Last night, the Buffalo Bill played their AFC East rivals the Miami Dolphins, who they proceeded to wallop. Up until the middle of the third quarter, the storyline was Bills QB Josh Allen’s ability to play mistake-free football, the stoutness of a depleted Bills defense, and especially the poor play of divisive Miami quarterback Tua Tagovailoa. That changed, though, when Tagovailoa lowered his helmet and hit Bills safety Damar Hamlin, causing Tagovailoa to suffer a frightening concussion, complete with
I'm not sure how this connects but it feels like it does. I find the push to expand football globally odd. We know this sport isn't healthy for its participants. Do we really want to expand it? For it to displace soccer, or baseball or basketball? I always thought one interesting thing about Ricky Williams retiring early supposedly to smoke weed was that if that's why he did, he made the healthier life style choice. For me, I love the game. Grew up watching it. If the fastest and strongest guys want to show what they can do connecting on 40 yard bombs down field. I'm in. But marketing it in an effort to grow comes off as tone deaf. Also, maybe not the best strategy to send Philly fans abroad...not exactly leading with our best fan base. I'm a Philly fan naturally.
some soccer fans tried to learn me on how you can fall out of your league if you don't play well enough. It was in the full tanking days of the 76ers. that kind of system makes a lot of sense to me.
Yeah, the stakes are real in football (world’s version). I remember when current all-conquering club Manchester City were in the third tier playing small regional sides, and when that happens you’ve no guarantee of ever getting back up. You can be down there 30 years
If they really wanted to expand they would schedule NFL games on Friday and Saturday so that us in the eastern hemisphere can actually watch on the weekend, rather than having everything happening on Monday morning.
It’s worth noting that the rest of world has their dangerous sports as well. Rugby and hockey are incredibly violent and concussion-prone, their athletes just as big, fast and aggressive. Even soccer isn’t innocent: there’s a reason youth leagues prohibit headers.
This ritual absolution happens in all kinds of cases. If there's a mass shooting, gun advocates will say we shouldn't politicize it. If there's a religious terror attack, religious pluralists will do the same. It's in the guise of holiness but, as with this football example, what it really is is a thought terminator.
Sports journalism seems even more affected by hive-mind than news or political journalism.
My point is you lack the ability to make valid comparisons because you don’t understand that “mass shootings” are just plain bad, but they’re not an intrinsic downside to a common activity that people regularly enjoy. You could try to say “gun violence” is intrinsic to “having guns” or something I guess, but there you run into the problem of misuse—whereas in football the issue is that it’s not any foul play causing the problem.
For football, smashing heads is unavoidable without completely changing to the sport.
The elementary logic you’re missing is that there is a common activity with a lot of upside—football—with a (previously nonobvious) downside intrinsic to the activity—compounding brain trauma from every play.
Similarly, religiously motivated violence is very, very rare in a place like the US, and isn’t remotely intrinsic to say Presbyterians worshipping.
"Sports journalism seems even more affected by hive-mind than news or political journalism."
Maybe not journalism, but, frankly, in my experience, non-home team sports fans offer more reasoned and fact-based justifications for why they support a given team, than what I hear from most political fans.
Am I truly the only cat who recalls The Great NFL Concussion Coverup, aka "The War On Football(tm)", in which the NFL swore up and down that there was no link between multiple concussions and brain injury, even though they knew the truth full well?
Football is dangerous, I get it. So is auto racing. Hell, there are probably human out there who are suffering debilitating pickleball injuries, humans whose love for chess caused them to sacrifice their bodies and their health.
But why the need to lie about it? That is what killed it for me, and I used to like watching humans chase a bouncy ball.
That's a good question. Maybe when risks were higher for living in general than the risks of sport weren't such a big deal. We're entering a time when safety, life itself are more important than taking risks. There is probably a point of diminishing returns, more people living out their lives in the basement, but who knows if we are there yet. I took sporting risks, and others, when I was young, of course they were exciting then but I escaped without permanent consequences. And my Pickleball ankle injury is all healed now, thank you very much :)
> Maybe when risks were higher for living in general than the risks of sport weren't such a big deal.
There might be something to this. We used to be more willing to accept deaths in war, for example. And I've heard the theory that as the birth rate declines, people become more protective of their kids because they only have one or two. (Not that people with large families don't value their kids -- the theory was that there's unconscious anxiety when only one child carries your genes, and/or that people have more time to be overprotective when they have fewer kids.)
The example of war is such that death must always be accepted as a consequence, while the impetus should always be rejected. Unlike war, I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with the idea of football, but the application of the sport certainly has much to be desired.
Or it's that now you can produce two children and have a reasonable expectation that will survive the onslaught of microorganisms and make it to adulthood. That has only been the case recently. So now we do our utmost to protect them from other dangers, many of which are largely fictious. I mean, how many parents drive their children to school, exposing them to the risk of automobile crashes (common) to make sure the won't be abducted by a stranger or molested by the bus driver (rare)?
