After a successful football game played by one man, a teammate ran up and patted his rear end

This is a symbolic body language gesture that lies very dose to the danger area in man-to-man communication.

What the gesture says, of course, is “Thanks for a great play!” and it says it is an expression of warmth, of touching, and of sexuality.

Does this mean that football players are potentially homosexual? It’s not likely, because if a player were homosexual he’d be inhibited about the gesture and it isn’t likely that he’d use it in public.

In our male culture, such gestures between men are often done as a joke. It becomes a gesture of admiration, but a funny, sexual, symbolic one.

The constant body contact of a sport like football may also lead to greater body awareness among players. The pat on the rear is an acceptable way of discharging such awareness, as is the hugging after a successful play. But in most cases, these gestures are simply traditional. Others do it, the player figures, so I’ll do it, too.

Another significance of these expressions is their reinforcement of male bonding.  Some evolutionary psychologists feel that a long process of natural selection favored those men who hunted well together and were most comfortable in the company of other men. Primitive hunting was done best in groups, and therefore men who liked to hunt in groups had an edge in the struggle to survive.

These psychologists reason that over the millennia a preference for the company of other men was bred into the males of the human race. This they call male bonding One woman I know who jogs with her husband tells me that occasionally, after a good workout, her husband gives her this “man-to-man” pat on the rear. She recognizes it for what it is: a sign from her husband that she is, for the moment, “one of the guys”—a sign that he accepts her in a situation that has traditionally been mostly male.

The comfort many men feel in the company of other men leads to these contact gestures. Among male adolescents, goosing is a favorite aggressive-sexual-fun gesture and it carries over into many societies of men alone, such as the army, all-male schools, and fraternities.

Your football player, with his intimate approval touch, may simply be reinforcing a genetic male bonding, a pleasure in the company of other men.