Against Football (17 page)

One of the most disturbing memories of my childhood is a vicious brawl I had with my older brother Dave, which took place in our TV room. At some point, my dad came into the room. He didn't break things up. As I remember it, he urged me on. He knew that Dave bullied me a lot and I think he liked seeing me stand up for myself. He was proud of me afterward, but I wept in humiliation. And I'm still struggling with all this shit years later. I still have to fight the impulse to watch clips of the Raiders' glory days on YouTube—or worse, old boxing matches.

But sometimes I look around at the prevailing landscape
and I think: we're all hopped up on the same bad brew of rage and fear and grievance. We're ready to shoot each other in traffic. We're treating the provision of health care to poor people as some kind of conspiracy. We've forgotten that we once fought a War on Poverty. Maybe D.H. Lawrence was right. Maybe the essential American soul is “hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.”

And then there are other times, when I remember the symptoms associated with CTE—loss of memory, problems focusing, mood swings, impaired judgment—and lean toward a slightly more hopeful conclusion.

Maybe our entire Republic is concussed.

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:

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.
”