Against Football

by Steve Almond

  She believes the gravest threat to players comes from sub-concussive hits, which the NFL’s safety rules and concussion protocols won’t prevent. The next milestone, McKee predicts, will be when doctors can measure brain injuries incurred during play, and brain disease in living players. “That will be the defining moment, the one that rewrites the book,” she says. “I don’t think we’re that far away.” She foresees a day when players entering the NFL will receive a risk assessment for brain damage based on factors such as genetic disposition, the number of years played, position, etc.

  The introduction of such innovations would erode the haze of medical uncertainty that has long insulated the league and us fans. Imagine what would happen if word leaked that the top draft choice in 2017 stood a 25 percent chance of incurring brain damage five years into his career? Or if he was revealed to have incipient CTE? Or if fans had to confront not just replays of a superstar being knocked insensate, but a CAT scan showing the damage to his frontal lobes?

  McKee is sometimes miscast as the bête noir of the NFL, because she was among the most visible early authorities on CTE. In fact, league executives dismissed her research for years. They’ve since adopted a kind of keep-your-enemies-closer approach by designating her lab as the league’s “preferred” brain bank, and granting her millions in funding.

  McKee is also, helpfully, an outspoken fan of the game. Her desk is surrounded by hundreds of slides of brain slices dyed to show areas with a buildup of tau, the cell-strangling protein symptomatic of CTE. Precariously balanced atop one stack of slides is a bobblehead doll of Aaron Rodgers, the quarterback of her Green Bay Packers.

  McKee told me if she were a boy she would have played football, and that she wanted her son to play. “When he got to high school, his dad didn’t want him to play because it was too dangerous. I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’ It was horrifying to me!” McKee laughed. “So he played soccer.”

  I asked McKee how she justifies watching the game, knowing its dangers so intimately. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know where I am. I think it’s a really important question. I have, like, these two faces. Right now they’re pretty separate. I do watch a lot of football on Sunday.”

  In the morgue, a small, frigid room thick with the smell of preserving fluid, McKee lifted the lid of a white plastic bucket. Inside was a brain covered with splotches of dark crimson. “That’s a suicide,” explained her colleague, Dr. Victor Alvarez. McKee selected another brain and set it down on her cutting board. It looked like a small, discolored ham. She began slicing it up with a long scalpel.

  Most of the brains McKee examines belong to veterans, not athletes. But the second brain she chose was a young female rugby player who had suffered a concussion, then continued to play. After a second impact, she suffered massive swelling of the brain and died. High school athletes are especially susceptible to so-called “second-impact syndrome.”

  I was there to talk to McKee about CTE, but the conversation between her and Alvarez and a young assistant named Brian quickly turned to the Super Bowl, which had been played a few weeks earlier.

  Brian was a fan of the Denver Broncos, who had been routed. “After the first quarter, I just wanted it to be an entertaining game!” he said, carefully sliding brain slices into small plastic cases.

  “After the first series!” said Alvarez, a Buffalo Bills fan.

  At a certain point, I outed myself as a Raiders partisan, and we were off to the races.

  It was an odd situation—actually surreal is closer to the mark. Even as McKee was dissecting this girl’s hippocampus and amygdala and her delicate spinal cord, we were gabbing about football.

  Before I left, McKee showed me two large color prints that hung in the hallway outside her office. One showed the brain of an eighteen-year-old football player with the brown spotting that signifies the onset of CTE. The other was a photo of a brain with two ghastly gouges in its frontal lobes, a lobotomy as they were conducted in the years after World War I.

  A psychiatrist named Walter Freeman performed nearly 3,500 lobotomies, many of them by pressing an icepick through the corner of the eye socket and into the patient’s brain. The procedure was sometimes used to treat victims of shell shock. The press hailed Freeman as a miracle worker. Only years later were his methods debunked. McKee marveled at the public acceptance of such barbarism, and I said, only half joking, that maybe decades from now the public will recoil at the thought that we ever watched a game that could permanently harm a teenager’s brain.

