Against Football (18 page)

Van Pelt appeared to believe he was making an ethical argument here, in the same way an oil magnate points to public opinion polls to rebut the science of climate change. To justify belief and behavior based on mass appeal, in the absence of moral consideration, is not democracy. It's mob rule.

Back in 2009, on the Friday before Super Bowl XLIII, Roger Goodell delivered his standard rap about the NFL's commitment to safety before hundreds of media members in a gilded ballroom. An hour later, in a much smaller room just around the corner, a team of independent researchers held a press conference about the realities of CTE. Seven reporters showed up.

This incongruence neatly encapsulates the homerism inherent in sports journalism. But it also raises another question: What about the good old “lame stream” media? How often do they dig beneath the glossy veneer of Big Football?

Not often. This is partly a function of larger trends. Investigative journalism, which is expensive and involves complex subtleties, is in decline. Sports represent one of the few growth sectors for the corporate media. It's far more
profitable to cover football as a glorious diversion than a sobering news story.

The executives who run the NFL and NCAA know this. They have the clout to freeze out any reporter, or news organization, that asks inconvenient questions. Like all skilled politicians, Roger Goodell avoids antagonistic media. He has an entire network to disseminate his talking points, after all.

When he does grant access to an outsider, it's always a comfy collaboration. Witness his encounter with Chris Wallace of
Fox News Sunday
before the last Super Bowl. I hesitate to characterize the event as an interview, which would imply critical thought. Wallace came off more like a blushing groupie. His central concern was the weather for the big game. He then moved on to economics, citing Goodell's $25 billion revenue goal. “How do you make the NFL, which seems huge, even bigger?” he gushed. Goodell talked about making football a year-round business and expanding into international markets.

Wallace then asked how Goodell balanced two conflicting priorities, “player safety,
which I guess is foremost
” [emphasis mine] with fans' hunger for big hits. With eleven minutes gone in the twelve-minute spot, Wallace got around to broaching, ever so gently, the issue of brain injuries.

There's no need to print Goodell's answer, which was his usual potion of euphemism, elision, and half-truths. More revealing was the way the session ended, with Wallace asking Goodell to autograph a football “as a keepsake for the Wallace grandchildren.”

Among cultural observers, Chuck Klosterman occupies a fascinating niche. He's an unabashed fan of sports and most other forms of popular culture. He writes excellent literary fiction too. He's a provocative, even contrarian, voice, in part because he appears to be genuinely concerned with ethics.

Here's what he had to say about football after the bounty scandal:

Huh?

Why does Chuck Klosterman suddenly sound like a lawyer? Worse, why does he sound like a bureaucrat? This is the nervous prose of someone who wants credit for making a bold moral statement without wanting to feel bound to abide by it.
I get that, and I don't think the argument is weak.

I've talked to dozens of fans who offer some version of the same concession. Okay, okay, the game is totally corrupt. Can we move on?

In a 2012 column, Klosterman put it like this:

Klosterman writes here with characteristic eloquence. But there's a logical fallacy deftly tucked away in that last clause:
there is no way you can feasibly eliminate a sport
 …

Why the hell not?

Football is a form of entertainment, not a chip that gets implanted in our necks at birth by the Overlords. Klosterman is posing as a realist here, but he's being a cynic. He's arguing that profit and popularity amount to fate in our democracy.

Listen: Moral progress is inconvenient. It destabilizes the status quo. But the essential task of the American experiment is to build a more perfect union. Not a more exciting union. Not an easier, go-with-the-flow union. More perfect. That's why our citizens fought to end slavery and child labor and to establish universal suffrage and civil rights and the right of workers to unionize. Hundreds of thousands died for these causes.

Are we really so spoiled as a nation, in 2014, that we can't curb our appetite for an unnecessarily violent game that degrades our educational system, injures its practitioners, and fattens a pack of gluttonous corporations?

The real problem here (again, tucked away in Klosterman's formulation) is that our citizens refuse to become
cognizant.

In May, President Obama hosted a summit to raise awareness of concussions in youth sport. It was a quintessentially political gesture: a laudable and largely ceremonial event intended to validate his ardor for the game, which he detailed in a 2013 interview:

A few months later, he added:

I don't really know where to begin here. Is the life of Obama's hypothetical son worth more than the lives of the kids who grow into pros? Are players really like smokers? (Do we pack stadiums to watch pro smokers inhale?) Should the final goal of safety reform be to alleviate fan guilt?

