Against Football

by Steve Almond

  The dramatis personae are mostly members of the offensive line, a close-knit unit led by a charismatic veteran named Richie Incognito. The authors affirm that Incognito, along with fellow vets Mike Pouncey and John Jerry, engaged in “a pattern of harassment” toward Martin that went beyond the standard rookie hazing. Press reports focused on the racial epithets that Incognito, who is white, directed at Martin, who is African-American. Among the more poetic sobriquets: “half-nigger piece of shit,” “shine box,” “stinky Pakistani” and “darkness.”

  Incognito also makes vulgar comments about Martin’s mother and, in particular, his sister, a medical student whom he has never met. (“I’m going to bang the shit out of her and spit on her and treat her like shit” is one of his milder offerings.)

  Like a lot of dudes who traffic in this sort of casual misogyny, Incognito and his pals also spout a lot of homophobic trash talk. In addition to hurling racist slurs at a Japanese assistant trainer, Incognito makes it a point to ask him for “rubby rubby sucky sucky.” He nicknames another submissive teammate “Loose Booty,” and routinely grabs him and asks him for a hug. The homophobia has an anxious, compensatory feel to it. At one point, Pouncey restrains “Loose Booty” and tells Jerry to “come get some pussy.” Jerry then touches the victim’s ass in a way that simulates anal penetration. Because, you know, that’s how you prove you’re definitely not gay.

  What’s most striking about The Wells Report is its depiction of the volatile friendship between Incognito and Martin. Teammates describe the two as inseparable. In the course of their stormy fourteen-month relationship, they exchange 13,000 text messages, or nearly 30 a day. They seek each other out “at all hours of the day or night” and discuss “the intimate details of their sex lives, often in graphic terms.”

  Martin tells the investigators he befriended his tormentor hoping to stem his abuse, as victims often do. He appears genuinely perplexed by Incognito’s mood swings. “At one point he pulled his shirt off & tried to beat my ass yesterday,” he writes in one text. “Then 5 min later it was like nothing even happened and we went to the strip club.” He refers to Incognito as “bipolar.”

  But the deeper one reads into the report, the more it seems to describe a psychic crisis. Richie Incognito is guilty of bullying. But his true crime seems to be that he harbors forbidden desires for Jonathan Martin.

  As he admits to investigators, his term of preference for Martin is “my bitch.” When Martin declines his offers to socialize, or to take trips together, Incognito reacts like a spurned lover. His invective reflects a familiar preoccupation. At one point, Incognito pressures Martin to vacation with him in Las Vegas. Here’s the exchange of texts that causes Martin to back out:

  INCOGNITO: No dude hookers [male prostitutes] u faggot

  INCOGNITO: Don’t blame ur gay tendancies on [Player A]

  MARTIN: I’m gonna get more bitches in 2 nights than all of you combined

  INCOGNITO: Stop it. By bitches u mean cocks in ur mouth

  INCOGNITO: U fucking mulatto liberal bitch

  INCOGNITO: I’m going to shit in ur eye

  INCOGNITO: Goodnight slut

  But beneath this profane banter, a genuine tenderness emerges. “Let’s get weird tonight,” Incognito writes to Martin, at one point. And a bit later, “What’s up pussy? I love u.” Even after Martin has left the team amid controversy, the two continue to text.

  “I miss us,” Incognito writes.

  As I pored through The Wells Report, I kept thinking about this book I reviewed a few years ago called The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. The author, Neil Strauss, and his fellow pickup artists obsess over their masculinity and delight in detailing their conquests. But a familiar suspicion lurks beneath the braggadocio. “I was in the game to have more women in my life, not men,” Strauss writes. “And though the community was all about women, it was also completely devoid of them … The point was women; the result was men.”

  This, it seems to me, is an apt description of the life many pro athletes lead. They have engineered lives in which they work and eat and bathe with other men and live by a set of masculine codes that discourage empathy, introspection, any sign of weakness really. A guy such as Richie Incognito functions like a modern-day Achilles. He may embrace women as sexual objects. But his deepest love is reserved for the men with whom he goes to battle, and it is sometimes difficult for him to regulate the sexual and aggressive drives that roil within him.

  As history attests, there are clear social and political ramifications to this internal schism. The reason so many societies have attacked homosexuality is not just because their leaders were sexually insecure (though they were). It’s also because the most effective leaders exploited the homoerotic anxieties of their male populations. They defined masculinity as a willingness to do violence without remorse, and offered men the chance to atone for aberrant urges by persecuting homosexuals. This impulse might have found its earliest expression in religious allegories such as Sodom and Gomorrah, but it’s not some wild coincidence that fascist cultures and repressive regimes exhibit this same genocidal mania.

  Being a jock also provides a safe haven from the emotional and psychological demands of women; it’s what an old girlfriend of mine used to call “regression to the mean.” Fans experience this as well. The reason I love going out to a bar to watch a football game with Sean (our wives call these excursions “man dates”) is precisely because we can just sit there eating onion rings deep-fried in cholesterol, watching the Raiders choke, and not discussing anything deeper than the risks of calling a naked bootleg in the red zone. It’s a way of clinging to adolescence.