  “I’ve started to think it’s impossible to change the NFL,” McKee said. “People think none of this work will change the NFL.”

  She seemed completely blind to the irony hanging right in front of her. The ultimate agents of social change aren’t researchers like her, but individual fans (like her) who confront the moral meaning of the research, who make the connection between the damaged brains—such as those McKee dissects—and their own behavior.

  4

  THIS EAGER VIOLENCE OF THE HEART

  No one’s saying it’s easy. I’ve spent years trying to quit football, trying to view the game as a childish retreat from the world’s real crises, a callous endorsement of authoritarian thinking, and so forth. During my post-collegiate Diaspora, I spent years wandering from one city to the next, searching, it seems to me now, mostly for a TV upon which I could watch the Raiders.

  In Greensboro, North Carolina, where I arrived in the mid-nineties to become a writer and alienate everyone on earth, I hiked up to campus every Sunday looking for an empty student lounge. The Raiders themselves were never on. Still, I’d stand there for three hours watching teams I didn’t even like, games that meant nothing in my grid of devotion, refusing to sit because I needed to believe I was going to be there for just a few minutes.

  What kept me hooked was the limbic tingle familiar to any football fan, the sense that I was watching an event that mattered. The speed and scale of the game, the noise of the crowd, the grandiloquent narration and caffeinated camera angles—all these signaled a heightened quality of attention. The players dashed about, their bodies lit in a kind of bright funnel of consequence.

  A few years later I moved to Somerville, Mass, where I located a vast bacterial sports bar called the Good Times Emporium that catered to sickos like me. Imagine the wish complex of a thirteen-year-old boy detonated inside an airplane hanger: batting cages, bumper cars, paintball. They broadcast games at full-volume on giant washed-out screens, under which labored beautiful sullen barmaids with stretch marks and tattoos.

  Every Sunday in autumn, I drove there to watch my team and to curse softly into my chicken wings. Because Good Times showed every NFL game, guys would show up in team jerseys and share pitchers of beer and roar together at the big plays and bellow at the injustices. We all understood the brazen con to which we were a party, that our primitive loyalties defined us as marks, that our favorite player might be gone by next year, or next week, that some gilded owner, if so inclined by market forces, would happily ship our entire team to a new city, that we were, objectively speaking, cheering for bright laundry.

  Sometimes, during commercials, I would gaze around that bar, at the other men gazing upon their teams, the abject gleam in their eyes. In those moments I could see the tender truth nestled within each of us. We weren’t rooting for our teams. We were rooting for ourselves.

  Eventually, I got to recognize my fellow Raiders lifers. There were only four of us. We’d sit at separate tables and howl complaints, exchange looks of misery or the rare awkward high five. When the game was over, or we’d given up on the Raiders coming back, we’d leave without saying goodbye. The whole interaction felt illicit, intimate then shockingly hollow, like anonymous sex.

  I told no one—not even close friends—about these excursions. They seemed unworthy of the literary artist I was striving, and failing, to become. But those afternoons were the central emotional events of my life. How else can I explain the way my h
ands would tremble in the parking lot? How my heart hammered the moment I saw the lovely silver and black of the Raiders’ uniforms? After a tough loss, I would sit in my car and replay the fatal moments in my head until my fool heart ached.

  There are all sorts of laudable reasons people watch sports, and football in particular. We wish to reconnect to the unscripted physical pleasures of childhood. We wish for moral structure in a world that feels chaotic, a chance to scratch the inborn itch for tribal affiliation. Sports allow men, in particular, a common language by which to converse.

  When we root for a team, the conscious desire is to see them win, to bask in reflected glory. But the unconscious function of fandom is, I think, just the opposite. It’s a form of surrender to our essential helplessness in the universal order. In an age of scientific assurance, people still yearn for spiritual struggle. Fandom allows us to fire our faith in the forge of loss. Because our teams inevitably do lose. And this experience forms the bedrock of our identification.

