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NYT: Is It Wrong to Watch Football?
In the hype leading up to Super Bowl 50, many journalists are asking whether football should be watched at all. The Cleveland Plain Dealer offered the headline “Football and its unavoidable violence is becoming a moral dilemma,” while USA Today and the CBC ran two different stories sharing the title “Is it immoral to watch the Super Bowl?”
The New York Times held a colloquy on the issue, inviting two former NFL players and two laypeople to answer the question, “how can fans enjoy watching a game that helps ruin players’ lives?” I’m quick to dismiss elitist sniffery at the simple joys of blue-collar entertainment, be it the proliferation of chain restaurants or the love of shoot-’em-up movies, but the Gray Lady’s coverage was more balanced that I had expected. Below are brief excerpts of each argument.
Football is a spectacle of extreme athleticism, controlled mayhem and violence that entertains our thirst for domination. To really appreciate the glories of the game and what it does, though, maybe fans should watch more of it, and get closer to the real game.
Try 24-hour coverage of a player’s life, as they pop pills and get surgery. Then ‘game suits’ can let fans feel every ‘tremendous hit’ on the field.
Perhaps, to really show the game fully and augment the experience, telemetric technology imbedded in uniforms could inform viewers of the condition of the anterior cruciate ligament, broken forearm or separated shoulder of their favorite players.
Helmets could discolor and ooze when the dura mater in a player’s cranium is damaged…
My God, how brave and proud we must feel! Watch. Watch closely. See everything.
Over the last few years, the N.F.L. has made 39 rule changes to enhance player safety. Kickoffs were moved to the 35-yard line from the 30-yard line to increase touchbacks and decrease dangerous kickoff returns. A more rigorous protocol was established for dealing with concussions. Independent medical spotters can now call a timeout if they see that a player may have been concussed. Receivers on a pass that is intercepted are now classified as defenseless players. These are just a few recent changes that have had measurable results…
So as you watch the Super Bowl on Sunday, know you are watching an evolving game and that it is safer than it has ever been. Football has great life lessons and instead of shunning it, let’s all come together to make the game safer.
The thrill of watching a player get up after a big hit has been replaced with the concern that he’s unknowingly suffering permanent brain damage – damage the N.F.L. has gone to extreme lengths to cover up. While the N.F.L. punished Mike Vick for victimizing animals for sport, they knowingly victimized humans for sport.
Further, the N.F.L.’s influence has turned college athletics into a minor league with major problems. Players are recruited too young, used up too quickly, and left ill-prepared for the real world when their careers flame out, their young bodies riddled with arthritis, their future brains ripe with C.T.E.
The San Francisco 49ers linebacker Chris Borland retired last year at age 24 because of concerns about concussions. But John Urschel, an offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens who loves the challenge and elegance of mathematics, continues to play because he loves the game as well.
They are free to make their choices. Sports have the potential to give voices to the disenfranchised, and they provide economic and educational opportunities available to young African-American men. When I profiled Josh Norman of the Carolina Panthers, I saw how he used his nonprofit, Starz24, to address issues of food insecurity and income disparity in his hometown of Greenwood, S.C. I realized that for some athletes, the football field is a platform for larger aspirations — it gives them a chance to nurture young athletes and be an inspiration in their communities.
Football is my favorite sport, hands down. My primary complaints with the NFL are the constant stoppage of play and the barrage of flags for the mildest infractions or celebrations — Roger Goodell has overseen its descent into the No Fun League.
A career in football undeniably has physical consequences, but so does any job that requires physical exertion. Talk to a 40-something construction worker, small farmer, or stewardess and they’ll complain about the aches, pains, and surgeries required from their often grueling routine. If physical safety was the only concern, we would ban millions of jobs as inhumane.
I agree most with ex-NFLer Marvin Washington who notes that the game is safer than it has ever been and will only get better. What do you think, Ricochetti: has the recent coverage of football-related injuries lessened your enthusiasm for the game?
Published in Sports
I figure the government and it media arm will be just fine with the NFL after they figure out a new set of regulation, taxes, fines and penalties. Their is just so much money in sports and it needs to pay its “fair share”.
Well I was on Ricochet too, but I know what you mean.
I’m with McReynolds. The NFL is the Donald Trump of sports. It’s popular because it’s popular. No there there anymore. This game tonight is awful. An embarrassment.
Once horse racing dominated the headlines. Once boxing. Now football. It’s time is passing.
It will die because great athletes have better choices.
Buncha beta males who never made the team, that’s all this is about.
Yep.
They are the male counterparts of the Andrea Dworkins picketing the Miss America contest and calling supermodels “genetic freaks,” as if that will make people find them ugly. Good luck with that.