  And I can tell you exactly what happens to any dude who dares to speak out about the moral complexities of football. Here’s a sampling of the e-mails I received after writing such a piece for The New York Times Magazine, printed here verbatim:

  OMG. I am progressive on social issues but dude—you are the biggest fucking pussy on the face of the earth. Change your tampon you woman.

  I read an article you wrote about football and I couldn’t help but think of a slutty girl I knew growing up. I thought she had the biggest vagina I’d ever seen before until now … congrats dude, you have a bigger one.

  Why do libs have to ruin everything we do for fun or to take our minds off of the world? I don’t even like the Redskins but if that kind of stuff offends the large vagina crowd, I am a fan now.

  Well, then. That was certainly bracing.

  I realize that you think I’ve cherry-picked these. But I swear to you, nearly every piece of hate mail I received made reference to my vagina, which was usually characterized as very large.

  As the son of two psychoanalysts, I suppose I am obligated to speculate on this odd size fixation. Fine. On one level my correspondents simply wish to convey the exaggerated nature of my femininity (i.e., larger vagina = more feminine). Still, it’s hard to ignore that a large vagina suggests an unconscious fear of male inadequacy. Is it possible that merely asking these guys to examine their motives for watching football made them feel small?

  We can say for sure that these men feel accused. That someone might make them feel guilty for watching football represents the ultimate gender betrayal. The prescribed punishment appears to be the revocation of one’s male genitalia.

  For the record, my vagina is slightly smaller than average.

  If, at its worst, the cult of football preys on male insecurity, prizes physical dominance, and denigrates women, it follows that these tendencies would effect not just how players interact with each other, but with women. And I would be remiss, therefore, in failing to mention the pattern of sexual violence against women perpetrated by football players.

  Here’s the thing, though: to this point, I’ve avoided citing criminal complaints. It feels unfair to me to smear the many for the actions of a few. Also, the rate of allegation against players appears exaggerated because of their celebrity. The reason I’m making an e
xception when it comes to sexual misconduct against women is because of a disturbing pattern that goes far beyond the behavior of individual players: the gross negligence of law enforcement and the public.

  The most flagrant recent example involves Jameis Winston, a celebrated quarterback for Florida State University. In December of 2012, a nineteen-year-old undergraduate told Tallahassee police she had been raped after a night of drinking at a popular bar. The young woman claimed her alleged assailant, whom she did not know, transported her to the bedroom of his off-campus apartment, ignored her pleas to stop, held her down, and later carried her to a bathroom where he locked the door and continued the assault. There was physical evidence: bruises indicative of recent trauma, blood on her shorts, and semen on her underwear. A friend of the alleged rapist later told police that he’d taped a portion of the encounter on his phone.

  Police never saw this tape, because they barely investigated. Neither did school officials, though federal law requires them to look into any charge of sexual assault against a student. It was the alleged victim who, a month later, called police to identify Winston as the man who raped her, after she saw him on campus.

  Her family, fearful she would be antagonized for accusing a football player, asked a lawyer friend to contact the assigned detective, Scott Angulo. According to the family, Angulo—who had done private security work for an FSU booster group—refused to order Winston to submit to DNA testing, because it would generate publicity. He warned that Tallahassee is “a big football town and the victim needs to think long and hard before proceeding against him because she will be raked over the coals and her life will be made miserable.” Angulo closed the case without having interviewed Winston or secured his phone records or DNA.

  Only after the allegation became public, nine months later, did prosecutors reopen the case. By this time, Winston was one of the best-known football players in the country. Although his DNA matched the DNA found on the alleged victim’s clothing, prosecutors did not press charges. FSU did nothing to discipline Winston, though a second woman sought counseling from the school’s own victim advocate after a disturbing sexual encounter with him.

  In the ensuing months, Winston won the Heisman Trophy and led the Seminoles to a national championship. He has been projected as the number one overall pick in the 2015 NFL draft.

  His accuser was publicly reviled—viciously slut-shamed, in some cases—and withdrew from classes. Winston’s lawyer accused her of “targeting” his client, though she had no idea he was a football player when she first went to police. She received death threats on social media.

  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the twisted logic of rape culture. The true victim is always the famous baller. And the young woman who goes to the police, bruised and distraught, who submits to a rape exam? She has no right to expect an honest investigation of her allegations. She deserves to be verbally abused, ostracized, then discarded. And why?

  Because her claims threaten to expose the whole misogynist underpinning of the fan/athlete dynamic, the sickening arrangement by which we give athletes the cultural power to sexually possess women with little fear of the consequences. It’s a modern form of tribute; to the victors go the spoils.

  Thanks to police incompetence, or worse, we’ll never know exactly what happened between Winston and his accuser. FSU has yet to discipline the quarterback, and now joins a host of other colleges under federal investigation for allegedly mishandling sexual assault cases involving athletes. We do know that school officials and students and an entire nation of fans appear more troubled by the prospect of not being able to watch Winston play than by the fact that he might be a rapist.