  Backing a team helps Americans, in particular, contend with the unease of living in the most competitive society on earth, a society in which we’re socialized to feel like losers. That’s the special sauce that capitalism puts on the burgers. It’s how you turn citizens into efficient workers and consumers. You convince them that they are forever falling behind. Losing time. Losing money. Losing status. Losing hair. Losing potency. Losing the edge. We feel that we’re losing all the time, simply by failing to win it all. We squander our talents, we mismanage the clock, we choke in the clutch. Our teams enact public dramas that we experience as struggles to transcend our own private defects.

  We need look no further for evidence than to the proliferation of sports talk radio. Anyone who’s listened to this format will tell you that nothing lights up the phone lines like a crushing loss. And what one hears in the callers’ voices, beneath the bluster, is actually quite moving: an effort to preserve belief amid the tribulation of defeat.

  I’m afraid that brings us back to the Raiders, and to the single play I have thought about more over the past decade than, for instance, the births of my children. (Please know that I am as disgusted with myself as you are right now.)

  In January of 2002, the Raiders flew east to face the Patriots in a playoff game. I had been in Somerville a few years by then, and my friend Zach had stupidly agreed to let me watch the game at his place. I can still remember the color of the sky that morning, the dense gunmetal of a looming storm. By game time, huge, Hollywood-styled snowflakes were twirling down. They blotted out the yard markers and made traction nearly impossible, which lent the game a slapstick air.

  The Raiders dominated, but the Patriots rallied late, led by a rookie quarterback named Tom Brady. Down three points with two minutes left, he dropped back to pass and found his receivers blanketed.

  If I close my eyes I can still see Brady there, hopping about in the snow like a sparrow. He cocks his right arm as if to pass, thinks better of it, then pulls the ball down and pats it with his left hand. At this precise moment, Raiders cornerback Charles Woodson, deployed on an impeccably executed blitz, crashes into Brady and rakes away the ball. The ball lands in the snow, where it sits for an excruciating half-second. It is one of those enthralling moments, unique to football, where nobody knows what the hell is going on. At last, Raiders middle linebacker Greg Biekert falls on the ball. The Raiders can now run out the clock. The game is over.

  I rose out of my chair and made animal sounds. Then I turned to Zach and said something gracious, how the Pats had played a good game, the kind of thing I can summon only when my team has won. Zach was still watching the TV.

  Zach was still watching the TV because the referee had announced that the play would be reviewed. Two minutes later, the referee clicked on his mic and explained that Brady was attempting to “tuck” the ball as he was stripped and was therefore, by some malicious metaphysical logic, still in the act of passing, rendering his fumble an incomplete pass. The Raiders never recovered from the shock. They lost the game in overtime. New England went on to win the Super Bowl.

  If you were to plot the fortunes of NFL franchises on a graph—something I have come close to doing in dark moments—the Tuck Play would mark the spot where the Pats began their dynastic arc while the Raiders stumbled into disgrace. This play should have marked the spot on the map where my devotion waned.

  Just the opposite happened. I spent the next hour (read: five years) trying to get Zach to admit that Brady had fumbled the ball. I argued with strangers, too. I nearly came to blows with a guy at my gym. And I tracked every phase of the Raiders’ ensuing swoon, the carousel of inept coaches, the bungled draft picks, every senseless, drive-killing penalty.

  A saner human being would have jumped ship years ago. Instead, I am that one sad asshole who quietly roots against the Pats every time they have a big playoff game—games, incidentally, that I often have to plead to watch at the homes of my friends, who hate having me there. But I am not a saner human being. Which is why I have watched the highlights of the Patriots losing their perfect 18–0 season to the Giants in Super Bowl XLII no fewer than twenty times.

  There is no use in my attempting to justify this behavior. But the deranged patterns of our fandom, though they may manifest themselves in the here and now, took shape years ago. When I consider my earliest fervor for the Raiders, I don’t think about the three Super Bowls they won. I think about the fact that they could never beat the Pittsburgh Steelers.

