I have no right to tell anyone what to do, especially when it comes to football. I’ve supported the game for four decades. No overnight conversion is going to undo that. But I do have a right, like all Americans, to speak about what I see.
Still, it’s worth asking why I’ve written this manifesto now, as opposed to, say, a decade ago when it would have been genuinely subversive. I’ve wondered the same thing myself.
Partly it’s because, though I enjoy watching the game more than ever, I don’t enjoy the way it makes me feel afterward, as if a part of me is still hiding from feelings I’d be better off to face, as well as wasting my precious dwindling years on a selfish trifle. I’ve got three kids of my own and a tired wife who needs more help around the house, and a world in need of activism not voyeurism.
All this makes for good PR, of course. But the main reason, I think, has to do with my ma.
Seven years ago, on a sunny day in July, while vacationing with the family in Lake Tahoe, my mother was hit by a truck. This happened while she was walking to the grocery store to buy ketchup for one or another of her picky grandchildren. The driver didn’t see her. His pickup knocked her to the ground.
Her injuries seemed minor initially. She wanted to get right up and keep walking which, fortunately, she was not allowed to do. She wound up in the hospital with internal bleeding and a hairline fracture of her pelvic bone, among other injuries. I mention this because it was really the first time I had seen my mother profoundly incapacitated, her nimble mind blurred by anesthesia.
The following summer, she was diagnosed with cancer, for which she received chemotherapy and underwent the first of two major surgeries. She complained of “chemo brain.” But like a lot of intelligent, ambitious people, she managed to conceal the more distressing symptoms. She continued to work as a psychoanalyst. She exercised. She traveled. She published a highly praised book on maternal ambivalence. And we, her loved ones, did our best to attribute her lapses to the general wear and tear one might expect to see in a seventy-five-year-old survivor of multiple cancers.
Then, two summers ago, she began to show more pronounced signs of cognitive decline. In July, she fell on her way to her office to see a patient, and tumbled into a state of delirium. She wound up at an intensive care unit at Stanford Hospital. My wife had just given birth to our third child, but my brothers worried that Mom might be dying and my father admitted he could use some help.
By the time I arrived, my mother’s condition had deteriorated. She swung between benign confusion and extreme disorientation. Often, she had no idea where she was and virtually no short-term memory. At one point, she asked where her mother had gone. She insisted she was in the midst of an awful dream and stared in bewilderment at the IVs taped to her arms. Her face was deeply bruised from the fall. She could not feed herself. When doctors asked her basic questions (“Do you know what year it is, Dr. Almond?”) she looked at them imploringly.
A nice young doctor sat my dad and me on a bench and told us that the official diagnosis—by which he really meant his best guess—was a progressive dementia that had been masked for years. In the space of a week, she had gone from a high-functioning professional to an invalid who needed around-the-clock monitoring.
One night, as I tried to explain to her for perhaps the tenth time that she could not go home yet, she looked at me in a panic. “Something terrible is happening to me,” she said, and began to weep inconsolably.
It was a moment of appalling lucidity. She could see, if only for a few drowning seconds, the true nature of her circumstance.
The next morning, I brought her a picture of her grandson Judah. I thought it might jog her memory, or at least cheer her up. She looked at the photo and began sobbing again.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
“I’m going to miss everyone,” she said.
The doctors talk about the brain as a mystery. What I realized in those sorrowful days is how holy the brain is. It is a temple that houses our fragile selfhood. We think, therefore we are. But if we cannot think, no matter how vigorous the body, we vanish.
As it turned out, my mom’s brain had fooled the docs. Her episode was an acute dementia, apparently triggered in part by medication. Once home, she made a dramatic recovery. She still struggles a bit with short-term memory, and has opted to cut back on her work schedule. Other than that, she’s more or less her old self. What we saw was, in effect, a sneak preview of a horror film we’re all hoping will never come back to town.
But no one can come face-to-face with dementia and look at football in the same way. At least, I couldn’t.
One thing that never ceases to amaze me about America is how much we trumpet our freedom of speech and, at the same time, how little use we make of it, how obedient we are to public consensus. As a population, we generally agree to regard that which is popular as worthy and that which is convenient as necessary. And we shy from even the most obvious statements of truth if they puncture our prevailing myths. Statements such as, America’s economic system incentivizes greed. Or, Smart phones are making people stupider. Or, It is immoral to watch a sport that causes brain damage.
Can you recall a single public figure who has ever condemned football? A major politician? A religious leader? A celebrity of any kind? The most prominent ones are probably Buzz Bissinger and Malcolm Gladwell. Back in 2012, the two of them teamed up to debate the merits of college football against two former players. At the outset of the debate, 16 percent of the audience was in favor of banning the sport in college. Afterward, that figure stood at 53 percent. Gladwell also had the guts to deliver a speech at the University of Pennsylvania a couple of years ago calling for students to boycott football at their school, though he was careful to note that he has no objection to those paid to play professionally.
There is, of course, an entire industry whose ostensible job is to report and comment on the world of sports. But with a few exceptions—most notably, PBS’s Frontline series and the investigative reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru—the world of sports “journalism” serves as a promotional division of the Athletic Industrial Complex.
If, like me, you are a fan of sports talk radio, you can tune in at any time of the day or night and hear an articulate and passionate discussion of the scandal du jour. Or you can just turn on your TV. The most popular radio shows are now (somewhat amazingly, considering the visuals) televised. In fact, sports punditry is the industry’s unrivaled growth sector, a universe of cheaply produced bombast that mimics the dominant form over on the cable “news” networks. Hosts earn their salaries going after almost any form of hypocrisy that might excite their audience: selfish players, incompetent coaches, meddlesome owners.
What sports pundits almost never do is speak about the inherent morality of watching sports, in particular football. They never ask us fans to consider our own complicity in the weekly parade of outrages. Because we fans, by definition at this point, are the victims. We’re the ones forever betrayed, ripped off, taken for granted.
One of my favorite sports pundits is Bill Simmons. In fact, he’s so good at what he does that it feels unfair to call him a pundit. He captures the joy and agony of fandom in self-effacing prose. He studies our games and offers generous insights. Simmons gets that sports are absurd and, at the same time, deeply meaningful. In the past few years, he’s become a TV star and launched a website, Grantland.com, dedicated to the idea that it’s possible to write intelligently about sports without being pretentious.
A couple of years ago, Simmons wrote a fascinating column about the bounty scandal mentioned above, in which the defensive coordinator of the New Orleans Saints, Gregg Williams, was caught offering players money for injuring opponents. Here’s how that piece concludes:
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.
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.