Is Football Moral? (FTL)

Last updated on: July 30, 2015 at 6:49 am by Jane the Actuary

Is Football Moral? (FTL) 2015-07-30T06:49:34-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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This week’s “from the library” book: Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto by Steve Almond. I was originally going to pair this with Why Football Matters, by Mark Edmundson, but I got tired of the latter book; at any rate, I thought this would be a full-throated defense of football but it seems to be more ambivalent.

Here are Almond’s criticisms of football:

1) Football causes brain injury to those who play the game with the rigor demanded at the professional, college, and potentially high school level. This isn’t just a matter of concussions, but blows to the head that fall short of concussion cause injury, too. What’s more, the culture of football — “be a man” and don’t complain — as well as the continued increase in the size of the players, exacerbate the problem.

2) Football celebrates violence. The success of a football player is measured in terms of how successfully/violently he is able to tackle his opponent, and spectators become indifferent to the injuries (opposing) players suffer.

3) Football compels cities and states to spend ridiculous quantities of money on ever-newer, ever-larger stadiums, for which the teams pay a “rent” that doesn’t come anywhere close to resembling an appropriate sum, all due to the threat to move the team out-of-state, the threat of which succeeds due to the NFL’s anti-trust exemption.

4) Football players do bad things.

Items number 3 and 4 are not unique to football. Cities spend wildly inappropriate sums of money on ever-newer, ever-larger baseball and basketball and hockey stadiums. And pro and college athletes of all kinds behave badly.

With respect to #2, I don’t know. I suppose I’d have to ask you, readers, what your experience is, because in my football viewing (with my husband — who, I’ll remind you, does not come from a football culture, and only learned to watch the game in grad school — or with “civilized” adults) tackles are simply a function of the “stop the opponent from moving the ball” component of the game, not an end to itself. Football seems, in that sense, to be different than hockey, where fights erupt with regularity, and fans cheer the players on, and penalties are so built into the nature of the game that the “power play” is a basic part of gameplay. But maybe in a different crowd, players are admired for brutality.

But item #1: that’s the biggest issue.

Yes, there are many occupations which come with risk: working on an oil platform in the Gulf is risky, but the workers are well-compensated for their trouble. There are plenty of occupations in which the body is worn out prematurely — even low-paying jobs like migrant farmworkers. But the nature of the injuries that football players face — memory loss/dementia, suicide, and other issues that get at how one functions mentally, as well as devastating sudden on-field injuries — are of a different dimension entirely than the bum knee. These injuries have not been tracked adequately to really understand how pervasive a problem this is, especially because these injuries tend to be invisible until it’s too late, and the NFL has done their best to minimize the issue.

Should prospective pro players, or college players, simply be informed more thoroughly of the risks before setting foot on the field? Would it make a difference? Would these men be able to adequately consider the risks, or would the rewards, or potential rewards of a highly-paid football career, be enough for them to ignore the risks — and, even if they should choose to do so, is it right for this choice to exist?

Which gets to the question of my title: knowing that football harms its players, is it moral for the rest of us to spectate, and participate in various ways in the Football Industry?

Now, as a disclaimer, I have only a moderate interest in football in the first place. If the Spartans are playing U of M or some particularly important season-end game, I’ll watch, but not if it takes too much special effort — though at the same time I think there’s a further set of reasons why college football as it now exists is a terrible thing. But I do think that, of the major spectator sports, football is more interesting than the others because of the narrative component and the variety of actions — passing vs. rushing — compared to the back and forth, back and forth, goal-out-of-nowhere of soccer or the endless baskets of basketball. I’m also partial to hockey, out of the visual interest of men in skates.

I also know that there are boys for whom the game of football, insofar as it gives them a goal to work towards as a team, leads to self-improvement. And, of course, as a general rule, one shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, for instance, if changes in rules can increase player safety.

So: what do you think?

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