Against Football

by Steve Almond

  Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.

  Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation.

  Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon … It is a sword that heals.

  You know, sissy shit like that.

  I suspect King would have been heartbroken at the notion that football is the dominant form of empowerment in communities like The Canyon. He might well have viewed the mindset as a form of self-colonization.

  The ultimate message football sends to young boys, of whatever color or socioeconomic status, is that they are valuable not for the content of their character, not for their intelligence or creativity, but for how fast they can run and how well they can throw and catch and, especially, how hard they can hit. That’s what scouts and recruiters want. That’s how you get rescued.

  Consider The Blind Side by Michael Lewis, a 2006 bestseller that later became a blockbuster film. Lewis tells the story of Michael Oher, a painfully shy African-American teen from the projects of West Memphis who happens to be six feet six inches tall and 345 pounds. Thanks to his unusual combination of size and speed, he is accepted at a private evangelical high school, adopted by a rich white family on the east side of town, and molded into an All-American.

  There’s an undeniable buzz in tracking Oher’s rise from a destitute kid with no prospects to a prodigy besieged by college recruiters. But Lewis never seems to acknowledge that he’s telling a different story as well, one of racial exploitation. In fact, he highlights all the rule bending done to keep Oher college-eligible. The administration at his high school accepts him, though he can barely read. When his GPA proves too low for the NCAA, his adoptive father, a canny former college basketball star named Sean Tuohy, finds a loophole. He has Oher tested to prove he’s learning disabled, then has him take numerous easy, on-line courses. Lewis treats these measures as ingenious. We are meant to cheer the fact that Oher has gamed the educational process.

  Tuohy’s indomitable wife also plays a key role in the reeducation of Oher:

  Leigh Anne was now making it her personal responsibility to introduce him to the most basic facts of life, the sort of thing any normal person would have learned by osmosis. “Every day I try to make sure he knows something he doesn’t know,” she said. “If you ask him, Where should I shop for a girl to impress her? he’ll tell you, Tiffany’s. I’ll go through the whole golf game. He can tell you what six under is, and what’s a birdie and what’s par.”

  Leigh Anne treats her adopted son more like a giant kachina doll than a human being.

  Oher himself recognizes the ulterior motives swirling around him. “He didn’t go so far as to treat Leigh Anne with suspicion but, as Leigh Anne put it, ‘With me and Sean I can see him thinking, If they found me lying in a gutter and I was going to be flipping burgers at McDonald’s, would they really have had an interest in me?’ ”

  No one ever answers this question.

  Instead, the Touhys convince Oher to attend their alma mater, Ole Miss, where he becomes a star bound for the NFL. We are meant to view all this as an inspiring underdog saga, spiced with the proper pieties about Christian charity, the power of hope, and individual destiny.

  Michael Lewis is one of our finest journalists. He gets that Michael Oher is part of a larger system. “What the NFL prized,” he writes, “America’s high schools supplied, and America’s colleges processed.” He understands that assets like Oher have to “go through the tedious charade of pretending to be ordinary college students” to make the pros.

  For this reason, I kept wondering why Lewis never addressed that haunting question: why did the Touhys rescue Michael Oher? His avoidance could be due to the fact that he and Sean Touhy are old friends. But I suspect it’s deeper than that.

  It has to do with a much more fundamental blind spot that prevails when it comes to sports and race in America. And while I could talk here about other sports, such as basketball, football is the prime example, not just because two-thirds of its players are African-American but because it fuels our most insidious and intractable stereotypes about such men: that they are inherently animalistic.

  Like most fans, myself included, Lewis prefers not to parse the perverse arrangement by which watching young African-Americans in tight pants engage in mock combat has become our most profitable form of entertainment. Nobody wants to look at this stuff. Nobody wants to ask the awkward questions.

  Such as: What is the relationship between our nation’s racial history and our lust for football? What does it mean that football fever tends to run so hot in those states where slavery was legal and Jim Crow died hardest? What does it mean that millions of white fans cheer wildly for African-American men in the context of a football game when, if they encountered these same men on a darkened street, they might very well reach nervously for their cell phone? Is football a way of containing African-American rage? Is this why any African-American athlete who speaks too brashly or associates with friends from the old neighborhood has “character issues”? Does it relieve the racial guilt of white Americans to lavish so much money and adulation on a few African-American men? Is it an oblique form of financial restitution?

  And what does it mean that we give so much scrutiny to their bodies? That we think nothing of calling them “studs” and “beasts” and “specimens”? Are we turning them into fetish objects? And what does that mean? Can anyone really watch the NFL Combine—in which young, mostly African-American men are made to run and jump and lift weights for the benefit of mostly old white coaches, and us couch potatoes—and not see visual echoes of the slave auction?

  For that matter: Isn’t the whole system by which young African-Americans are harvested from this country’s impoverished precincts, segregated from the general population, and exploited for their extraordinarily profitable physical labors, a kind of extravagantly monetized plantation?

