My Take on an American Obsession--Part 3

Is football a violent sport?  If so, is that a problem?  What constitutes ethical/moral behavior in relation to football?  What is right for me personally?  Questions like these can get pretty uncomfortable.

When I watched our students wrestle with such questions, I was heartened at times--when they considered them seriously, examined the evidence, and reached logical, if difficult, conclusions.

At other times, I felt disbelief and chagrin as they resolutely headed down the business-as-usual path, although it didn't work out so well for them, since it usually ended in a very confused speech or paper.  Confusion followed one of two patterns:  1.  Craft a reasonable thesis and supporting points, and then forsake the thesis and the evidence by making a new and different assertion at the end of the paper or speech.  (If it's a speech, hurry through the conclusion as fast as possible, duck your head sheepishly, and grin guiltily at the grader as you head back to your seat.)  2.  State a flawed thesis, and then, in the absence of data to support the thesis, support its opposite instead and never again refer to the flawed thesis.   Data can be such an inconvenience . . .

I tended not to take such confused responses too seriously, (these students are still young and have time to grow up and acquire wisdom) but I heard a more serious view of them later.  I heard something like this:  "Let's pray that they would become willing to follow through on what they know, because it's dangerous to develop a habit of resisting the truth."  I agree.

The crux of the problem with football is that it is, by dictionary definitions, a violent sport.  It is behavior involving force with the intention of hurting, damaging, or killing someone or something.  I can already hear the protests:  football players aren't trying to hurt anyone, much less damage or kill them.  There is some truth to this, but significant evidence is present on the side of intentional hurting, damaging, or killing in the course of playing football.  For fans to argue the contrary view is disingenuous.  Stan Savran, a Pennsylvania sportscaster,  says this (I'm quoting from memory, since the League of Denial book is already back at the library):  "In football, the biggest cheers are for the touchdowns.  But the second biggest cheers are always for the really nasty hits."  Leigh Steinberg, an agent who represented dozens of NFL players, noted that for years the logo that opened the Monday night football broadcasts had two helmets crashing against each other.  The documentary I saw showed a clip of an NFL player, all suited up and ready to play, who said fiercely, "I'm ready to kill someone."

The fact is that, while most football players are not wanna-be maimers and murderers with suicidal tendencies, playing the game well necessitates the temporary suppression of almost all gentle, respectful impulses toward other people, and replaces them with a grim (vicious?) determination to exert tremendous amounts of force against other human beings.  While some of what is involved is undoubtedly the "standing your ground" kind of force, much of it is unmistakably active and offensive.  Tackling another player is not a defensive action.  It is, in fact, a violent act.

Violence against other human beings is always a problem according to New Testament ethics.  Intentional self-harm is also a problem.

While some argue that all of life involves some risk, and football is no different, and, because the game wouldn't be any fun to play or watch without this element of risk, we should all just be OK with it.  Excuse me?  Although some sports are notably more violent than others, in almost no other sport is one-on-one physical assault an integral part of the game, as it is in football.

While ice skating, it's possible for a person to slip and fall and bang their head hard enough on the ice to suffer a concussion.  That's a risk of ice skating.  But banging one's head on the ice is not an intended part of ice skating.  It's possible to break a leg while playing basketball.  That's a risk of playing basketball, but bone-breaking blows to the legs or jolts from landing wrong are not an intended part of the game.  In contrast, the risks of playing football are formidably stacked in favor of damage to bodies because forceful body-to-body contact is an integral part of the game.  Even protective helmets can turn into battering rams.

Probably, for me, the most distressing revelations from investigating the game of football came, not in reading or watching League of Denial material, but in seeing similarities between the culture of violence in first-century Rome and the culture of violence in our country currently. Violence occurs, of course, in many areas other than in sports, but they are not the focus of this post.