  That’s how much we need our football.

  Two years ago, in Steubenville, Ohio, a pair of high school football players sexually assaulted a teenage girl incapacitated by alcohol, giddily documented the attack on film, and shared photos on social media. Members of the community rallied around … the rapists. They assailed the victim for casting the team and town in a negative light. She was pressured to remain silent and was made an outcast by her peers. Three adults, including the superintendent of schools, were arrested for obstructing the investigation.

  Given the preponderance of evidence, the boys were convicted in a juvenile court. Poppy Harlow, a CNN correspondent, described the scene by saying it was “incredibly difficult, even for an outsider like me, to watch what happened as these two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students, literally watched as they believed their lives fell apart.”

  If the convicts had been drifters or undocumented workers, we can assume they would have been perceived quite differently. But Harlow’s little soliloquy reveals a darker possibility: the fact that the assailants were star football players might help explain their crimes. The people of Steubenville—fans, parents, coaches—made those boys feel chosen, as if their physical gifts entitled them to special rights, made them impervious to the codes of decency that govern the rest of us, as if their athletic fate mattered more than the dignity of the unconscious teenage girl they raped and humiliated.

  7

  THE BLIND SPOT

  In 1993, a slew of European tourists who had come to Florida on vacation were murdered. The most publicized of these crimes took place in a Miami neighborhood called Liberty City, just a few blocks from a notorious housing project called the James E. Scott Homes, which residents referred to as The Canyon.

  I was a reporter for a weekly paper in Miami at the time. I’d reported stories from The Canyon and felt it might behoove the journalistic mission to describe the place in greater detail. I didn’t have an angle. I just wanted to hang out long enough—a year of weekly visits, it would turn out—to begin to understand the lives of the women and children who lived there.

  Like many public housing projects in poor areas, The Canyon was essentially a village of despondent mothers and restless children. I wound up spending most of my time there with a pack of young boys, none of whom had fathers. To these boys, and their mothers and aunties, one of the few heroic figures was a former NFL player who had returned to run a football program.

  He was renowned for one of his rules, which I heard over and over: he didn’t accept any kid older than nine. After that, it was too late. He couldn’t undo whatever recalcitrance had been wired or whipped into them. And of course this was terribly sad. Because youth football was viewed as a form of salvation in Liberty City. Pop Warner championships drew thousands of fans. People saw the game as a way to instill discipline and self-respect, to keep wayward boys from taking the wrong path, a golden ticket.

  “The only ones ever come back with money is the football players,” one mom told me. “Them and the drug dealers.”

  I keep thinking about it from the point of view of the kids I hung out with, Nookie, Boo Man, the others. These boys lived with mothers or guardians who were too broken to care for them properly. They went to a school that was overcrowded. Their teachers saw them mostly as discipline problems. They had no positive male figures in their lives, no power in the world, no idea how to acquire any.

  So I could understand why they were desperate to join a game that gave them a sense of purpose and direction, that earned them the approval and guidance of respected elders who recognized their potential, a game that offered them a chance at riches and fame, however remote. They accepted the need to sacrifice. They had to learn strategy, cooperation, how to channel their aggressive impulses, how to evade or defeat the opponent. They understood that the game in question gave people tremendous pleasure, but that it wasn’t economically productive for the local community. And though they preferred not to think about this part, they knew it came with considerable risks to their health.

  Despite all this, some of them still wanted to sell crack cocaine.

  Am I now suggesting that football is as bad for the African-American community as crack cocaine?

  No.

  I’m just making the point tha
t neither is a realistic solution to the crises that poor African-American boys face growing up in this country. In fact, they are distractions from the systemic inequalities that keep such boys locked in a cycle of poverty and incarceration.

  Without a doubt, football is great at getting boys motivated—mostly to play football. It can give the right sort of kid a leg up. But it’s “a way out” only for a handful. Less than 10 percent of the 100,000 high school seniors who play football will make a college squad, and fewer still will receive scholarships; 215 will wind up in the pros. That’s 1 out of 500 players. The others—the Nookies and the Boo Mans, the ones we prefer not to think about—need better child care programs and better schools and better job training and better wages.

  Whatever laudable lessons football imparted to the children of The Canyon, it reinforced the idea that violence was a source of power and a path to destiny. Here’s how the commissioner of the local league explained it to Robert Andrew Powell, whose book, We Own This Game, offers a vivid chronicle of Miami’s peewee set: “Football is the most natural for them. Basketball puts limits on their aggression; baseball puts limits on their aggression. In football they had better well be aggressive. And with the background of these kids, where these kids come from, aggression comes naturally.”

  Carlos Guy, the uncle of one player, put it like this: “Somebody a long time ago came to the idea that this—football—was the very best way to show that we could make it out, that we could rise above the slave mentality, segregation, and really be what we want to be. It’s not a part of the culture now. It is the culture.”

  I keep trying to imagine what Dr. Martin Luther King would have to say about these statements. His image was all over The Canyon, staring out from the chipped murals that were painted every few years, in anticipation of some visit from a politician. Often, these murals included quotes.