I think the decline of birthrates has more to do with the dwindling of resources. In the wild, animals decrease reproduction when times get tough, and we are animals. Yet we are also human, so we only have to preceive a future of scarcity to cut down on reproduction. You don't have to go far on Medium or Substack to find articles with titles like "Climate Change and the Child Question."
The thing that was only understood more recently is that it’s not the concussions that really matter. It’s just the constant head impact.
The NFL did try to avoid the whole topic for a while there, but as with sports like boxing, it’s just too common to hide as the athletes age.
See also: the story a while back about artillerymen who fired a lot of rounds against ISIS suffering from brain issues unexpectedly due to the repeated low-level head trauma.
The New York Times published a story in December strongly suggesting the Maine spree shooter may have become brain damaged from all of the explosions he experienced during his work as an Army grenade instructor.
"Publicly, the Army has said almost nothing about Mr. Card’s time in uniform — only that he was trained as a petroleum supply specialist and never deployed to combat. But soldiers who spoke to The New York Times said that description left out something crucial: Mr. Card worked every summer for years as an instructor at an Army hand grenade training range, where he was rocked by thousands of brain-jarring explosions.
For generations, the military assumed that the blast waves that troops experienced from firing weapons or throwing grenades in training posed no danger to them. It is only in the last few years that increasing evidence of harm from repeated exposure, along with mandates from Congress, has driven the Defense Department to start trying to track, study and understand the impact of blast exposure.
. . .
Each summer, all 1,200 West Point cadets have to throw at least one M67 grenade. Most throw two. Mr. Card was nearly always one of the instructors with the cadets in the grenade pits. The soldiers from his unit said he could easily have been exposed to more than 10,000 blasts in all.
The Army declined to provide details about Mr. Card’s work in uniform.
'The concussion from the grenade is brutal, brutal — it will shake your heart,' the senior platoon member said. 'We have a berm at the range that protects from shrapnel, but it doesn’t protect from the blast. Some guys got a lot. Probably too much.'
I do find the unwillingness of football chud podcasts (maybe Freddie is listening to a higher intellectual sphere of football podcasts, I dunno) to move on from the Tua thing and talk X's and O's a bit odd.
Because the whole rotten show is not in fact indefensible. The defenses are morally questionable and unconvincing to many audiences, but the inability or unwillingness to adapt the gladiatorial ethos of 90's football commentary for a slightly more enlightened era always sticks out to me, especially since the "we accept the risks of this dangerous game" is the attitude always coming out of the players' mouths when asked.
Men risking disfigurement for glory has always stirred passions and garnered interest, that's a universal human impulse. That our mass audience communications lack language to express that (even from the right, imagine JD Vance or Elon Musk's answer to a question on this) is indicative of the way our culture just doesn't sync up with the realities of the human experience anymore.
McLuhan again. He got it right more than a half century ago. The medium defines the discourse.
TV, cable TV, talk radio, then early internet, and then enhanced-virality social media above all and 10x worse than the others — it is almost literally impossible to have these nuanced discussions when the primary medium isn’t in-person conversations and the (slow, paper) written word.
NFL hypocrisy and loss of nuance is but one aspect of this larger phenomenon.
I quit watching the NFL after the GQ article about CTE back in 2009. I know I’m morally compromised in countless other ways that are worse. Meat, like Freddie pointed out. Shopping on Amazon—which contributes directly to human suffering in a way that me watching the games would not, since one household is irrelevant to NFL numbers and profits.
I also admit I got tired of boycotting, and I probably would have gone back to football by now… except I have a seven-year-old son, and I don’t want him to get into football. I don’t want him to ask me to play. So really, it has become a boycott for selfish reasons.
They seem to subject the warehouse and delivery workers to a ton of pressure and stress, like they don't have time for a restroom break, and most of the products are cheap because they're made in poor countries with minimal labor laws. Plus Amazon hurts local business, bookstores, etc.
The things people still say about Walmart, yes, I remember those. Still markedly preferable to Amazon warehouse work. But okay, liberal, keep telling me about how a job that destroys your body in a decade should be the best the filthy poors can aspire toward.
Better to have such an option available than the forced labor under Marxism where everyone is poor because the labor theory of value, central planning, and price fixing destroys economic efficiency due to denying the basics of markets.
This is a completely erroneous way to conceive of the situation. Not only is your claim about Marxism confused and completely misunderstood , it’s equally unhelpful to view corporate-scale commodity manufacturing as an individual-scale issue that can be solved morally.
Humans I know who have done both say that WallyWorld is much less of a sweatshop and generally treats its employees better and less like a respurce to be exploited untild depleted.
