Am I Ready For Some Football?

Several years ago, when I was a senior in college, I sat down to watch a football game in the living room of the off-campus apartment I shared with two friends. The game, if I remember correctly, was between the New York Giants and the Green Bay Packers. I had little rooting interest in the game, but it was Sunday, it was football, and I was trying to avoid whatever work I had to do (a habit I've never been able to shake).

At one point in the game, and I can't be sure if I'm remembering this correctly, I recoiled at a particularly violent hit that left a player immobile for several moments. And it was at at that moment that I thought to myself "I can't watch this game anymore. It's too violent." I was thinking, of course, not just about that particular game but about the game of football itself. I had been a football fan all my life, but in that moment, I felt like I needed to take a stand. As a liberal, enlightened soon-to-be college graduate, I was going to cut football from my life as a protest against the violence of the sport and the culture that it embodied. I was done.

More than twenty years later, I have yet to follow up on that bold proclamation. I may have stopped watching football for a few weeks, maybe even a month, but my boycott was fairly short lived. "I'll just check in to see what the score is" turned into "maybe I'll just watch the first quarter," and pretty soon I was back to watching games from start to finish. My discomfort with the violence of the game remained, but it didn't stop me from being a fan. It's one of many statements of intention I've made in my life that I've either forgotten or failed to see through.

This memory of kind-of-but-not-really taking a stance has been rekindled not only by the upcoming football season, but also by Steve Almond's new book, "Against Football: One Man's Reluctant Manifesto" (excerpted in the latest Village Voice). In the book Almond lays out his arguments for why he can no longer morally stomach a game that he has followed for more than 40 years, and why we should take a hard look at the role the "Football Industrial Complex" plays in our society.

Almond is a terrific writer and an insightful cultural critic. His arguments against football are multifaceted. He takes on the violence of the game and its impact on the long-term health of players, the greed of the league and its owners, the hypocrisy of the people who cover the sport, and the impact of the sport on our institutions of higher learning. Most significantly, he doesn't let fans off the hook by blaming it all on the coaches, Roger Goodell, TV, or the NCAA . He argues that we fans are the ones who have enabled football to become a sanctified, morally palatable form of entertainment. And the power of his critique of the game comes from the fact that he is a fan.

Almond is not alone in his stance. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a piece for the New Yorker in 2009 in which he compared football to dog fighting, and in an interview with Slate asked whether it is ethical to watch football. Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, in a 2012 piece for the Atlantic following the suicide of former NFL linebacker Junior Seau (a suicide that is widely believed to stem from the brain trauma he had suffered as a player), concluded that, at least for him, it was not. For Coates, the NFL's refusal to acknowledge the damage the game was doing to its players was the last straw. "For me," Coates wrote, "the hardest portion is living apart--destroying something that binds me to friends and family. With people whom I would not pass another words, I can debate the greatest running back of all time. It's like losing a language."

I remember reading that article at the time, and feeling uncomfortable because, despite similar concerns, I was not ready to take that step. Steve Almond's arguments make me feel uncomfortable as well. I applaud the decision he's made, but I'm not there yet. I love watching football, and talking about football, and listening to guys talk about football. But I can't deny my discomfort with many aspects of the game has grown, and gets stronger every season. Like Coates, I'm uncomfortable with being a fan of a game that impacts the brains of those who play it, and I have questions about the ethics of supporting a business that clearly has little regard for the safety of its employees. And I'm uncomfortable with the knowledge that my continued support of the game makes it unlikely that the NFL or the NCAA will ever seriously address brain injuries.

But what makes me most uncomfortable is the knowledge that I am a moral agent in this. In Steve Almond's view, I'm complicit in feeding the beast. I can't argue against that judgement. The question for me is whether I'm willing to accept that.

Death and the Cult of Celebrity

Years ago, when I was in high school, I had a friend over at my house and we were watching television. As I flipped around the channels (I think I actually had to go up to the cable box and turn the dial), there was a news report about the death of former New York Yankees and Kansas City Royals manager Dick Howser from a brain tumor. I commented that it was sad. "Why is it sad?" my friend asked me. "Did you know him?"

Of course I didn't know Dick Howser personally. But his death, after a very public battle with cancer, struck me as sad. He wasn't that old, he had put on a very brave face despite knowing his fate, and he seemed like a nice guy. I had no better answer than that. And I've thought about that conversation since the news broke last night that Robin Williams had been found dead, of an apparent suicide. I think of it every time someone in the public eye dies before their time.

Many articles have appeared today extolling the talents of the hyper-kinetic Williams, while others have explored his battles with addiction and the connection between creativity and mental illness. All I can add is that Robin Williams made me laugh, and that it's clear that many artists have demons that they cannot keep at bay. If there is anything good to come of Williams's death, it is that it will remind people of how crippling a disease depression can be, how relentless it is.

But what I'm interested in is how we react to these deaths. The death of Robin Williams comes in the midst of a summer of carnage and mayhem around the world. Just within the past few weeks we've seen war in Gaza, violence and brutality in Iraq, an outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, and the senseless shooting down of a commercial airliner. Yes, we notice these things, we express our outrage and our fear, but we keep them at bay. But if you spent any time on social media last night, you saw an outpouring of grief and shock and sadness over the death of a single, albeit very talented, individual. And there was a palpable sense that everyone needed to stop what they were doing and acknowledge what a loss this is.

And so again I come back to that question my friend asked me years ago. Why is the death of Robin Williams so sad to so many people? Why is it sadder than the unnecessary deaths of people in Gaza, Iraq, and Sierra Leone? Or, for that matter, the thousands of people who take their lives each year? It isn't. But I think it's hard for many of us to wrap our heads around the violence and death and poverty that exists in many parts of the world. Many of the problems in the world are complex and deep-rooted, and to dwell on the dark side of humanity for too long would make many of us want to curl up in the fetal position.

I don't necessarily think this is all about our obsession with celebrity, although in some cases that may play a role. We do, in some sense, live vicariously through famous people. But ultimately, it seems we come together to mourn for actors and writers and musicians and athletes because they've brought us joy, they've touched us with their art, they've shown us the better side of humanity. And losing that source of joy, that connection to something larger, can be incredibly sad. I have no better answer than that.