In the Roman Colosseum, the gathered crowds were there to see blood sports, either animals killing each other, animals and humans engaged in mortal combat, or humans fighting each other to the death.  Some of our students were quick to dismiss any connection between Roman Colosseum violence and football because the performers in Rome were there through no choice of their own, and football players have a choice whether they play or not.  That those in Rome were coerced and that American football players are not is mostly true.  Players are paid outrageously for playing football, and, for some, the gain seems worth the pain, and they play willingly--although I suspect this is destined to change as more players become aware of the eventual and likely insufferable cost.  Players often really love the game, or is it the glory they really love?  The cheers and adulation and fame?  Maybe it's the aura of uber-macho-ness that trumps all other considerations.

Beyond the varied circumstances for those who participated then or now in violent sports, an even more troubling aspect involves the players/performers/providers-of-entertainment only peripherally. It is the similarity in the appetites and behaviors of the spectators that is most deeply troubling.

Some of my information comes from this book:  Violence and Aggression in Sporting Contests, edited by R. Todd Jewell.  In a novel approach, this book focuses on how more or less violence in sports affects the economics of the activity.  In my own simplified terms, the question the book seeks to answer is this:  What is the exact level of sports violence that makes the activity the most appealing to spectators, and therefore the most profitable?  In most cases, ramping up the violence increases the sports' appeal to fans commensurately, although presumably an invisible threshold exists beyond which a further increase in violence would prompt fans to turn away.

Chapter 2 of the above book is titled A Brief History of Violence and Aggression in Spectator Sports.  The whole chapter is really worth reading and you can do so by inserting that title in a search engine.  It is available as a pdf download.  The chapter opens with this quote by George Orwell, written in 1945:

"Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play.  It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard for all rules, and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence.  In other words, it is war minus the shooting . . .  Most of the games we now play are of ancient origin, but sport does not seem to have been taken very seriously between Roman times and the nineteenth century . . .  Then, chiefly in England and the United States, games were built up into a heavily-financed activity, capable of attracting vast crowds and rousing savage passions, and the infection spread from country to country.  It is the most violently combative sports, football and boxing, that have spread the widest."

The "sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence" is the part of the football picture that is strikingly similar to Roman Colosseum entertainment, and it is the most damning aspect of both.  It is no more honorable to delight in watching violence than to delight in engaging in it.  Why do nonresistant Christians not understand this?

The football "industry" grew exponentially when viewing games on TV first become common in the 1970s.  By now sports is a $400 billion gross-revenue-per-year industry.  The movie industry trails very far behind at $10 billion.

In another document,  Jesse Hicks writes in the Penn State News, "American football has many similarities with gladiator games."  "Large-scale sporting events create intense bonds among fans, provoking feelings of belonging, validation and camaraderie.  Individuals feel part of a greater whole, and they feel empowered."

Hicks also quotes Dr. Garret Fagan, who is a professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies and History at Penn State University Park, who has written a book with this title:  The Lure of the Arena:  Social Psychology and the Spectators at the Roman Games.  Fagan says regarding football and the gladiator games, "The psychological lure remains much the same."  "This is a very powerful emotional experience."

Fagan again:  "The distance between the Roman gladiator arena and the modern American football stadium is not as far as we might think or wish."  He suspects also that "if we staged a gladiator spectacle and we picked the right constituency to staff it--people who are commonly regarded by society as expendable, such as death row inmates--I think we could fill Beaver Stadium."

One of the questions I asked our students to consider is what single action would dethrone football as an American icon.  One obvious answer is Everyone stops playing the game.  Equally effective, however, and far more plausible as an action we ourselves might participate in is this:  Everyone stops watching or following the game.

For me, this is easy, since I've never really started.  Especially, knowing what I know now about the likelihood of unseen and unseeable injuries occurring in the brains of every player who gets hit or receives a hit, I couldn't enjoy it.  I see too much misery ahead for these players.  For others, however, to stop watching or following football would be akin to watching a golden calf burned and ground to powder and then seeing the powder mixed with water and having to drink it.  Distasteful, to be sure.

My friend was right, you know.  We put ourselves in a dangerous place when we understand truth and turn away from acting on it.  Regularly on Monday nights, and certainly on Super Bowl Sunday next February, many of us will have a chance to act on what we know, or to turn away from acting on it.  I'm not planning to keep track of who does what in relation to these matters, but I think I know Someone Who will.