I’ve played tackle football with and without protective equipment in my school days. I went on to become an Army airborne infantryman then a Special Forces soldier. Everyone I met in S.F. liked sports with physical contact whether they were high school graduates or PhD’s. Given the activities of my choice along the way I had a couple of concussions.
I choose to live that life and wouldn’t go back and change a thing. After my second concussion, the results of an unfortunate parachute landing decision, my physician discussed with me the long term consequences of my profession. This was in 1971. I post this so all can understand that getting concussions from hitting your head hard on stuff has been well known throughout my life.
So what changed that has made someone whose not my mother care about my choices? What I see is nothing new or bold, just the continued assault on a way of life that not everyone wanted to participate in as they couldn’t deal with the potential consequences. Now these folks have some power and are lording it over all institutions to which they are opposed. They present arguments that cause me to change or finance without my permission. I don’t like it but really can’t offer a solution and don’t want to just give up.
The NFL is one of the last meritocracies. The Left hates that. They’ve already done their evil work on the military, and even they know they’ll never get away with “there aren’t enough Asians and women in the NFL,” so they try this method instead. They are systematically dismantling America.
To be a leftist is to live in fear that somebody, somewhere will make a consequential decision for himself or his loved ones.
That’s right, and much of the Republican Party and the so-called “conservative” movement sits idly by and does nothing. I’m disgusted.
I am too, and I’m seriously considering moving to an island somewhere.
Sounds like a good idea. We just need to give it a name…
I actually watched most the game tonight, I haven’t watched football in a while and I was surprised the kicking off from the 35 yard line thing.
I am glad I watched and got to see me Broncos win another super-bowl. However, it was the ugliest Superbowl win I have ever scene. How many times has a defensive player won Superbowl MVP? It certainly was the Denver D that got the win tonight.
Liberals/leftists love to infringe on individual liberty and individual decision-making because, you know, everybody knows that liberals know best how people should behave and what work people should participate in.
But every time I listen to current and past football players, most tend to speak positively about the game and to say they were happy and grateful to be able to play the game of football. So, in my book, as long as they are aware of the risks involved in that occupation, they can freely participate in it and customers should decide without the slightest of any inkling of guilt if they wish to accommodate these players’ desires.
I,for one, gladly, enthusiastically, unhindered by these feminized, metrosexual liberal/leftist angst and accusatory, totalitarian finger-wagging, willingly surrender my dollars to accommodate these football players’ wishes to play the game of football. As an unwashed, unrepentant fan, I sneer at these ridiculous feminized nobodies of liberalism and the papers for their frivolous slander of football and the people who play and watch football.
That’s exactly the point, as I see it. I think anyone old enough to enlist in the military, as Kozak points out, is old enough to make this decision for himself. But no one who’s able to play at the professional level began playing at any kind of meaningful age of consent. We don’t allow twelve-year-olds to enlist in the military. Or drive, or drink, or have sex, or make any other decision the consequences of which they can’t understand at that age. And playing football isn’t like joining the military. It’s neither heroic nor an act of sacrifice. Unlike people in the military, they’re doing what they do to entertain us. I don’t think I should be entertained by the sight of people engaging in self-destructive behavior. I don’t find it hilarious to watch young men take drug overdoses, after all. And given what we now understand about the risk of brain injury associated with certain sports, no, I don’t feel it’s particularly noble to watch it.
I’d also argue that brain injuries are different from the sprains and contusions common among other kinds of athletes.
While I wouldn’t agree that the government should be mixed up in legislating this, there’s a difference between saying, “It’s not the state’s business” and saying, “My participation in this activity is good.”
I don’t watch it often, but when I do I enjoy it. What bothered me last night was the hype, it was some kind of religious frenzy. It’s just a game and risky like a lot of jobs but pays a hell of a lot more and is fun. Someone will design better helmets and other devices. It’s good that players know the risks. Keep the government out of it.
The problem is just that – you can’t. You would have to design a better human head. There is a space between your brain and skull and concussion is caused by the violent forward motion of the brain into the bone. No amount of outside cushion is going to change the inside anatomy.
Football is taking steps to try and limit the damage. Starting with the youngest players they are being instructed to not use their heads. This is not just an issue for Football. Boxing, Hockey, Rugby, and even Soccer, preferred team activity for the Hive in the US, has a CTE issue.
Funny for generations young men have survived those sports, and many, many of them have benefited from the activity both physically and mentally. We’ve been here before with football.
How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football
What is good then? If we take life this seriously we’ll never do anything. Boxing, hockey, gymnastics? How about those insane cheerleading competitions? Pro Bowlers probably have terrible arm and wrist pain.