Corporate-scale commodity manufacturing is not an issue that can be solved by individual-scale moralizing. This problem stems from alienation. Boycotting would only work on a mass-organized level, which is difficult to pull off logistically. Individual choices on the matter otherwise remain personal.
Helmets in football are like boxing gloves; they make it seem like they're offering decent protection, but all the while the player's brain is getting shaken about like a polaroid picture.
I know the rules have evolved, but as a Brit, it was always seemed mad that somewhere along the line players decided that the best way to stop the giant, armour-wearing athlete in your way was to smash your head into them.
Add to that all of the accusations of sexual assault, domestic violence and the rest, the weird fetishisation of the military and the Kaepernick stuff, and yeah it's a pretty grim spectacle. I wonder what would have to happen to make me stop watching?
Setting aside what history actually shows, the idea (my idea, not sure Freddie would agree) is that under socialism, people would play sports for the love of the game only, not because it made them rich. Take away the potential for a huge payday, and the risk-reward calculus changes. It might mean that American football goes away, since not enough people want to play or watch to make it worthwhile. Or maybe it changes into a different game, or maybe it persists because the appeal can withstand the absence of obscene riches as a motivator.
"under socialism, people would play sports for the love of the game only"
Is actually way more realistic than the typical "people would Do X without material incentives" you hear.
Note that plenty of amateur athletes who know they have no shot at making it big wreck their health or take other considerable risks in various combat and extreme sports.
Note also that the NFL is actually the least of the problems; it's just a few hundred athletes at any given time. The real problem is all of the many hundreds of thousands of kids who bash in their skulls on a regular basis for years and years and don't even get paid. (Obviously, the popularity of the NFL and kid football are linked, with causality going both ways.)
That's true, which is why I think the question of removing the riches is an interesting one. Plenty of amateurs play football (and other dangerous sports), although plenty of them think, despite the odds, that *maybe* they'll make it. They also do it because they enjoy it, don't get me wrong; I doubt very much a socialist society would be one without people who did risky and even insane things for love and glory. Still, the draw of football, even for those who have no intention of going pro, has something to do with its enormous cultural prominence, which has something to do with the huge amount of money it generates. Remove that, and I wonder if it would be anywhere near as popular (as a non-fan, I'm inclined to think it would be a minor sport at best, but that's just speculation).
99% of guys that play football in high school and college (including myself) have no illusions about ever playing in the NFL.
I don't even think FdB was making a point about capitalism, per se, but if no football player made money from football, there would still be a ton of guys playing football. Because it rules.
I cannot agree with FdB's moralizing here. First, Jim McMahon, Junior Seau et al. are not the fate of all NFL players. Meaning that severe consequences are a risk, not a certainty. A risk that grown men are entitled to take. Second, the belief that NFL players were unaware of the risk until the advent of modern brain imaging technologies is as risible as the idea that smokers were unaware of the propensity to lung cancer prior to the 1964 Surgeon General's report. That isn't how "epistemology" works in actual life. In any case, Tua and all other current NFL players are certainly aware of the risks and elect to incur them, usually for considerable monetary compensation. The idea that the regular, if not widespread, materialization of these risks means that viewing the sport is unethical is, to me, a symptom of the general progressive mindset that understands progress to consist in progressively shrinking the sphere in which human beings may act on their own will.
As for the post-game commentary, that posture of extreme unction that irritates FdB is just another, predictable result of the hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing of people like FdB who assert that the whole thing is unethical and shame on everyone who supports it when the only ethical thing to do is to put on your lachrymosity and weep and lament and lead the dirge for the poor players being exploited by the evil football-industrial complex.
First, denial is the standard reaction of anyone who is accused of being bad or promoting something bad. Human nature. Second, NFL and the tobacco industry are for-profit businesses. So of course they can be expected to adopt a fortress mentality when their product is being disparaged. In the case of tobacco, one could even argue that their boards owed a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to offer vigorous opposition to claims of risk and danger. After all, 60 years later, the actual mechanism by which tobacco causes cancer is still unknown; all we have is the statistical correlation. The causal link has simply been accepted by enough people as true. And the anti-tobacco forces have been known to mislead as well: the original "study" by which it was claimed that second-hand smoke causes cancer was a travesty, one could almost say fraudulent. But look -- I'm generally swimming against the tide when it comes to public assignment of blame and tort theories of liability in this country. Definitely a minority viewpoint.
Also, the NFL is a trade association under IRC Sec. 501, not a "for-profit business". The Tobacco Institute also was some kind of a trade association, again not a business.
I used to watch boxing, until the day I watched the Welterweight Championship fight and saw Emil Griffith kill Benny, the Kid, Paret. I’ve never watched a single match again. Giving up things you like can be done whether sports, or anything else, but the revulsion, the outrage, must be real. When it is, you never go back.
