Football has taken some hard hits in
the news recently, from domestic violence scandals to revelations about brain
damage. It has also become the gridiron for a culture war – on one side,
traditionalists who defend the game’s character-building values, and on the
other, a swelling tide of moral revulsion. Is football good for us? Or is it just
plain immoral?
Critics of the dehumanizing aspect
of the sport go back at least as far as the book Out of Their League in 1971, by a former NFL linebacker. Today bestselling
author Malcolm Gladwell arguably leads the charge to marginalize the sport,
having penned a 2009 article for The
New Yorker in which he equated
football with dogfighting. More recently, he dismissed the game in an
interview as “a moral abomination” that is “fundamentally out of touch with
the rest of us.”
Gladwell is not alone. Former fan
Steve Almond, author of the bluntly-titled Against
Football, judged in the Washington
Post that “Football
Has Proven its Moral Vacancy.” He too complained about the game’s “extreme
and inherent violence” and “horrifying health risks.” Basketball great LeBron
James said
recently that he doesn’t let his two sons play football for those same
reasons. Even President Obama told
The New Republic, “If I had a
son, I’d have to think long and hard before I let him play football.”
In football’s corner are authors
such as Daniel Flynn (The War on Football),
who lists the game’s benefits for young men: competition and camaraderie,
direction and discipline, male role models, and fun. Mark Edmundson (Why Football Matters) concurs with Flynn
but acknowledges that the sport is punishing and can encourage darker behavior
in some players.
Critics claim that that darker
behavior, like Ray Rice cold-cocking his fiancée in an elevator, proves that
football encourages a culture of violence for players which bleeds over
(literally) into their relationships and everyday lives. But the percentage of NFL
players arrested in any given year is actually lower than
the national average for men of the same age. Far and away the most common crime
NFL players are charged with is not domestic violence but driving under the
influence, and despite the recent bad publicity, this year is on track to be
the least criminal on record.
It’s easy to point to
sensationalized incidents like the Ray Rice videotape and say that football
creates a culture of violence. What doesn’t make the news is the positive
effect that football has had on countless kids in shaping their character and teaching
life lessons. Says New York Magazine’s
Jonathan Chait, in an article defending
male aggression:
Football channels
boys’ chauvinistic belligerence into supervised forms, shapes them within
boundaries, and gives them positive meaning. These virtues, like those often
attributed to the military, can feel like clichés imported from an earlier era
— and yet discipline and directed ambition are, as every social scientist
knows, the bedrock of success in adulthood.
However, the physical risks,
especially at the professional level, are undeniable. The NFL recently revealed
that nearly a third of retired players develop
long-term cognitive issues much earlier than people in general. “The idea that
we are paying people to engage in a sport for our own entertainment that causes
irreparable damage to themselves is appalling,” said a disgusted Gladwell.
He believes that one day we’ll look
back on football as reprehensibly savage, like we now view the gladiatorial
battles of ancient Rome. But we haven’t distanced ourselves all that much from
those bloody bouts: this summer the New
York Times reported on the rising popularity today of medieval jousting
– yes, jousting. In that piece, the writer described the crowd reaction at the
moment when one participant strikes the other squarely in the torso with his
lance, sending him flying: “It was as if someone had sent an electric current
through the arena’s aluminum bleachers. Men leapt to their feet with their
fists in the air. Teenage girls clutched one another’s arms.”
Gladwell would no doubt find that reaction
revolting, but it speaks to the fact that humanity, generally speaking, has a
violent streak. Look at the burgeoning popularity of mixed martial arts; cage
fighting is more brutal than boxing or football. Gladwell believes we are evolving
away from that propensity, but I am skeptical not only that we can, but that we
should.
Blood sports are a useful way for a
select few of us to channel that violence
relatively safely, while the audience experiences it cathartically. Football
is mock warfare that fulfills a primal need. Professional football players
accept and even embrace the violence and its punishing consequences in return not
only for the glory and/or money, but for the opportunity to test themselves and
others in ritualized battle.
Is that immoral? I think only where
the combatants have no choice in the matter, as in dogfighting or the
gladiatorial arena, and only if you believe that violence is immoral under any
circumstances. Yes, we have a responsibility to lessen the injurious
consequences to the players; fans love hard-hitting football, but they don’t
love watching players get carted off the field. To call the game “a moral
abomination” and do away with it altogether, however, is to be “fundamentally
out of touch” with the positives it offers – the competition and camaraderie,
direction and discipline – and with the primal function it serves.
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 11/26/14)
