Against Football

by Steve Almond

  That’s what the NFL is banking on these next few years—hypocrisy, basically—as more stories emerge about the tortured lives of retired players. Many of them can’t walk, sit down or remember anything. Some battle debilitating headaches and gulp down pills like they’re peanuts. A few weeks ago, Jim McMahon confessed in an interview that his short-term memory was gone, then admitted he wouldn’t even remember the interview as he was giving it. You hear these things, you sigh, you feel remorse, you forget … and then you go back to looking forward to the next football season. Gregg Williams crossed the line; he won’t be there. I just wish someone would decide, once and for all, where that line really is.

  Listen: Bill Simmons is a smart, compassionate guy. And like a lot of smart, compassionate guys, he is genuinely troubled by the damage done to football players. But what he’s doing here is pretty bush league. He’s performing that old American jujitsu: using acknowledgement of a problem as a form of absolution. He’s letting himself, and the rest of us, off the hook.

  But Bill Simmons knows the truth: we set the line. We, the fans. Not Roger Goodell. Not Congress. Not some squad of avenging lawyers. Us.

  And specifically, Bill Simmons. He is, after all, the most influential booster in America, a guy with millions of followers and enough platforms to construct his own sports-themed pagoda. He has more power over the viewing and interpretive habits of fans than any other person in America.

  If Bill Simmons declared tomorrow that he was drawing the line, that he refused to be a hypocrite, that he could no longer choose his own viewing pleasure over his conscience, there would be a collective freak-out in the world of American sports. Plenty of fans and players and colleagues would repudiate him. But a lot of others would do some necessary soul-searching. The discussion around football would become—at least in some precincts—a genuine ethical debate rather than an ablution performed before the next big game. At the very least, fans would at last be talking about their true role in the process: as sponsors of the game.

  It’s not like there’s no historical precedent. In 1984, Howard Cosell, the most famous sportscaster in America, called a championship fight between Larry Holmes and Tex Cobb. He was so distressed at the beating Cobb took that he announced, in disgust, that he would never call another fight. He never did. Cosell may have been a raging egotist and a shameless grandstander, but he was also a rarity in the blinkered guild of sportscasters: a man not afraid to draw his own line. Did Cosell’s boycott end boxing as we know it? No. That’s not the point. You take a stand because it’s the right thing to do, not because it’s effective.

  I don’t mean to single out Bill Simmons. There are half a dozen sports pundits smart and principled enough to recognize that football is rotten on all sorts of levels. But when the mics click on, these guys all retreat into a familiar brand of sophistry.

  As often as I can, I listen to the opening rant of a guy named Colin Cowherd, who has a national show on ESPN. Cowherd is a terrific orator. He cuts right through the noise of the Athletic Industrial Complex. The guy has a keen bullshit detector. Like a lot of other top-tier hosts, Cowherd dutifully interviewed Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru about their chilling book, League of Denial, which details the NFL’s repugnant response to the concussion crisis.

  But his subsequent rant on the subject of NFL health risks sounded more like an apologia for the league. The real problem, he suggested, was media hype. He made the lives of former players sound like a wonderland of golf tournaments and free buffets. He ran an audio clip of Roger Goodell bragging about how NFL players enjoy longer-than-average lives, never bothering to inform his listeners that this claim is, at best, disputed. Then he ticked through a litany of more dangerous jobs, conveniently neglecting that football players, unlike crane operators, get injured playing a game for the entertainment of fans like him.

  The same thing happens every time a new report forces these guys to confront football’s dark side. They trot out the same bromides and subtract themselves (and us) from the equation. ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt reacted to a Frontline documentary on NFL concussions by reminding listeners that players choose this life, and most would do so again. He urged listeners to watch the show with an open mind, then shared his takeaway: “I found myself asking this last night: In what way does what I heard impact me? And the answer, honestly, is it doesn’t.”

  That settles that.

  I understand that sports pundits live in the bubble of fandom. It’s not just a matter of personal preference. They, and the networks that employ them, are professionally beholden to the NFL. But their rationalizations often devolve into a kind of might-makes-right gospel that feels creepy and frankly fascistic to me. “Football is the most popular thing in America,” Scott Van Pelt intoned. “Not the most popular sport. The most popular thing.”

  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:

  Now, I realize an argument can be made that eroticized violence is inherent to any collision spectator sport, and that people who love football are tacitly endorsing (and unconsciously embracing) a barbaric activity that damages human bodies for entertainment and money. I get that, and I don’t think the argument is weak.<
br />
  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:

  Imagine two vertical, parallel lines accelerating skyward—that’s what football is like now. On the one hand, there is no way that a cognizant world can continue adoring a game where the end result is dementia and death; on the other hand, there is no way you can feasibly eliminate a sport that generates so much revenue (for so many people) and is so deeply beloved by everyday citizens who will never have to absorb the punishment.

  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:

  I’m a big football fan, but I have to tell you if I had a son, I’d have to think long and hard before I let him play football. And I think that those of us who love the sport are going to have to wrestle with the fact that it will probably change gradually to try to reduce some of the violence. In some cases, that may make it a little bit less exciting, but it will be a whole lot better for the players, and those of us who are fans maybe won’t have to examine our consciences quite as much.

  A few months later, he added:

  I would not let my son play pro football. At this point, there’s a little bit of a caveat emptor. These guys, they know what they’re doing. They know what they’re buying into. It is no longer a secret. It’s sort of the feeling I have about smokers, you know?

  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.

  EPILOGUE

  STOP BEING A FAN, START BEING A PLAYER

  How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

  —Benjamin Disraeli

  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.

  • Revoke the NFL’s non-profit status

  Should have been done forty years ago.

  • Require that allocation of public funds for sports facilities be approved by public referendum

  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 w
hile 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.

  • Institute a parental discretion warning before football games

  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?

  • Enforce a weight limit on players and/or teams

  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.

  • Create a helmet that records every sub-concussive hit

  Most medical experts agree that there is no way around the basic physics of football: players colliding at high speeds cause brain traumas. No magic helmet is going to change that.

  However, as researchers at the University of North Carolina and Purdue have shown, the technology does exist to measure the overall impact absorbed by a particular player. So why not monitor impact and mandate benching players who amass too many Gs? This would create an incentive for coaches and players to avoid the style of play (“Lead with your head, son!”) that results in brain injuries.