Football is an inherently dangerous full contact sport, but what really grinds my gears is how people act like it's just the NFL that's at fault for this instead of sports at large. I watched a documentary about Lindsey Vonn, and her knees and a lot of other parts of her legs were basically destroyed before the age of 40. Athletes have died downhill skilling plenty of times, and spills at 70 miles an hour rarely turn out well.
I watched another documentary on Netflix about figure skating (Harley & Katya), and let me tell you the people bashing the NFL would never dream of getting outraged at figure skating, and there was this Australian duo where the female partner had multiple injuries from being dropped. Like, when you think about it, how could that not be dangerous? You're on solid ice with zero protective equipment getting thrown in the air and spun around. Falls happen all the time. She eventually fell into alcoholism and took her own life when the sport basically abandoned her after she could no longer perform.
You're never going to make sports completely safe. That's the bottom line. I think most players understand this. I'm sure no one wants to get hurt, but they've accepted that getting injured is part of the deal. I'm just sick of the NFL being the whipping boy for this kind of thing. Most people making these arguments just kind of hate football and wish it go away. I wish they'd be honest.
I have never fully understood why a human who destroys their body and health for sport is held up as a hero, but a model who destroys her body and health for fashion is shallow and vain.
Probably because I don't see any necessary moral dimension in sport, and judging from Athletes Behaving Badly, I am not sure why I should.
I don't think that's a very good comparison. For one, team based sports like football are almost totally meritocratic (outside weird edge cases like Bronny being drafted to keep his father happy), while fashion is creative and subjective. Not to mention men and women who lose a bunch of weight and/or get fit are congratulated and praised all the time, Subway Jared even made a career out of it before he went down.
Good stuff but would just tweak the end. You wrote, “There’s no ethical way to enjoy football. So either stop watching or acknowledge your complicity.” You can acknowledge your own complicity and try to make the game safer and care for those who have been debilitated by the sport. That’s what I’ve been trying to do. Click on my profile and see my Substack if you want more info.
I largely agree with you - and I also watch football (mostly college) - but to say that there is "no ethical living under capitalism" is confusing in this context. I don't think it's capitalism that drives football players and other elite athletes. Did Michael Jordan push himself for years and years because of capitalism? I have always thought that he and people like him do it for competition and perhaps addiction, as well as love, of the game. And do we who are spectators watch because of capitalism? Or is it just that we enjoy witnessing the fruits of the most talented and committed among us more than we enjoy staying faithful to our morals?
Personally I prefer soccer, but I'm not much of a sports spectator unless my kids are playing.
I get the love of risk taking though. I'm a horse rider. I used to do eventing and now I wander around the mountains on horseback. Off and on something happens and I get smashed up a bit.
My father-in-law played for Michigan in the 40s. He played in the Rose Bowl and has the National Championship ring. He was a poor farm kid who ended up in the Big House. When he was in his 50s, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, a common diagnosis for aging football players.
My son and husband walked out on the field with him at the 50th Anniversary of the National Championship game. His PD was bad at the time and he had to time his meds so he could do it. He died in his 70s from the effects of PD.
My daughter won't let her son play football. We found out in his soccer years that he's got a helluva powerful and accurate kick, but no.
We still watch football...well for me, I mostly just watch watch the Michigan game and the Bengals when they make it to the playoffs.
Last year, when Michigan won, we cried, put the ring on my grandson's finger and took a pic so his friends would believe his great grandpa was a Wolverine. But he's not allowed to play.
My father-in-law Donn was one of my favorite people and we all wonder if football caused his Parkinson's even as we love what those games do for our family. We feel the same ambivalence.
The concussions are awful, and I felt like a hypocrite, but what drove me away is I felt like the whole product was getting worse by the year. It was a relief to drop out of my old fantasy football league (in large part because that format is just a sucky competition) and stopped low level gambling (which required listening/reading to so many stupid takes), and stopped planning my weekends around the tv schedule. I will sometimes watch a playoff game and I still watch hockey, which has nearly as much head banging (although they seem to have made greater strides in player safety). But I dropped out of the NFL culture and my life has improved as a result. The reality of the concussions forced me to consider what I was doing and the rest was an easy choice.
I'm not sure how this connects but it feels like it does. I find the push to expand football globally odd. We know this sport isn't healthy for its participants. Do we really want to expand it? For it to displace soccer, or baseball or basketball? I always thought one interesting thing about Ricky Williams retiring early supposedly to smoke weed was that if that's why he did, he made the healthier life style choice. For me, I love the game. Grew up watching it. If the fastest and strongest guys want to show what they can do connecting on 40 yard bombs down field. I'm in. But marketing it in an effort to grow comes off as tone deaf. Also, maybe not the best strategy to send Philly fans abroad...not exactly leading with our best fan base. I'm a Philly fan naturally.
Philly fans are just passionate.
