Myles Garrett (right) ripped off Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Mason Rudolph’s helmet and hit him with it in closing seconds of last night’s game.
15 November 2019 (Washington, DC) – I do not frequent sports bars, and I do not follow U.S. sports. They are boring. Baseball is like watching paint dry. American football is armed combat. I see enough of that in the real world every day. But I was in Ragtime, a sports bar close to my hotel, which happens to make the best burgers in town. So I watched last night’s football game. Splashed across 4 screens in the bar, sound at full volume. Hard to avoid.
Frankly, I never saw the fascination with American football. I have never been a fan, even as a kid. I always saw it as the NFL/collegiate powers’ mercenary marriage of patriotism, military, violence and unquestioned loyalty. With its military-like strategy on the field and its culture of conflict and male solidarity. It’s an American “cultural thing” that permeates living rooms and language, and even the holidays. I have never seen it as a “sport”. Too much religious, quasi messianic tonalities, resonant with awe, horror, and excess.
But American football is especially egregious. On every snap of every NFL game, players risk their careers and well-being. The game by its very nature shreds ligaments and snaps bones and damages brains, sometimes with alacrity and sometimes imperceptibly. Lives change every Sunday because of what the sport does to those who play it. NFL football at its core is human achievement at the cost of human suffering.
The inherent violence of football is what made the calculated violence of Myles Garrett on Thursday night an affront so shocking that the league suspended him indefinitely today. The game is built on sanctioned brutality … but within those parameters lies an agreement between players. They may destroy each other, but not on purpose and not outside the mayhem that happens during plays. It is a gladiatorial contract that should make you wince, but it is the understood agreement participants enter with full understanding.
And the “sport” reviled me even more when the media stories continued to proliferate about university football players escaping punishment for proven sexual assaults by universities fearful of losing alumni funding, and the brain scans that were (finally) exposed that showed what many knew or suspected : the lingering brain damage in high school and college football players. A headline-grabbing study of the brains of 111 deceased NFL players found signs of CTE, a degenerative brain condition brought on by repeated strikes to the head, in 110 of them.
But death has always stalked football. In a clipping my researcher found in The Chicago Tribune on-line archives a reporter noted the football season of 1905 was a “death harvest.” The game, with its battering-ram formations and minimal equipment, saw nineteen deaths, a hundred and thirty-seven serious injuries, and countless broken bones. The administrators at Northwestern, Columbia, and Duke universities dumped the sport, Stanford switched to rugby, and Charles Eliot, the president of Harvard, declared that football was “more brutalizing than prizefighting, cockfighting, or bullfighting.”
As the professional players grew bigger and faster, as the equipment became more “combat ready” (as legendary football tackler Alex Karras once noted) and incentives to “take out” an opposing player grew with the financial rewards, reforms and subsequent tweaks to the rules and the equipment failed to keep up. In 1994, Paul Tagliabue, the league commissioner, dismissed widespread reports about debilitating head injuries as a “pack-journalism issue”… sitting on reports contradicting those very words. Obviously taking his cue from the tobacco industry PR machine. His successor, Roger Goodell, faced with overwhelming evidence of the toll on players, acted with the stealthy instincts of “a coal-company executive charged with keeping terrible secrets” (from a long piece by David Remnick in The New Yorker).
And do not think the modern football fan will slowly find out he is in possession of a conscience and a reasonable knowledge of the horrific statistics about injuries suffered by players. The riposte in countless articles? “Hey. Caveat emptor. These guys, they know what they’re doing. They know what they’re buying into. It is no longer a secret. It’s sort of the feeling I have about smokers, you know?”
So football will not lose its place in the culture anytime soon, when the ratings for games, college and pro, are so high, and when so many young people – not least young black Americans and rural whites who make up 87% of the players in the NFL and see it as their only financial resource – continue to play it.
The N.F.L. will always take half-measures and pressure its critics, the better to safeguard its gold mine. Since the nineteen-sixties, football has been the most popular American sport, and the Super Bowl is the most highly rated television program of the year. And the highest earning. The NFL receives close to $1 billion from that game alone from multiple sources (total revenue of all National Football League teams in 2019 has been estimated at $25 billion).
The NFL does not disclose the value of its contract with TV networks to broadcast regular season football games, but Kantar Media which tracks this stuff says CBS, Fox and NBC will pay around $3 billion a year collectively to do so, with a total of around $27 billion for the period 2013 to 2022. Each network gets the Super Bowl match to themselves three times over that period. Advertising Age said advertising revenue from this year’s Super Bowl alone was more than $450 million. An average 30-second ad-spot cost $5.2 million.
For now … just another story about the misguided warriors (some paid well, some paid not so well) who sacrifice their minds and bodies to build football into a multibillion industry. The violent nature of the game – the focus of our guilty pleasure – is the same thing that breaks spines, shatters bones, renders middle-aged men demented. But there will never be adequate reform. There was none after the horror of Sandy Hook. And now you want it for a simple “sport”?
No, ain’t gonna happen. As I have mentioned in many previous posts, corporate oligarchs have seized all institutional systems of power in the United States. Electoral politics, internal security, the judiciary, our universities, the arts and finance, sports, along with nearly all forms of communication, are in corporate hands. American “democracy” … with those faux debates between two corporate parties … is meaningless political theater.