But What If We're Wrong? (17 page)

This is what happens when any populist, uncomfortable thought is expressed on television.

There's an embedded assumption within all arguments regarding the doomed nature of football. The assumption is that the game is even more violent and damaging than it superficially appears, and that as more people realize this (and/or refuse to deny the medical evidence verifying that damage), the game's fan support will disappear. The mistake made by those advocating this position is their certitude that this perspective is self-evident. It's
not. These advocates remind me of an apocryphal quote attributed to film critic Pauline Kael after the 1972 presidential election: “How could Nixon have won? I don't know one person who voted for him.” Now, Kael never actually said this.
59
But that erroneous quote survives as the best shorthand example for why smart people tend to be wrong as often as their not-so-smart peers—they work from the flawed premise that their worldview is standard. The contemporary stance on football's risk
feels
unilateral, because nobody goes around saying, “Modern life is not violent enough.” Yet this sentiment quietly exists. And what those who believe it say instead is, “I love football. It's the last bastion of hope for toughness in America.” It's not difficult to imagine a future where the semantic distance between those statements is nonexistent. And if that happens, football will change from a popular leisure pastime to an unpopular political necessity.

When discussing football's future, the gut reaction is to try to reconcile its current condition with whatever we imagine the future will be like. At present, football is a problematic monolith, and it seems unlikely that such monolithic status can be sustained over time. But you don't need to remain monolithic if your core constituency cares more deeply than those who want the monolith destroyed. Football could lose 75 percent of its audience and matter just as much as it does now, assuming the people who stick with the game view it as a sanctuary from a modern world they distrust. Over time, it could really,
really
“mean something” to love
football, in a context that isn't related to sports at all. It could be a signifier for an idea that can't be otherwise expressed—the belief that removing physicality from the public sphere does not remove it from reality, and that attempts to do so weaken the republic. Football could become a dead game to the casual sports fan without losing a fraction of its cultural influence. It could become the only way for a certain kind of person to safely access the kind of controlled violence he sees as a critical part of life.

“But look what happened to boxing,” people will say (and these people sometimes include me). “Boxing was the biggest sport in America during the 1920s, and now it exists on the fringes of society. It was just too brutal.” Yet when Floyd Mayweather fought Manny Pacquiao in May of 2015, the fight grossed $400 million, and the main complaint from spectators was that the fight was not brutal
enough
. Because it operates on a much smaller scale, boxing is—inside its own crooked version of reality—flourishing. It doesn't seem like it, because the average person doesn't care. But boxing doesn't need average people. It's not really a sport anymore. It's a mildly perverse masculine novelty, and that's enough to keep it relevant. It must also be noted that boxing's wounds were mostly self-inflicted. Its internal corruption was more damaging than its veneration of violence, and much of its fanbase left of their own accord. Conversely, football is experiencing a different type of crisis—there is a sense that the game is being
taken
from fans, and mostly by snooty strangers who never liked the sport in the first place. It will come to be seen as the persecution of a culture. This makes football akin to the Confederate flag, or Christmas decorations in public spaces, or taxpayer-supported art depicting
Jesus in a tank of urine—something that becomes intractable precisely
because
so many people want to see it eliminated. The game's violence would save it, and it would never go away.

[
3
]
But then—sometimes—I think something else.

[
4
]
During the first week of 2015, I interviewed Los Angeles Lakers guard Kobe Bryant in a pancake house. It was a short conversation, but we covered a lot of ground—his lack of close friends, the rape accusations levied against him in 2003, his self-perceived similarities to Mozart. It was the best interview experience I'd ever had with an athlete. At one point, we were talking about film, and I asked Kobe if he'd seen the movie
Whiplash
. “Of course,” he said. “That's me.” The trajectory of the conversation switched after he said this, so I was never able to ask a follow-up; I was never able to ask if he meant that he saw himself as the film's protagonist, its antagonist, or a human incarnation of the entire movie. All three possibilities seemed plausible.

Whiplash
is a movie about conservatory jazz, but it's really a sports movie. It's about a teenage drumming prodigy (Miles Teller) who will do whatever it takes to be great, even though he's never really considered what “greatness” signifies. He becomes the pupil of an esteemed, sociopathic jazz instructor (J. K. Simmons) who proceeds to verbally and physically abuse him, relentlessly manipulating his emotions. The character Simmons embodies believes this cruelty is the only true path to genius. “There are no
two words in the English language more harmful than ‘good job,'” he says without discernible emotion. What sets this film apart is its unexpected conclusion:
The abuse works.
Simmons's unethical, unacceptable mistreatment of Teller is precisely what pushes him to transcendence. He is, essentially, pounded into greatness.

The broad response to
Whiplash
was positive. It's a good movie—there are a few unrealistic twists, but the acting is excellent (Simmons won an Academy Award) and the emotional resonance is hard to deny. It was well reviewed and made decent money. Yet the more political, more sophisticated takes on
Whiplash
inevitably implied that something about this movie was immoral, in a deeper context unrelated to film.
Whiplash
was entertaining, these critics would always concede, but it got something wrong: It got jazz wrong, or it got race wrong, or it latently supported the patriarchy, or it glorified masochism. But I suspect all of those critiques were veiled attempts at expressing discomfort with the movie's bedrock theme, a notion that has been entirely eradicated from the popular culture. Only Richard Brody of
The New Yorker
came close to saying this directly: “To justify his methods,” he writes, “[Simmons] tells [Teller] that the worst thing you can tell a young artist is ‘Good job,' because self-satisfaction and complacency are the enemies of artistic progress . . . and it's utter, despicable nonsense. There's nothing wrong with ‘Good job,' because a real artist won't be gulled or lulled into self-satisfaction by it: real artists are hard on themselves, curious to learn what they don't know and to push themselves ahead.”