  Yes, football attracts fans of all races and classes. Yes, players choose to compete and are well paid. But the power dynamics remain eerily familiar: a wealthy white “owner” presides over a group of African-American laborers. Is the “slave mentality” something that a signing bonus erases? Do the millions absolve everyone involved? Does it matter that players risk grievous injury? That they are cast off like beasts of burden?

  Does football provide white Americans a continued sense of dominion over African-American men? Do their huge salaries give us the right to pass judgment on them incessantly? To call up radio programs and yell about how they’re lazy or money-hungry or thuggish? Do we secretly believe they belong to us? Why do we enjoy seeing them play through pain? Why do we berate them for cowardice when we ourselves wouldn’t last ten seconds in an actual game? Is this cycle of hero worship and vilification one way in which white men express anxiety over their perceived physical inadequacies relative to men of color? Is that why the sportscaster Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder got fired, in 1988, for saying “the black is a better athlete … because he’s been bred to be that way” by the slave owner? Was he made a scapegoat for expressing sentiments the rest of us prefer to hide?

  Why do white fans react with such shock and horror when African-American players, who are rewarded for ruthless aggression on the field, exhibit these traits elsewhere? Is the obsessive coverage of their violent crimes a public justification for our private prejudices?

  What does it mean that 95 percent of our most famous African-American citizens are athletes? Or that, when we see a physically imposing African-American in the lobby of a fancy hotel, or a television studio, we immediately think: football player. Why don’t we think doctor or software engineer? Are these assumptions a form of bigotry? If not, why not?

  I’m going to get hammered for asking these questions. Fine. Hammer away. But don’t pretend that’s the same as answering.

  Or consider poor Jonathan Martin, last spotted dancing his tortured interracial tango with Richie I
ncognito. The saddest—and most overlooked—story told by The Wells Report is that of his racial reckoning.

  Martin grew up in a family that prized education and professional achievement. Had Martin chosen to attend Harvard, where he was accepted, he would have been the university’s first fourth-generation African-American student. Instead, he went to Stanford, where he majored in Classics and became a football star widely respected by his comrades.

  His problems began when he joined the NFL. African-American teammates accused him of not acting “black enough.” He was too intellectual and sensitive. Like that famous punk Martin Luther King, he avoided violent confrontations, which is why Incognito, playing to type, targeted him. Martin blamed his problems on “white private school conditioning, turning the other cheek.”

  Other players urged Martin to confront Incognito. Instead, he turned his hatred inward, grew disconsolate, and harbored suicidal thoughts. The episode that led him to leave the Dolphins is revealing. Martin was in line at the cafeteria. Incognito was sitting at a table with the other offensive linemen, most of them African-American. He called out to Martin that he didn’t want his “stinky Pakistani ass” to join the group. When Martin approached the table anyway, the other linemen rose in unison and, at Incognito’s instigation, moved to another table. Martin had been denied a place at the table.

  Soon after, media reports noted Incognito’s use of racial epithets. The Wells Report included two text message exchanges between Incognito and a white teammate in which they joke about murdering black people.

  PLAYER B: That’s a solid optic made specifically for a .308 battle rifle

  INCOGNITO: Perfect for shooting black people

  PLAYER B: Lol

  And yet African-American teammates still voiced support for Incognito and disdain for Martin. Better a racist than a race traitor. That’s what Jonathan Martin was, after all, in the eyes of his comrades. African-American football players don’t come from educated families. They don’t have a life of the mind. They don’t practice nonviolence. With internal standards like that, who needs racial oppressors?

  8

  THEIR SONS GROW SUICIDALLY BEAUTIFUL

  To this point, I’ve focused pretty narrowly on the NFL. I’ve done so because, as Lewis notes above, the pro game drives the whole machine. Its incandescent lure induces a lot of kids to endure a lot of hardship. But there are plenty who play football purely for kicks, who harbor no hope of competing in college or beyond. And it’s pretty hard to argue with a kid who simply loves the game. If my son wants to head out to a park for a five-on-five, I’m not about to stop him. I’d rather they play two-hand touch, but if they mix in a few tackles, well, I received my fair share of injuries doing the same.

  What bums me out about football at the amateur level is that it’s gotten way too organized and cutthroat and just generally corrupted by parasitic adults. And that begins with the fact that the sport has become a part of the educational system of this country, which, I’m sorry, is pathological.

  The primary mission of high school and college, I hope we can agree, is to educate students, to stimulate and expand their minds, to prepare them for jobs and lives that contribute to society. (Or at least hold the apocalypse at bay for a few more sunny decades.) But all across the country, particularly in the South, schools have become football factories.

  The insane commercialization of the pro game has trickled down through college to high school and led to an athletic arms race. National networks such as ESPN now air high school games. Elite “programs” spend hundreds of thousands on facilities and coaches and recruit from across state lines. The players, in turn, work out year-round. They’re as big and strong and fast as the pros of twenty years ago. This has led to a booming industry of scouts, trainers, promoters, and (lest we forget) steroid dealers, whose job is to groom these teens for college stardom. Sixth-period PE, meet late-model capitalism.