A friend recently fell while Ice skating with her children. Terrible concussion. Too risky?
Certainly there are activities that are too extreme. But football seems well within the boundary of human sporting activity.
I let my son play football for several years when he was a kid. It was before CTE was known about. Even then his pediatrician tried to get me to have him play soccer instead, which is not a viable option if your kid loves football. He stopped playing in high school when he realized he wasn’t good at it, but he had always loved the game and still does. I don’t think youth football should be banned, but the potential consequences are something we should think about, particularly at the high school level.
PeeWee football coaches are volunteers. Most are great, but there are some who want to win at all costs. Those are the ones to watch for, but that’s a parent’s job. And sometimes it’s the parents pushing the kid too hard. Anyone who has ever had a kid play youth sports knows exactly the type of parent and coach I’m speaking of.
Funny story, though. The worst injury I’ve ever personally witnessed at a youth sporting event was at my daughter’s soccer game. One of her teammates had her femur broken by a member of the opposing team while they were tangling over the ball. (The girl clamped the teammate’s thigh between between hers to trap it and when they fell her thigh was twisted hard enough to break the bone.) These were 10 and 11 yo girls. That was horrifying.
Another friend has a son who plays football. Last year he fell while learning to ski. Concussion symptoms for months. Has never been hurt playing football.
My middle child was on a competitive cheerleading squad for several years. More injuries than any other sport any of my other kids participated in. My daughter pulled both hamstrings and broke her hand (kept tumbling until the end of practice on it. I was not happy when I arrived to pick her up.) Once she was getting bruised on her bicep from her teammates elbow slamming into her when they caught the flyer after tossing her in the air. The bruise got so bad I told her if she didn’t make sure get coached addressed the problem, I would. She loved every second of it, and talk about a meritocracy? Those girls knew that they might get a trophy for participating, but it was meaningless if it wasn’t first place, or didn’t earn them a bid to the championships.
It seems to be quite a bit more dangerous than most sporting activity. Concussions, we’re learning, are a lot more dangerous than we’d thought. As new evidence comes in, I do change my mind about what “reasonable risk” involves. I loved smoking, and I fully understand people who say life isn’t worth living if you can’t smoke, but ultimately the overwhelming weight of the evidence persuaded me I’d rather live the extra twenty years.
“Terrible arm and wrist pain,” or the pains associated with your typical gymnastic or ice-skating injuries, are not on the same order of suffering as the ghastly neurological, neurocognitive, and psychological illnesses prevalent among former professional football players. Parkinson’s and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis aren’t afflictions like a sore wrist or a broken leg — ALS, in particular, is worse than death.
The new evidence has changed my view about what risks I personally want to take. I’m much less enthusiastic about sports with a high concussion risk now that I know this.
The question wasn’t whether it should be illegal, it was whether we should feel guilty for watching this. And my answer is yes. It’s wrong to enjoy watching people do things that very likely to be harmful to them.
It’s famous for that, yes. But concussion risk?
But you seem willing to enjoy watching people do some less significant level of harm to themselves?
Is any sport that involves potential for significant brain injury off the list? Or only those sports with some significant chance? In other words, Boxing and Football = great chance, Hockey and Soccer a little less, gymnastics and skiing less yet.
Mostly for the flyers, depending on how good the people holding them up and catching them. Spinal/neck injuries are a real possibility when you are spinning in the air and dropping from a great height, or from having a person fall on your head from a great height. But those are things that are anomalies which happen if something goes wrong, not an intrinsic part of the sport as is the case with football.
Many football parents I know are young parents who don’t pay attention to the news and who may not be fully aware of the risks. Probably would not be a bad idea for youth organizations to have a parent meeting to talk about these things. (Mandated at the organizational level, not by the government.) I’m guessing most parents wouldn’t change their minds, which is fine, but at least they are making a more informed decision.
Claire it’s more then concussions. There is a risk of CTE with any repetitive impacts. That includes heading the ball in soccer.
Chronic traumatic brain injury in professional soccer players
So add Soccer, Rugby, Australian rules football and God only knows how many other sports and activities to the list.
Add them, then. If we now understand that the risks are much greater than we realized, it’s time to change our minds about whether the benefits of the pleasure these sports bring us outweigh the risks of terrible long-term damage to the people who play them.
It’s not hard to convince me on rugby, a friend of mine was left a quadriplegic at the age of 18 after a rugby accident.
Sure. If the risk is small, it’s part of life, which we can’t make risk-free. When risk exceeds a certain level, we revise our opinions about whether the activity is common-sensical. It’s neurotic to avoid swimming entirely because you could be attacked by a shark, but it’s nuts to swim in waters known to be shark-infested.