let football live

[ram29jackson]

http://www.themorningnews.org/article/let-football-live

And now I cannot keep the balance, for the grace no longer justifies the violence, and the myths no longer justify the corruption. It turns out that the very act that gives the game its power—hitting—may be fatally flawed. It turns out that persistent blows to the head—especially if they involve concussions—damage the brain, in the worst cases causing something called chronic traumatic encephalopathy. This trouble with concussions began to be clear to the public only recently, but it turns out that it was clear to the leaders of the game up to 20 years ago and that they have covered it up, allowing not just relatively well-paid pros but also millions of high school students and youths to play in a way that might turn their brains into mush.

But my own gridiron crackup is not a result of this sudden public awareness of brain damage and reports of demented former players killing themselves to end their misery. I used to think that was the case, but it’s not. I could live with the risk of brain damage—even my own, maybe even my son’s—if I still held a deeper faith in the good of the game. But I’ve lost my faith, not just in the NFL, the NCAA, and whoever runs the youth leagues, but in the essence of football itself.

First and Ten

Football is not a religion—it lacks any real theology or spiritual component, no matter how intertwined it becomes with certain strains of Christianity and no matter how strongly you might feel about the genius of a coach like Vince Lombardi, the grace of a soaring wide receiver like Lynn Swann, or the supernatural curses placed upon select teams (you know, like mine). But just below the ultimate mysteries, the sport has taken hold as “the sacramental expression of the American way of life,” a way to find grace amid a frisson of brutality, which is a powerful tonic in our violence- and religion-driven land.

Football is central to the myth of one part of my family, and from my earliest days I loved it with all my heart, and that love soon turned to unquestioned faith. Football was about hearing stories of my grandfather playing with an actual pig bladder in his gritty Michigan railroad town, and then returning from the horror of liberating Europe in World War II to play college ball, one of those upwardly mobile vets who took out their frustrations on the soft kids who knew nothing of real combat.

[ram29jackson]

Through all these years, I’ve always liked the humble grittiness of the NFL players, and I still like NFL players today, the flashier the better, actually, because the violence and the grind seem to ground the showmanship in a way impossible in, say, basketball.

What I don’t like anymore is the NFL as an organization and its push toward a reactionary America. I don’t like the massive public theft that lies behind most stadium deals, the pandering to a military-industrial entertainment complex, even as the actual military is pushed beyond reasonable limits. To be honest, I don’t like the war stuff on any level. I’ve lived in war zones, and I’ve spent lots of time with homeless vets. The shtick of the football player as warrior or gladiator might have worked for a couple decades—in the middle of the Cold War perhaps—but not in this age of dirty, drone-filled endless war.

The “No Fun League” on TV has become harsher and the game is ever more beholden to technocratic and autocratic coaches and league officials. For me, football is starting to reflect the same American divide that brought us the government shutdown, the tea party, and Occupy Wall Street. It is becoming a socially conservative position to take in the culture wars.

But what I really don’t like is the cover-up on concussions, the fact that the powers that be chose evil over good and suppressed concerns and research about the effects of head injuries. And, no, I don’t care if the scandal is overblown, if the costs don’t merit the panic, if it’s all being fueled by the kind of risk-adverse middle-class neurosis that I usually scorn. That doesn’t make it right. There is now much talk about the possible death of football, and I’m certainly a bellwether—will the middle class “knowledge worker” and former college player give up the sport?

Yeah! Or, well, yeah, sure. You know, maybe.

For it is easy to be angry in print and another thing to actually leave the church. Let’s be honest. I’m going to watch games with my dad. Football—and by extension the heartless NFL—is my Rosebud. It is the repository of family, childhood, Buffalo, transcendent bliss, and obstacles overcome. It symbolizes barriers I smashed against, battles I fought, the way I molded my own masculinity, for better or for worse. I could never regret playing because it was never an option not to, and as I write this, I realize I desperately want to find a way to watch it in good conscience. I am moving back to California after 20 years away and that means temptation and expectation and a craving for the familiar as my kids leave the land of their Rosebuds and make the same journey I did to a more complicated (yet hopefully safe, sunny and happy) childhood.

Can I give them football? What would it take to make football all right?

Fourth and Long

What do I want out of football? I want football to change, and not half-assed changes passed off as revolutionary, like eliminating kickoffs and three-point stances.

And while people may not change in relationships, football can. The game has faced the same problems for a century—dying players and the corruption of money—and the reason it endured is because it evolved. The guy who first picked up a soccer ball and ran with it added grace. Teddy Roosevelt helped to add grace by pushing for the forward pass. Rules to protect quarterbacks and wide receivers ensured even more grace. How can we now push the edge of that balance between grace and violence to allow for honesty about the level of brutality inherent in the game?

What I really want is more player autonomy, more flow, more collaboration. I want less specialized positions, more players calling their own plays, and more players making up their own plays. Talk to me when the sport is coed or when I see flag football at the Super Bowl.

Talk to me when we can go real old school and take the helmets off and not get anyone killed.

The other day, I found a deflated American football as we closed up our summer cottage for the winter. We bought it on impulse in an out of the way sporting goods shop when my son was an infant. Now he and the neighbor kid picked it up and threw it around in the disintegrating autumn leaves, two Swedish kids not sure what to do with it.

And watching them, I remembered why I love football. I remember the energy and the running and the damp ground and the grass stains. I could feel the boldness mixed with the tradition. I could see football as a bridge between the industrial age and whatever is coming next. At 40, I’m too old to fall in love with a new tradition in the same way I did in Hamburg in the late 1970s. But my son and daughter are ready, and if I can’t find my faith in football again, I will lean on more inclusive and less divisive myths to ground them as American kids, and I will ignore the gap in my heart left by the passing of football from the story of my family. And that would be sad, but it would also make me more whole, and that is more important than the game.