Don't worry, I'm pretty sure the NFL's plans to expand the game globally are going to be futile.
God yeah. As a Brit, the only way I hear of an NFL player is if they date someone famous.
some soccer fans tried to learn me on how you can fall out of your league if you don't play well enough. It was in the full tanking days of the 76ers. that kind of system makes a lot of sense to me.
Yeah, the stakes are real in football (world’s version). I remember when current all-conquering club Manchester City were in the third tier playing small regional sides, and when that happens you’ve no guarantee of ever getting back up. You can be down there 30 years
It might have some success depending on the world's appetite for a bit of 'americana'.
they have the NBA for that :)
If they really wanted to expand they would schedule NFL games on Friday and Saturday so that us in the eastern hemisphere can actually watch on the weekend, rather than having everything happening on Monday morning.
It’s worth noting that the rest of world has their dangerous sports as well. Rugby and hockey are incredibly violent and concussion-prone, their athletes just as big, fast and aggressive. Even soccer isn’t innocent: there’s a reason youth leagues prohibit headers.
This ritual absolution happens in all kinds of cases. If there's a mass shooting, gun advocates will say we shouldn't politicize it. If there's a religious terror attack, religious pluralists will do the same. It's in the guise of holiness but, as with this football example, what it really is is a thought terminator.
Sports journalism seems even more affected by hive-mind than news or political journalism.
Your comparisons don’t hold because head trauma is intrinsic to every play in football.
And injury or death is intrinsic to every mass shooting with guns, your point?
My point is you lack the ability to make valid comparisons because you don’t understand that “mass shootings” are just plain bad, but they’re not an intrinsic downside to a common activity that people regularly enjoy. You could try to say “gun violence” is intrinsic to “having guns” or something I guess, but there you run into the problem of misuse—whereas in football the issue is that it’s not any foul play causing the problem.
For football, smashing heads is unavoidable without completely changing to the sport.
The elementary logic you’re missing is that there is a common activity with a lot of upside—football—with a (previously nonobvious) downside intrinsic to the activity—compounding brain trauma from every play.
Similarly, religiously motivated violence is very, very rare in a place like the US, and isn’t remotely intrinsic to say Presbyterians worshipping.
"Sports journalism seems even more affected by hive-mind than news or political journalism."
Maybe not journalism, but, frankly, in my experience, non-home team sports fans offer more reasoned and fact-based justifications for why they support a given team, than what I hear from most political fans.
“I watch the NFL and I enjoy it and every time a game ends I feel like I just bought some conflict diamonds.” Indeed.
Am I truly the only cat who recalls The Great NFL Concussion Coverup, aka "The War On Football(tm)", in which the NFL swore up and down that there was no link between multiple concussions and brain injury, even though they knew the truth full well?
Football is dangerous, I get it. So is auto racing. Hell, there are probably human out there who are suffering debilitating pickleball injuries, humans whose love for chess caused them to sacrifice their bodies and their health.
But why the need to lie about it? That is what killed it for me, and I used to like watching humans chase a bouncy ball.
That's a good question. Maybe when risks were higher for living in general than the risks of sport weren't such a big deal. We're entering a time when safety, life itself are more important than taking risks. There is probably a point of diminishing returns, more people living out their lives in the basement, but who knows if we are there yet. I took sporting risks, and others, when I was young, of course they were exciting then but I escaped without permanent consequences. And my Pickleball ankle injury is all healed now, thank you very much :)
> Maybe when risks were higher for living in general than the risks of sport weren't such a big deal.
There might be something to this. We used to be more willing to accept deaths in war, for example. And I've heard the theory that as the birth rate declines, people become more protective of their kids because they only have one or two. (Not that people with large families don't value their kids -- the theory was that there's unconscious anxiety when only one child carries your genes, and/or that people have more time to be overprotective when they have fewer kids.)
The example of war is such that death must always be accepted as a consequence, while the impetus should always be rejected. Unlike war, I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with the idea of football, but the application of the sport certainly has much to be desired.
Or it's that now you can produce two children and have a reasonable expectation that will survive the onslaught of microorganisms and make it to adulthood. That has only been the case recently. So now we do our utmost to protect them from other dangers, many of which are largely fictious. I mean, how many parents drive their children to school, exposing them to the risk of automobile crashes (common) to make sure the won't be abducted by a stranger or molested by the bus driver (rare)?
I think the decline of birthrates has more to do with the dwindling of resources. In the wild, animals decrease reproduction when times get tough, and we are animals. Yet we are also human, so we only have to preceive a future of scarcity to cut down on reproduction. You don't have to go far on Medium or Substack to find articles with titles like "Climate Change and the Child Question."
The thing that was only understood more recently is that it’s not the concussions that really matter. It’s just the constant head impact.
The NFL did try to avoid the whole topic for a while there, but as with sports like boxing, it’s just too common to hide as the athletes age.
