One man’s decision to give football a permanent time out.
Two summers ago, in the bleary days after the birth of my third child, I received a phone call from my older brother Dave in California. “Something’s happened to mom,” he said. Dave is a doctor. His approach to medical concerns is calm and clinical. He sounded neither. He informed me that our mom had fallen and was experiencing “some sort of episode.”
“What does that mean?” I said.
“I’m not sure. Her legs just stopped working. And she doesn’t seem aware of where she is.” Dave paused. “You’d better get out here.”
I immediately booked a flight from my home in Boston to San Francisco. By the time I arrived, mom was in intensive care. Her face was deeply bruised from the fall. She stared in confusion at the IVs taped to her arms. “Something terrible is happening to me,” she whispered. Then she began to weep.
The closest we could get to an official diagnosis was a progressive dementia that had been masked for years, then triggered by the fall. In the space of a few days, mom had gone from working as a full-time psychiatrist to, it appeared, needing around-the-clock care.
In the end, that is not what happened. Against all expectations, my mother returned home and recovered her cognitive function. And yet seeing her so anguished and vulnerable sparked a curious association: I began to think about retired football players and all the reports about gridiron heroes who now have dementia. None of it had seemed real until I walked into my mother’s ICU room. This was what America’s favorite sport did to its bravest practitioners, men such as Junior Seau and Mike Webster and Dave Duerson.
In this way (which is to say reluctantly), I began to grapple with a question I’d managed to avoid for more than four decades: Should I be watching football?
If you’re anything like me, some part of you may be pondering the same thing right now, especially during the season of the Super Bowl – which would be a national holiday if it weren’t held on a Sunday.
Like many other kids, I came to football because it provided a chance to connect with my father. We rooted for a team – the glorious, snarling Oakland Raiders of the 1970s – full of players as tough and fearless as I wished to be. Football offered me an arena where the chaotic aggression that often ruled our household was transmuted into a beautiful, intricate game.
I can still remember watching my favorite quarterback, Kenny Stabler, elude a pack of homicidal rushers and heave a spiral down the sidelines to Cliff Branch, who would leap and pluck the ball from the air. Later, I felt the rush of the game myself as a sandlot player – moments when my body was liberated from the doubt I carried around and given over to the joys of speed, leverage, and grace.
Even after getting knocked unconscious during a pickup game – I must have been about 10 years old – and despite blurry vision and a throbbing headache, I yearned to rejoin the fray. But I lacked the size and skill to play seriously, so I settled for devout fandom. I clung to the Raiders stubbornly, perhaps pathetically, even as the team descended into wretchedness. The way I saw it, football was a benign escape.
Then came my mother’s delirium. Suddenly the game was no longer just entertainment. I began to research how football functions and to ponder its moral hazards. What I discovered astonished me.
Consider this: The NFL – which generates revenues approaching $10 billion a year – is officially tax-exempt. It’s also a legal monopoly: In 1961, Congress granted the league the right to negotiate collectively. This led to a windfall of TV money and ushered in the era of “franchise free agency,” in which teams routinely threaten to abandon a city unless they get new facilities. Taxpayers in Minnesota are paying half a billion dollars for the Vikings’ new downtown stadium; folks in New Orleans paid twice that.
Having an NFL franchise boosts civic pride among fans and stimulates commerce on game days. But aside from a few thousand temporary, low-wage jobs, citizens never see an economic return on these investments. Cash is sucked from the public till and poured into the pockets of billionaire owners.
The NCAA operates on an even more cynical model. College players support an industry worth billions. They receive scholarships, but not one penny of the profits generated by their dangerous labors.
As a fan, I had often defended football by arguing that it provided a path to education and economic salvation for kids who might otherwise have none. But the more I scrutinized this argument, the flimsier it became. After all, only 1 in 500 high school seniors who plays football makes it to the NFL, and the average career lasts barely three seasons. What about the other 499 boys, the ones we never see dressed to kill on Draft Day, the ones who never ink the big contract?
To them, football no doubt imparts virtues such as discipline and teamwork. It might even get them to college. But most fans don’t care whether they learn anything there – we just want them ready to play on game day.
“To take pleasure in a football game requires us fans to suppress our empathy, to celebrate a form of masculinity that extols men for causing, and quietly absorbing, pain.”
And it’s a violent game. As much attention as recent scandals involving off-the-field violence have received, what’s more shocking is how eagerly we embrace the savagery on the field. To take pleasure in a football game requires us fans to suppress our empathy, to celebrate a form of masculinity that extols men for causing, and quietly absorbing, pain.
When it comes to player safety, we tell ourselves that the NFL will find a way to reform the game. But the sad truth is that the league spent years denying the link between football and cognitive ailments. This is why more than 5,000 former players sued the NFL, alleging a “concerted effort of deception,” including “industry-funded and falsified research.” As a result of this lawsuit, NFL officials recently admitted that they expect nearly a third of all retired players to wind up with some form of brain damage.
I met with Ann McKee, a neuropathologist who studies the brains of deceased players. She told me that the biggest threat on any given Sunday isn’t concussions but the thousands of sub-concussive hits inherent to the game. As players get bigger and stronger and faster at all levels, McKee explained, the risk grows.
One chilling study, conducted by researchers at Purdue University, revealed that high school players who had never been diagnosed with concussions showed diminished cognition and damage, including dramatic changes to their frontal lobes, by season’s end.
Amid this sobering data, I clung to one final rationalization – the “I’m Just a Fan” defense, if you will: that players knowingly incur risk and are lavishly rewarded for doing so. It was my wife who pointed out the obvious flaw in this logic: We fans built America’s vast Football Industrial Complex. Without us there would be no NFL, no Monday Night Football, no mind-boggling contracts. It is our rabid consumption that empowers those billionaire owners.
Having faced this inconvenient truth, I made a decision that would have been unthinkable even a year earlier: I went cold turkey on football.
It hasn’t been easy. I still love the game. I still feel the itch to watch every Sunday. The toughest part has been telling my friends. For years, we’d used football games as a form of bonding and a refuge from the pressures of family and work. My neighbor Sean still looks at me in disappointment before he heads off to watch a game at our local bar.
Folks who know I’ve quit watching football often ask if I’m hoping to trigger a mass boycott. The truth is, I don’t have any grand agenda. All I want is for fans like me to see the dark side of our national passion as well as its dazzling allure. I’m hoping they’ll grapple with the same question that dogs me every time the Super Bowl rolls around – should I watch football? – and that they’ll settle on whatever answer their own consciences recommend. – Steve Almond