How I Hate Football

Football is brutish. This is from someone who trained Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

I went to high school in Texas. Every Monday, there would be at least two guys with a new set of crutches. My debate partner got slammed. When he got out of the hospital, he had metal up his right leg and was banned from ever playing football again. My cousin still deals with debilitating back pain.

But when I was in high school, I did go to Friday night football games. Not that I was into football. The first couple times I went, it was to see my older cousins playing. Then, my classmates. Not really my friends. Because my friends were all nerds and didn't play football. I had friends in the band. Actually, my friends wouldn't go to football games. I was kind of strange in that sense. Having grown up in the same neighborhood my entire life, I actually did know some people out of my high school nerd clique, like friends from Girl Scouts in elementary school or my junior high volleyball and track mates. So I would find someone to hang with. And there was something fun about being outside in the fall air. I liked that it was multi-generational: parents, adults. I would make the rounds, shmoozing it up with people of all ages and cliques.

But I hated football. It was an evil--that should be banned. When one guy was down and the trainers ran out to the field, my friend who had just moved from a small town in East Texas got pissed, "Those cheerleaders should be down on their knees praying." We were slightly more progressive (in terms of separating church and state) in Katy.

It was always the same routine. I'd stand next to someone, sometimes a boy I liked, and I would ask how the game works, kind of playing dumb, but not really "playing" because I always had the same conversation, and I never really paid attention enough to learn how the game worked. Something about 4 downs.

I learned a little better when I played Powder Puff my junior year. It was a source of amusement in Texas to watch girls play football. Every year, the Juniors played the Seniors. The football players of our respective classes coached us. Practices started about a month before the game. These same guys would dress as cheerleaders for the game, and come up with funny cheers. It was all gender-bender.

Yeah, I was offended as a woman, that we were the "butt" of the joke. But I wasn't as offended as a real football game. There were no major injuries during our games. And I personally didn't feel like I was risking injury. I was a running back. I never really had to learn the game either, just run and try to catch the ball and take it to the endzone without getting tackled or throw it to a team mate before getting tackled. That's all I needed to know.

So the question comes down to: Is brutality a fundamental aspect of the game? Or could protections, regulations, and some rule changing make it more . . . responsible?"

According to a recent article in The New Yorker "Offensive Play" by Malcolm Gladwell, it is inherent to the game. Players experience the equivalent of multiple head-on auto collisions every practice. They experience depression and loss of motor control as a result of their head injuries later in their lives.

"In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt called an emergency summit at the White House, alarmed, as the historian John Sayle Watterson writes, “that the brutality of the prize ring had invaded college football and might end up destroying it.” Columbia University dropped the sport entirely. A professor at the University of Chicago called it a “boy-killing, man-mutilating, money-making, education-prostituting, gladiatorial sport.” In December of 1905, the presidents of twelve prominent colleges met in New York and came within one vote of abolishing the game. But the main objection at the time was to a style of play—densely and dangerously packed offensive strategies—that, it turns out, could be largely corrected with rule changes, like the legalization of the forward pass and the doubling of the first-down distance from five yards to ten. Today, when we consider subtler and more insidious forms of injury, it’s far from clear whether the problem is the style of play or the play itself."

Should there be legislation? Regulation? Should the government step in? Most people and any libertarian would claim that every citizen should be able to spend her money and risk her life how she pleases, as long as she doesn't harm anyone else. The free market should be able to do its thing. But the free market must be regulated--to stop rich people from stealing from poor people--either through exploitation, i.e. not paying a living wage, or practicing fraud, i.e. Wall Street.

Is stealing the health and life from grown men who choose to play football a form of exploitation or fraud? That is the question.