See also: the story a while back about artillerymen who fired a lot of rounds against ISIS suffering from brain issues unexpectedly due to the repeated low-level head trauma.
Man, that story about the artillerymen still haunts me. Those guys were absolutely destroyed by that work and then basically abandoned
The New York Times published a story in December strongly suggesting the Maine spree shooter may have become brain damaged from all of the explosions he experienced during his work as an Army grenade instructor.
"Publicly, the Army has said almost nothing about Mr. Card’s time in uniform — only that he was trained as a petroleum supply specialist and never deployed to combat. But soldiers who spoke to The New York Times said that description left out something crucial: Mr. Card worked every summer for years as an instructor at an Army hand grenade training range, where he was rocked by thousands of brain-jarring explosions.
For generations, the military assumed that the blast waves that troops experienced from firing weapons or throwing grenades in training posed no danger to them. It is only in the last few years that increasing evidence of harm from repeated exposure, along with mandates from Congress, has driven the Defense Department to start trying to track, study and understand the impact of blast exposure.
. . .
Each summer, all 1,200 West Point cadets have to throw at least one M67 grenade. Most throw two. Mr. Card was nearly always one of the instructors with the cadets in the grenade pits. The soldiers from his unit said he could easily have been exposed to more than 10,000 blasts in all.
The Army declined to provide details about Mr. Card’s work in uniform.
'The concussion from the grenade is brutal, brutal — it will shake your heart,' the senior platoon member said. 'We have a berm at the range that protects from shrapnel, but it doesn’t protect from the blast. Some guys got a lot. Probably too much.'
By age 39, Mr. Card was wearing hearing aids."
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/11/us/brain-blast-army-robert-card-maine-lewiston.html
The NFL's incredible grab bag of special privileges makes them very invested in maintaining a squeaky clean image.
I do find the unwillingness of football chud podcasts (maybe Freddie is listening to a higher intellectual sphere of football podcasts, I dunno) to move on from the Tua thing and talk X's and O's a bit odd.
Because the whole rotten show is not in fact indefensible. The defenses are morally questionable and unconvincing to many audiences, but the inability or unwillingness to adapt the gladiatorial ethos of 90's football commentary for a slightly more enlightened era always sticks out to me, especially since the "we accept the risks of this dangerous game" is the attitude always coming out of the players' mouths when asked.
Men risking disfigurement for glory has always stirred passions and garnered interest, that's a universal human impulse. That our mass audience communications lack language to express that (even from the right, imagine JD Vance or Elon Musk's answer to a question on this) is indicative of the way our culture just doesn't sync up with the realities of the human experience anymore.
McLuhan again. He got it right more than a half century ago. The medium defines the discourse.
TV, cable TV, talk radio, then early internet, and then enhanced-virality social media above all and 10x worse than the others — it is almost literally impossible to have these nuanced discussions when the primary medium isn’t in-person conversations and the (slow, paper) written word.
NFL hypocrisy and loss of nuance is but one aspect of this larger phenomenon.
I quit watching the NFL after the GQ article about CTE back in 2009. I know I’m morally compromised in countless other ways that are worse. Meat, like Freddie pointed out. Shopping on Amazon—which contributes directly to human suffering in a way that me watching the games would not, since one household is irrelevant to NFL numbers and profits.
I also admit I got tired of boycotting, and I probably would have gone back to football by now… except I have a seven-year-old son, and I don’t want him to get into football. I don’t want him to ask me to play. So really, it has become a boycott for selfish reasons.
What makes shopping on Amazon uniquely bad as shopping goes?
They seem to subject the warehouse and delivery workers to a ton of pressure and stress, like they don't have time for a restroom break, and most of the products are cheap because they're made in poor countries with minimal labor laws. Plus Amazon hurts local business, bookstores, etc.
Remember what people used to say about Walmart?
Retail is an incredibly competitive space and all the big companies are fairly ruthless to stay competitive by keeping prices low for consumers.
Nothing helps the disadvantaged more, by the way, than being able to afford necessities that would otherwise be much more expensive.
The things people still say about Walmart, yes, I remember those. Still markedly preferable to Amazon warehouse work. But okay, liberal, keep telling me about how a job that destroys your body in a decade should be the best the filthy poors can aspire toward.
Better to have such an option available than the forced labor under Marxism where everyone is poor because the labor theory of value, central planning, and price fixing destroys economic efficiency due to denying the basics of markets.
This is a completely erroneous way to conceive of the situation. Not only is your claim about Marxism confused and completely misunderstood , it’s equally unhelpful to view corporate-scale commodity manufacturing as an individual-scale issue that can be solved morally.
Humans I know who have done both say that WallyWorld is much less of a sweatshop and generally treats its employees better and less like a respurce to be exploited untild depleted.
Protecting your son from preventable harm isn't selfish.