Socially, this is absolutely the way we have been conditioned to think. The idea that greatness is generated through pain and adversity and fear is not just an unpopular position—when applied
to the lives of young people, it's practically a criminal act. The modern goal is to
remove
those things from whatever extracurricular pursuit any young person is pursuing. Now, the logic behind this is hard to criticize: What is the value of a hobby that makes a kid unhappy? The response, I suppose, is that someday that kid will be an adult (and scenarios involving adversity and fear won't be optional). But I'm not interested in the argument over whether this is positive or negative. I'm simply wondering if the overall state of society is—very slowly, and almost imperceptibly—moving toward a collective condition where team sports don't have a place. In other words, a distant future where football disappears, followed by every other sport with vaguely similar values. Which, to varying degrees, is every team sport there is.

A few days before Super Bowl XLIX, the public radio show
Radiolab
produced an episode on football,
60
specifically its origin and its troubling appeal (they essentially billed it as a football show for people who don't like football, which is how they see their audience). Midway through the episode, the show's producers try to mathematically verify if youth participation in football is decreasing as much as we suspect. It is. But the specificity of that stat is deceiving: It turns out youth participation is down for all major sports—football, basketball, baseball, and even soccer (the so-called sport of the future). Around the same time,
The Wall Street Journal
ran a similar story with similar statistics: For all kids between six and eighteen (boys and girls alike), overall
participation in team sports was down 4 percent. Surprisingly, basketball took a bigger hit than football.

As part of their investigation, the
Radiolab
staff contacted a cross-section of youth football coaches and asked why this is happening. The producers mildly scoffed at the coaches' answers, all of which were eerily similar: video games. “The bottom line is that—today—if the kid doesn't like the score, he just hits restart. He starts the game over.” This is a quote from a youth coach in Louisiana, but it was mirrored by almost every coach
Radiolab
encountered. On the surface, it seemed like the reactionary complaint of a Luddite. But sometimes the reactionaries are right. It's wholly possible that the nature of electronic gaming has instilled an expectation of success in young people that makes physical sports less desirable. There's also the possibility that video games are more inclusive, that they give the child more control, and that they're simply easier for kids who lack natural physical gifts. All of which point to an incontestable conclusion: Compared to traditional athletics, video game culture is much closer to the (allegedly) enlightened world we (supposedly) want to inhabit.

Should physical differences matter more than intellectual differences? Should the ability to intimidate another person be rewarded? Is it acceptable to scream at a person in order to shape his behavior? Should masculinity, in any context, be prioritized? The growing consensus regarding all of these questions is no. Yet these are ingrained aspects of competitive sports, all the way back to Sparta. A key reason college football came into existence in the late nineteenth century was that veterans who'd fought in the Civil War feared the next generation of men would be soft and ill
prepared for the building of a republic (“We gotta give these boys something to do,” these veterans believed. “Hell, they'll probably go through life without killing
anyone
!”). We inject sports with meaning because
they are supposed to mean something
. So what happens when the things they signify are no longer desirable traits? It would mean the only value sports offer is their value as an aerobic entertainment commodity. And that would make it the equivalent of a fad, with the inherently finite life span all fads possess.

In 2014, the NCAA implemented a playoff system for major college football. They did not, however, end the traditional bowl system—if you include the two semifinal games and the championship, there are still around forty bowl games played throughout December and January. What emerged from this structure was a fascinating trend: The only people interested in these games were the people watching on television. The Camellia Bowl pitted Bowling Green against South Alabama. The game was played in the state of Alabama, less than six hours from the South Alabama campus. Somehow, it drew just 20,256 fans. But the TV audience was relatively huge—around 1.2 million viewers. The gap for the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl was even greater—the human attendance was under 18,000 while the TV audience approached 1.5 million. This prompted
USA Today
to examine the bizarre possibility of future bowl games being played inside gigantic television studios, devoid of crowds. Crazy as that may sound, there would be some real practicality to this. With no concern for a live audience, the entire event could be constructed to maximize the TV experience. The whole facility could serve as a camera, and the visuals would be unprecedented. But this kind of fantastical speculation speaks to a broader change in how sports are now perceived. It reframes football as a
simulation, not that far removed from a movie. The sole purpose of the event would be to fill a three-hour window of programming on ESPN2, and—if a better, cheaper alternative could be aired in its place—the game would have no purpose at all. Yes, the players would still be real. Yes, the hitting would still hurt. But if all this is merely a distraction to stare at on a pixelated screen, why would the human element remain essential? Robot players would work just as well. CGI players would work even better. It could
literally
be a video game, controlled and manipulated by a computer. Then we wouldn't have any problems at all. It would just be a TV show that provides an opportunity for gambling.

This, obviously, is not something that could (or would) happen overnight. It would take multiple decades and multiple generations, and it would require our current socioeconomic arc to remain unchanged (which, as I've now latently stated countless times, almost never happens). It also denies the long-held assumption that physical games are a natural manifestation for a species that is fundamentally competitive, and that team sports are simply adult versions of the same impulse that prompts any two five-year-olds to race across the playground in order to see who's faster. When I mentioned this theory to a friend who works for ESPN, he thought about it for a long time before saying, “I guess I just can't imagine a world where sports don't exist. It would seem like a totally different world.” Well, he's right. It would be a totally different world. But different worlds are created all the time, and the world we're currently building does not reasonably intersect with the darker realities of team sports. We want a pain-free world where everyone is the same, even if they are not. That can't happen if we're still keeping
score.