  Given all this, you might expect enhanced safety standards, if for no other reason than to protect those valuable two-legged commodities. But the nearly 1.1 million boys who play high school football—more than any other sport—are getting hurt more and more often.

  The most definitive epidemiological studies suggest that upward of 65,000 concussions are reported per year, though thousands more go undiagnosed because schools lack the medical staff required to recognize the symptoms. Rates have doubled in the past fifteen years. According to a 2013 study funded by the NFL, high school players are nearly twice as likely to incur a concussion as their college counterparts.

  Why? Because the NCAA has rules regarding maximum playing and practice times—twenty hours per week during the season; eight hours in the off-season. Although these limits are routinely flouted, they provide some measure of moderation. By contrast, there’s no national body to regulate the sport at the high school level.

  What’s more, the incentives are all wrong. Coaches are under intense pressure to win. They’re working with kids who’ve been taught for years that enduring pain is what makes them worthy, an especially dangerous credo when you cannot conceive of your own mortality. These young men hunger to compete, and a lot of people depend on them to do so: parents, coaches, teammates. The result is that players devote much of their high school careers to preparing for a dozen games each fall. The driving ambition is not education. It’s entertainment.

  Here’s the scariest part: not only do high school players receive more blows to the head than college players, they are more vulnerable to these blows because their brains are still developing.

  Three years ago, researchers at Purdue University began monitoring every hit sustained by two local high school teams. The goal was to study the effect of concussions. But when researchers administered cognitive tests to players who had never been concussed, hoping to set up a control group, they discovered that these teens showed diminished brain function as well. As the season wore on, their cognitive abilities plummeted. In some cases, brain activity in the frontal lobes—the region responsible for reasoning—nearly disappeared by season’s end. “You have the classic stereotype of the dumb jock and I think the real issue is that’s not how they start out,” explained Thomas Talavage, one of the professors running the study. “We actually create that individual.”

  Let’s take a deep breath and consider how psychotic that is.

  What would happen if some invisible gas leak in the school cafeteria caused diminished brain activity in students? Can we safely assume district officials would evacuate the school until further notice? That parents would be up in arms? That media and lawyers would descend in droves to collect statements from the innocent victims? Can we assume that the community would not gather together en masse on Friday nights to eat hot dogs and watch the gas leak?

  So why do Americans not only accept high school football, but, in certain regions, worship it? What is it in our national psychology that gets off on seeing boys engage in such a savage game? I think there’s some kind of shame mixed up in it all, the shame of men whose dreams have collapsed.

  Here’s what James Wright had to say on the subject, in his poem “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,” which I have been unable to get out of my head:

  All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.

  Their women cluck like starved pullets,

  Dying for love.

  Therefore,

  Their sons grow suicidally beautiful

  At the beginning of October,

  And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.

  Too heavy? Fine. Let’s consider the allure of a show such as Friday Night Lights, which revolves around the high school football team in itty bitty Dillon, Texas. I’m not a fan of FNL, but I’ve seen enough episodes to recognize why so many of my friends are. It’s well written and acted and it portrays rural America in that seductive way Hollywood so often does: forlorn, earthy, mysteriously rife with gorgeous folks engaged in soap-operatic intrigue.

  Also, the producers were canny
enough to confront the dark side of high school football right from the start. The pilot features pushy boosters, unctuous recruiters, even a star quarterback who gets paralyzed in the season opener.

  To someone who did not grow up in this country, this might not seem like a promising launch. But Americans recognized it as a familiar enticement: a drama whose presentation of “real issues” is actually a form of moral flattery. People who would never allow their own kids to play football watch FNL and feel ennobled. Sure, the franchise is built on a slavish devotion to a game that uses and even disables children—but at least they cop to it, man!

  FNL also came along in an era when the big concern was traumatic injuries, which could be dismissed as freak accidents. There’s no consideration of cognitive impairment on the show. In fact, you barely ever see a student in class. Dillon High exists as a substrate for its football team.

  And football isn’t just football. It’s the local brand of redemption. The pilot includes a scene in which revered quarterback Jason Street gives a bunch of Pop Warner players an inspirational speech, then asks everyone to kneel in prayer. “Do you think God loves football?” one of the moppets asks.

  “I think everybody loves football,” the QB says.

  We are left to consider (or not consider) the theological implications of Street’s subsequent spinal cord injury. God’s favorite sport apparently mandates that a few of His children be sacrificed.

  The star of the show is head coach Eric Taylor, who exudes a beleaguered dignity, which masks the fact that his techniques are actually kind of horrifying. When his hunky star fullback shows up to practice half drunk, Taylor knows just what to do: he has his players circle around the boy and take turns smashing him into the turf, as rock music blares in the background and the coach yells “Get up, son” in his best John Wayne twang. But don’t worry. Punishing this kid by turning him into a human tackling dummy doesn’t hemorrhage his brain or rupture his spine. It saves his soul. Tough love. Rehab in shoulder pads.