Corporate-scale commodity manufacturing is not an issue that can be solved by individual-scale moralizing. This problem stems from alienation. Boycotting would only work on a mass-organized level, which is difficult to pull off logistically. Individual choices on the matter otherwise remain personal.
Helmets in football are like boxing gloves; they make it seem like they're offering decent protection, but all the while the player's brain is getting shaken about like a polaroid picture.
I know the rules have evolved, but as a Brit, it was always seemed mad that somewhere along the line players decided that the best way to stop the giant, armour-wearing athlete in your way was to smash your head into them.
Add to that all of the accusations of sexual assault, domestic violence and the rest, the weird fetishisation of the military and the Kaepernick stuff, and yeah it's a pretty grim spectacle. I wonder what would have to happen to make me stop watching?
There’s even less ethical living under socialism and communism, as history shows.
At least under capitalism, the athletes can try to get rich via voluntary transactions as they risk their health.
They would be rich under socialism as well. Heroes of the revolution.
Setting aside what history actually shows, the idea (my idea, not sure Freddie would agree) is that under socialism, people would play sports for the love of the game only, not because it made them rich. Take away the potential for a huge payday, and the risk-reward calculus changes. It might mean that American football goes away, since not enough people want to play or watch to make it worthwhile. Or maybe it changes into a different game, or maybe it persists because the appeal can withstand the absence of obscene riches as a motivator.
I must admit:
"under socialism, people would play sports for the love of the game only"
Is actually way more realistic than the typical "people would Do X without material incentives" you hear.
Note that plenty of amateur athletes who know they have no shot at making it big wreck their health or take other considerable risks in various combat and extreme sports.
Note also that the NFL is actually the least of the problems; it's just a few hundred athletes at any given time. The real problem is all of the many hundreds of thousands of kids who bash in their skulls on a regular basis for years and years and don't even get paid. (Obviously, the popularity of the NFL and kid football are linked, with causality going both ways.)
That's true, which is why I think the question of removing the riches is an interesting one. Plenty of amateurs play football (and other dangerous sports), although plenty of them think, despite the odds, that *maybe* they'll make it. They also do it because they enjoy it, don't get me wrong; I doubt very much a socialist society would be one without people who did risky and even insane things for love and glory. Still, the draw of football, even for those who have no intention of going pro, has something to do with its enormous cultural prominence, which has something to do with the huge amount of money it generates. Remove that, and I wonder if it would be anywhere near as popular (as a non-fan, I'm inclined to think it would be a minor sport at best, but that's just speculation).
99% of guys that play football in high school and college (including myself) have no illusions about ever playing in the NFL.
I don't even think FdB was making a point about capitalism, per se, but if no football player made money from football, there would still be a ton of guys playing football. Because it rules.
I cannot agree with FdB's moralizing here. First, Jim McMahon, Junior Seau et al. are not the fate of all NFL players. Meaning that severe consequences are a risk, not a certainty. A risk that grown men are entitled to take. Second, the belief that NFL players were unaware of the risk until the advent of modern brain imaging technologies is as risible as the idea that smokers were unaware of the propensity to lung cancer prior to the 1964 Surgeon General's report. That isn't how "epistemology" works in actual life. In any case, Tua and all other current NFL players are certainly aware of the risks and elect to incur them, usually for considerable monetary compensation. The idea that the regular, if not widespread, materialization of these risks means that viewing the sport is unethical is, to me, a symptom of the general progressive mindset that understands progress to consist in progressively shrinking the sphere in which human beings may act on their own will.
As for the post-game commentary, that posture of extreme unction that irritates FdB is just another, predictable result of the hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing of people like FdB who assert that the whole thing is unethical and shame on everyone who supports it when the only ethical thing to do is to put on your lachrymosity and weep and lament and lead the dirge for the poor players being exploited by the evil football-industrial complex.
Sheesh.
So why did the NFL or The Tobacco Institute so vehemently deny the risks, if everyone knew that they were out there?
First, denial is the standard reaction of anyone who is accused of being bad or promoting something bad. Human nature. Second, NFL and the tobacco industry are for-profit businesses. So of course they can be expected to adopt a fortress mentality when their product is being disparaged. In the case of tobacco, one could even argue that their boards owed a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to offer vigorous opposition to claims of risk and danger. After all, 60 years later, the actual mechanism by which tobacco causes cancer is still unknown; all we have is the statistical correlation. The causal link has simply been accepted by enough people as true. And the anti-tobacco forces have been known to mislead as well: the original "study" by which it was claimed that second-hand smoke causes cancer was a travesty, one could almost say fraudulent. But look -- I'm generally swimming against the tide when it comes to public assignment of blame and tort theories of liability in this country. Definitely a minority viewpoint.
Great, but it doesn't really anwser my question.
