has only been in a band with a divisional rival once. Previous Hate Eternal bassist Jared Anderson, who passed in 2006, was a Dallas Cowboys fan, and they traded good-natured smack talk for years. Rutan, though, has a plan if he has to audition in the future.
“If I’m ever going to play with a new guy, that’s going to have to be one of the first questions,” Rutan jokes. “Listen, it’s cool if you’re not a football fan. I’m cool with that. You’re not an Eagles fan? All right, well, who do you like? Cowboys ain’t going to work. Next.”
Kirk Windstein doesn’t have any love for America’s Team, either, but he felt some empathy for his bandmate when they were stuck in enemy territory. “When Rex Brown was in Down, god, I felt so bad for him when the Saints played the Cowboys.” In one specific instance, when Down took a break from rehearsing to watch the game, the Texan bassist (also of Pantera) was sectioned off from the rest of the Saints faithful. “We put him in a corner with police tape, in his own chair, and everything. He was all set up, completely isolated from the rest of us.” The Saints won 42-17. That result wasn’t an aberration, either. During Brown’s stint in Down, the Cowboys went 1-6 against the Saints.
In the Obituary camp, the dueling fanbases of the Miami Dolphins and Tampa Bay Buccaneers are decidedly more peaceful, according to John Tardy. “For me, it helps if the Dolphins have a better record than the Bucs, and if the Dolphins lose on Sunday, practice on Monday is canceled!!!” the singer writes in an email, the multiple exclamation points matching his vocal style perfectly. “Haha, it’s all good. [Drummer] Donald [Tardy] and I are Dolphins fans, and [guitarist] Trevor [Peres] and [bassist] Terry [Butler] are Bucs fans. [Guitarist] Ken [Andrews] would not know a football from a baseball, so he actually takes more of a beating than anyone.13 We are really huge sports fans and spend a lot of time talking about all kinds of sports, but football is the biggest, and we love to talk a lot about it. Fins up!!!!”
As for Tim “Ripper” Owens, there might be a future battle for the football heart and mind of guitarist KK Downing if the legendary shredder ever decides to dive into American football. Inside KK’s Priest are two fans. On one side, Ripper, the Browns fan. On the other, drummer Sean Elg, a rabid Los Angeles Chargers supporter. Ripper assumes that if Downing was left to choose for himself, he might pick a Dallas team because that region was critical for breaking Judas Priest in the States. But, just in case, he fashions a pitch to bring Downing aboard the Browns bandwagon.
“Well, his singer’s favorite team is the Browns,” Ripper says with a mischievous grin, setting up a ribbing of his friend, Elg, who also drums in Ripper’s The Three Tremors. “So there’s no other reason to cheer for anybody else because I’m much more important than Sean, the drummer. Don’t go to the Chargers.”
And with KK Downing’s budding Browns fandom now set in stone, the officials are throwing flags to bring us back to the question asked at the start of this intro: Why does it feel like so many American metalheads in bands are football fans?
“I think it’s just because football metal’s such an abrasive and hard and angry type thing,” Windstein says. “It’s the violence in the sport that attracts metalheads more than any other sport, other than stuff like MMA.”
Rutan also thinks that violence and aggression play a part. Still, he sees many other parallels, particularly in how bands are constructed and the inherent need for collaborative teamwork.
“I look at being in a band as a team sport in a sense,” Rutan says. “It’s like you have all these people that you have to work with. You’ve got your managers, you’ve got your agents, you’ve got the record label, and this whole team of people that you’re working with. It’s all about how the team flourishes. How efficient is your team?”
Rutan realizes that a lot of fandom is conditioned, too. “I mean, I grew up having Thanksgiving dinner, then sitting around on the couch watching football. Grandpa’s sleeping in the La-Z-Boy. I’m watching the four o’clock game. It just becomes a part of the fabric of your life, really.”
For Dylan DiLella, the shock is that the football/metalhead fabric doesn’t upholster the other side. “It’s such an absolutely brutal game. It always surprised me that more football PLAYERS aren’t actually metalheads. The insane energy of the game, as well as the fact that it’s so completely unpredictable, are two characteristics that overlap with metal in general and especially extreme metal. So it makes sense that so many metalheads like football. When Doug and I watch Eagles games together, we usually put on death metal or grindcore during commercial breaks, and it’s honestly a perfect match.”
And Doug Moore, as if he were executing a perfect Philly Special, ties it all together. “Football and ‘extreme’ metal are both super challenging, technical pursuits that require intense teamwork and the channeling of heavy emotion into the execution of a fiddly, involved action script. Obviously, there’s a lot of testosterone and violence involved in each of them. Unfortunately, both of them stand a pretty good chance of shortening your lifespan. And yet, they have both enriched my life beyond measure! To me, it couldn’t make any more sense.”
You can tell I thought this piece was going to have broader appeal by dint of me not opting to drop a Chuck Bednarik “The Hit” reference here. This is going to sound incredibly egotistical, but I spent a good chunk of my writing career waiting for one of these to get picked up by either Longform or Longreads, and neither would touch me with a the toilet plunger they use at Union Station. But, if you want to submit this one to Longreads, I won't stop you.
I think I was on the phone with Rutan for about two hours. You know what metal musicians like talking about? Anything that isn’t metal. Also, as anyone who has ever talked to me knows, that’s not exactly a long conversation for ya guy.
As a true sicko, the mere mention of Koy Detmer makes me laugh. I remember there was a tweet that went out when the Seahawks were in garbage time of their Super Bowl win. The team pulled all the starters, and someone wrote something to the effect of, “Imagine you wake up from a coma and see Seneca Wallace under center about to win the Super Bowl.” I think about this every time a backup comes in.
I blame Emperor and Aesop Dekker for “ensorcells”’s continued proliferation in the heavy metal vernacular. Me and Aaron have also done our part.
A better writer would just let this anecdote die a death in order to keep the story flowing. I am not that writer. I think we spent, like, 30 minutes going through the playoff prospects of every team based solely on whether or not she liked the laundry. Nice lady.
Guess which one of these teams didn’t win? All of them.
Gotta shill for the PR person who scored you the interview.
I hope you know I tried to find that picture, Jordo.
Hell yeah, dude.
That would be “Concrete Charlie” on the Pyrrhon album Exhaust, out now.
Not sure why I reiterated that he was on the phone here. But I bet the publicist was sweating bullets until I dropped the album mention in finally.
Didn’t I already say this? I must’ve hit that late-night stretch of deadline delirium.
If you read this in his voice, it’s hilarious. Find an interview on YouTube.