I was just a kid in March of 1962 when the Bennie “Kid” Paret and Emile Griffith squared off in a welterweight championship bout, a moment that I still think about all these years later. Griffith killed Paret in the ring, in part because a referee failed to stop the fight when Paret became powerless as he sagged against the ropes. Until that fight, I had enjoyed watching boxing bouts on television. But after the “Kid” died right in front of the nation’s television viewing eyes, I soured on the sport. I just did not have an appetite for such violence. Just recently, I soured on pro football. Any sporting event that brutalizes its participants is now on my list of games to avoid. Sure, I know, lots of athletic competitions may lead to hospital visits (or worse), but some competitions such as MMA, boxing, and NFL football are unambiguously injurious to combatants. If you choose to get involved in one of these sports, you will be hurt. Period.
Over the last few years, pro football has been flagged for unnecessary roughness because, as Bob Costas asserts, “this game destroys people’s brains.” An honest view of NFL football depicts freakishly big and muscular men smashing into one another, creating spectacles of violence for the pleasure of American fandom. Whether or not that pleasure falls into the sadistic classification, you decide. With some ambivalent feelings, I have decided that the game has become more blood sport than straight-up athletic competition. The bigger the hit, the louder the applause. A common sight in most every NFL game is a player down and being attended by trainers and medical people while a group of competitors from both teams take a knee as a show of sympathy, if not a suggestion of prayer, for the fallen player. No surprise because each player knows that one bone-crushing play can end a career and leave a body crippled. Or dead. More, ask any aging footballer how the knees, shoulders, and hips feel on an icy winter morning, and you’ll discover that no one graduates from the game without a long list of physical deficits. No one! Simply put, the game hurts people unlike any other American sport. Because football is so imbedded in American culture, it is difficult to turn away from it even when most of us know its harmful physical effects. But beyond damaging a player’s bones, brain, muscles, and soft tissues, other toxic results remain.
Steve Arnold, author of Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto, makes a case against the morality of the game, at least at the professional and collegiate levels.
“Football is a remarkably exciting game, but it also reinforces a lot of basic American pathologies around race, violence, greed, sexuality, sexual orientation, and we give a free pass,” he says. “We don’t even think of it as something that deserves moral scrutiny, when it’s the biggest thing in America. And that’s nuts.”
Steve Almond The moral case against football (Jeltson, 2014)
Lately, we have witnessed the flap over NFL players not standing for our national anthem, a restrained demonstration against the upsurge of killings of black men by policing agencies. As expected, many of the white owners of NFL teams saw these remonstrations as disrespectful to our flag, our military, and our nation, not to mention to the boss class of which those owners are a noteworthy part. Just take a look at the power structure of football, and the angle on racism becomes evident. Nearly 70 percent of the players in pro football are black. Guess how many owners are white? Take a look at how many quarterbacks are white. Now count the number of black quarterbacks. Hmmm—Those numbers sound about right to you?
On the topic of violence, the obvious presents itself. Do you think the game would have a large viewership if tackling were outlawed? How about some spirited flag football? Perhaps some two-hand touch? How many television commercials could the league sell if violent contact no longer was permitted? The peanut-munching crowd wants bloody heads and cracked bones. It’s just human nature, I guess. Shame on me. Shame on all of us.
Football has no place for wusses, you will agree. Ever since the Richie Incognito bullying incident a few years back, the notion of sexuality tolerance has been a stain of NFL football. Big boy football is a team game driven by floods of testosterone. The idea is to push people around. And, I’m sure it will take a while for the football culture to adapt to progressive changes in the larger society. But for now, football is measured in capacities of testosterone, the heterosexual paradigm of manliness, the pick-up driving, unrepentant thick-necked, smash-you-in-the-face-if-you-piss-me-off lowbrow tough guy. I know it is not fair to suggest that all footballers fit into this stereotypical description (they don’t), but for the sake of a workable snapshot, there you have it.
When Almond refers to “American pathologies” embedded in our favorite sport, he points to obvious disorders reflected in our larger society. Sure. We are sick and neurotic! Perhaps, then, if we change our culture we will by default change the way we play games or change the games themselves. Don’t hold your breath.
That is, one way to change who we are is to change the way we play games. Is that even possible? Should we accept that we are violent creatures and concede that our games are correspondingly violent? Really? Or should we take a greater interest in baseball, racket sports, golf, track and field, and so on? These less violent games, however, may simply be what methadone is to heroin, a substitute that masks the real addiction.
Really, how does one distinguish the dance from the dancer? And how do we change culture? Isn’t it more likely that the subsuming force of culture will change us rather than the other way around? Should we accept the notion that people are by nature violent and are thus condemned to blood sport games or contests that can be reduced to territorial struggles (hockey, football, soccer, basketball), i.e., games that simulate war? Can’t we simulate war in non-violent games? Chess, for instance, or, gosh, I don’t know, how about a board game such as Risk?
For all my liberal high-mindedness, I recall an incident from my sport-viewing youth. I was at a hockey game blabbing to my companion that hockey did not appeal to me because it was fiercely brutal. But there I sat—can’t remember why—in spite of my shallowly held beliefs. As I was demonstrating how morally worthy I had become, a fight started on the ice. An enforcer named Connie Madigan was playing for Portland, and he started swinging at one of our Seattle players. I broke off my sermon on non-violence as the fight got larger, the ice littered with sticks and gloves. Then I was on my feet. I have forgotten what I screamed, but I know that I encouraged our Totems to punch, kick, bite, and strangle those Portland stinkers. I am ashamed to admit how much of a hypocrite I was and continue to be. That confessed, I continue to believe that we can rise above our savage nature and play nicely.
In The African Queen, the besotted and intemperate captain of the boat played by Humphrey Bogart, says to Rose Sayer, the character played by Katherine Hepburn, “A man takes a drop too much once in a while, it's only human nature.”
Rose replies, “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.”
I keep trying.
(Jeltson, 2014, p. Huffpost)