  This is a direct result of growing up in the shadow of a domineering older brother who, mostly out of spite, rooted for the Steelers. I felt about the Raiders the way I felt about myself: that no matter what I achieved in the world, I would never vanquish Dave. And thus I spent the dim Decembers of my youth in the same state of grievance I would experience three decades later in New England.

  The record books suggest that the Raiders beat the Steelers just as often as they lost. But what matters to a fan is the history your heart constructs. Long before the Tuck Play, I’d withstood the Immaculate Reception, in which Steelers running back Franco Harris plucked a deflected fourth-down pass off his shoe tops and galloped 43 yards for a touchdown with thirteen seconds left to knock the Raiders out of the playoffs. Cataclysm is my default setting as a fan.

  I assumed that getting married and having kids would break my habit once and for all. But adult responsibilities have a way of sending us scurrying for the vestiges of our youth. Three seasons ago, I ordered a friend whom I was visiting to drive me thirty-five miles to a sports bar with satellite TV, all so I could watch the Raiders, finally within smelling distance of a playoff spot, destroy the 3–8 Miami Dolphins. After three quarters, Oakland trailed 34–0.

  At such moments, sitting in a loud, corporate-themed sports bar in Greenville, South Carolina on the brink of tears, I am apt to reflect on the urtext of football freaks, Frederick Exley’s novel A Fan’s Note. “Whatever it was,” he writes, “I gave myself up to the [New York] Giants utterly. The recompense I gained was the feeling of being alive.”

  It sounds romantic to be that abject. But the relationship Exley is describing is essentially vampiric. His hero looks to the Giants each Sunday to awaken him from the spiritual stupor of his life. That could be religion—or addiction.

  “When I drank by myself, the liquor truly seemed like the one thing that gave me access to my true feelings,” Caroline Knapp writes in Drinking: A Love Story, her searing account of alcoholism. It provided “an illusion of emotional authenticity which you can see as false only in retrospect.” Reading these words, I thought about all the times I’d watched football alone, how much hope and sorrow had surged through me and how hollow I’d felt afterward, how hungover.

  Knapp writes also about the camaraderie of drink, the way drunks will find cover by seeking out other drunks. This aspect of fandom may do the most, in the end, to insulate football from ethical scrutiny. The NFL, and the bloated media cult that feeds off of it, rely on us fans not to connec
t the dots. But to an even larger extent we rely on each other. There’s safety in numbers.

  As a writer living outside Boston, I tend to hang around with a bunch of highly educated smart alecks. But of all my male pals, there’s exactly one who isn’t conversant in football. The rest range from casual to fervent as fans. Here are the two most telling facts about this population.

  Fact #1: They all admit to having moral qualms about watching football.

  Fact #2: They all watch anyway.

  Even the poets! My friend Dave is a Pittsburgh native who watched Tony Dorsett during his years at Pitt. He was so devastated to learn of Dorsett’s cognitive decline that he lectured his college students about the tolls of football. He also confessed to me that he couldn’t bring himself to take down the Terrible Towel hanging on the wall of his cubicle.

  I’ve had a lot of difficult conversations with friends in the course of writing this book, none more so than with my neighbor Sean.

  Sean is a former football player and what I like to call a fracture-level fan. Some months ago, he showed up at my house with a cast on his hand from accidentally punching a wooden bed railing during a game. (I myself have punched many wooden objects during games, always intentionally and never with sufficient force to break a bone.) It might be worth mentioning that Sean is six-four and 260 pounds. When I talked with him at the outset of this project, he looked at me for a few long seconds then said, in a quiet, imploring voice, “Please don’t take this away from me.”

  For the past five years, Sean and I have sought refuge from the pressure cooker of family life. We have done this not by tearing out of our homes and jumping on the motorcycle Sean has been rebuilding for the past three years and gunning it down to Daytona Beach and guzzling enough tequila to participate in an ironic wet T-shirt contest for sad, middle-aged men and then blacking out—but instead by watching football games together. That’s the “this” I assumed he meant.