Also, the NFL is a trade association under IRC Sec. 501, not a "for-profit business". The Tobacco Institute also was some kind of a trade association, again not a business.
I used to watch boxing, until the day I watched the Welterweight Championship fight and saw Emil Griffith kill Benny, the Kid, Paret. I’ve never watched a single match again. Giving up things you like can be done whether sports, or anything else, but the revulsion, the outrage, must be real. When it is, you never go back.
Ray Mancini was forever shaken up after killing Duk Koo Kim in the ring.
Football is an inherently dangerous full contact sport, but what really grinds my gears is how people act like it's just the NFL that's at fault for this instead of sports at large. I watched a documentary about Lindsey Vonn, and her knees and a lot of other parts of her legs were basically destroyed before the age of 40. Athletes have died downhill skilling plenty of times, and spills at 70 miles an hour rarely turn out well.
I watched another documentary on Netflix about figure skating (Harley & Katya), and let me tell you the people bashing the NFL would never dream of getting outraged at figure skating, and there was this Australian duo where the female partner had multiple injuries from being dropped. Like, when you think about it, how could that not be dangerous? You're on solid ice with zero protective equipment getting thrown in the air and spun around. Falls happen all the time. She eventually fell into alcoholism and took her own life when the sport basically abandoned her after she could no longer perform.
You're never going to make sports completely safe. That's the bottom line. I think most players understand this. I'm sure no one wants to get hurt, but they've accepted that getting injured is part of the deal. I'm just sick of the NFL being the whipping boy for this kind of thing. Most people making these arguments just kind of hate football and wish it go away. I wish they'd be honest.
I have never fully understood why a human who destroys their body and health for sport is held up as a hero, but a model who destroys her body and health for fashion is shallow and vain.
Probably because I don't see any necessary moral dimension in sport, and judging from Athletes Behaving Badly, I am not sure why I should.
I don't think that's a very good comparison. For one, team based sports like football are almost totally meritocratic (outside weird edge cases like Bronny being drafted to keep his father happy), while fashion is creative and subjective. Not to mention men and women who lose a bunch of weight and/or get fit are congratulated and praised all the time, Subway Jared even made a career out of it before he went down.
1. Sports are also subjective, unless figure skating is run against the clock now. Not sure why it matters.
2. I said nothing about getting fit but about ruining one's body.
Good stuff but would just tweak the end. You wrote, “There’s no ethical way to enjoy football. So either stop watching or acknowledge your complicity.” You can acknowledge your own complicity and try to make the game safer and care for those who have been debilitated by the sport. That’s what I’ve been trying to do. Click on my profile and see my Substack if you want more info.
I largely agree with you - and I also watch football (mostly college) - but to say that there is "no ethical living under capitalism" is confusing in this context. I don't think it's capitalism that drives football players and other elite athletes. Did Michael Jordan push himself for years and years because of capitalism? I have always thought that he and people like him do it for competition and perhaps addiction, as well as love, of the game. And do we who are spectators watch because of capitalism? Or is it just that we enjoy witnessing the fruits of the most talented and committed among us more than we enjoy staying faithful to our morals?
He who is without sin cast the first stone.
Personally I prefer soccer, but I'm not much of a sports spectator unless my kids are playing.
I get the love of risk taking though. I'm a horse rider. I used to do eventing and now I wander around the mountains on horseback. Off and on something happens and I get smashed up a bit.
My father-in-law played for Michigan in the 40s. He played in the Rose Bowl and has the National Championship ring. He was a poor farm kid who ended up in the Big House. When he was in his 50s, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, a common diagnosis for aging football players.
My son and husband walked out on the field with him at the 50th Anniversary of the National Championship game. His PD was bad at the time and he had to time his meds so he could do it. He died in his 70s from the effects of PD.
My daughter won't let her son play football. We found out in his soccer years that he's got a helluva powerful and accurate kick, but no.
We still watch football...well for me, I mostly just watch watch the Michigan game and the Bengals when they make it to the playoffs.
Last year, when Michigan won, we cried, put the ring on my grandson's finger and took a pic so his friends would believe his great grandpa was a Wolverine. But he's not allowed to play.
My father-in-law Donn was one of my favorite people and we all wonder if football caused his Parkinson's even as we love what those games do for our family. We feel the same ambivalence.
The concussions are awful, and I felt like a hypocrite, but what drove me away is I felt like the whole product was getting worse by the year. It was a relief to drop out of my old fantasy football league (in large part because that format is just a sucky competition) and stopped low level gambling (which required listening/reading to so many stupid takes), and stopped planning my weekends around the tv schedule. I will sometimes watch a playoff game and I still watch hockey, which has nearly as much head banging (although they seem to have made greater strides in player safety). But I dropped out of the NFL culture and my life has improved as a result. The reality of the concussions forced me to consider what I was doing and the rest was an easy choice.