Obama may be the one figure in American civic life with the moral authority to put football into its proper perspective. The guy was a community organizer, for God's sake. He battles every day against a roster of billionaires ravenous for corporate welfare, and a public more interested in football scores than his policy goals. And he's not even running for office again.

Couldn't the idealist we elected way back in 2008 awaken from his technocratic trance long enough to draw the line? Would it really be a radical departure from his stated values for him to announce that he can no longer endorse a game that profits by cruelty, that instills avarice, and that harms more than healing our most vulnerable communities? Couldn't the guy at least admit that it's wrong to watch a sport so dangerous he wouldn't let his own son play it?

It is possible that football will grow less popular in this country. After all, boxing was once our top sport. Here's how it might happen:

First, several retired stars might reveal the depth of their neurological impairment. Steve Young on
60 Minutes.
Brett Favre weeping to Oprah. Second, the safer equipment and
rules that fans are forever touting as silver bullets may do little to alter the brutal physics of the game. Third, medical technology inevitably will make visible the damage done to young men who play the sport. Fourth, a major college or pro player might be paralyzed or killed during a game. Fifth, a successful class-action suit at the high school or college level could trigger a domino effect.

But realistically, it's going to take more than this to change our collective perception of the game. Cognizance is partly the result of cultural leaders (such as Obama and Simmons and Favre) speaking out, thus refusing to provide us the safe cover of an immoral orthodoxy.

Maybe the way to think of football is as a kind of refuge. Maybe it's so popular because it's the one huge cultural space where we can safely indulge all the shit we haven't worked out yet as a people: our lust for violence, our racial neuroses, our yearning for patriarchal dominion, our sexual hang-ups. It's the place where men get to be boys—before the age of reason, before the age of guilt.

But I keep thinking, also, about this young woman I met the other night, who found out I was writing a book about football and got very excited and told me she was a huge fan of the Philadelphia Eagles, that she had an Eagles hat in her bag, did I want to see it? She told me football was what kept her connected to her hometown, and to her dad especially. “Every weekend he'd go hunting for deer and he'd kill one
and make venison burgers and we'd watch the Eagles game. That was our thing.”

Her face was shining with love.

“What's your book about, anyway?” she said.

So I did that thing where I marched out all my arguments, which were supposed to make me feel righteous. But I looked at this young woman, at her sad eyes, and all I felt was petty and cruel. The Philadelphia Eagles had given her something precious to share with her father. What right did I have to shit on that?

So I want to say to her, and to you: I'm sorry.

The point of this book isn't to shit on your happiness. It isn't to win some cultural argument. Let's make it larger than that. Let's make it an honest conversation between ourselves, and within ourselves, about why we come to football, about why we need a beautiful savage game to feel fully alive, to feel united, and to love the people we love.

Readers may come away from this book with the reasonable objection that it's long on questions and complaints and short on solutions. It was so designed. My intention was to inveigle readers—fans and non-fans alike—into a state of distress and contemplation. Best to understand the illness before we seek the cure.

That being said, there are practical steps that can and should be taken to address the most glaring moral hazards football presents. The following list represents not a blueprint so much as an effort to instigate discussion. If you agree with any of these measures, make your voice heard by those with the power to propose and legislate.

Should have been done forty years ago.

In 1997, Pittsburghers voted down a referendum that would have imposed a sales tax to build the Steelers a new stadium. Despite public uproar, the city came up with a “Plan B”—widely known as
Scam B
—by which the taxpayers ponied up more than $200 million while team ownership chipped in $76 million. The Heinz Company promptly paid
the owners
$57 million for naming rights.

The will of the voters should never be subverted by backroom deals.

Likewise, city and county officials should pass measures that require sports franchises to share the profits derived from the facilities where they play, based on the percentage of public funding.

Films are rated based, in part, on acts of simulated violence. Football games contain hundreds of acts of real violence, the most extreme replayed ad nauseam. Why not force parents to confront this upfront?

A study published in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
reported that 56 percent of all pro players who suited up during the 2003 season had a body mass index doctors would consider overweight. Players gorge themselves to put on pounds, especially in light of the NFL's crackdown on steroids. Retired lineman Brad Culpepper explains: “Now you have to be 300 to move people.” Players at every position have gotten bigger, making collisions more damaging, and increasing the risks of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, etc.

A weight limit at the pro level—either for individual positions, or for a team
in toto
—would compel players to slim down rather than bulk up, an incentive that would slim down the college and high school game as well.