It’s the start of football season and time for my annual blog about why I don’t watch the games anymore.
A once enthusiastic fan of the Green Bay Packers and Wisconsin Badgers (I am a Packers shareholder), I stopped watching or listening to the games three seasons ago because I was starting to feel like a spectator at the Roman Coliseum. Owing to the now year-round training of athletes and to strength coaches, players have become bigger and faster. The result is literally bone crushing collisions. A game that was always tough has become, in my view, obscene.
Less significant, but making it even easier to stop watching, are the endless breaks in the action for huddles, referee conferences, video reviews and TV timeouts. An NFL or big time college game these days is a series of committee meetings interspersed with bursts of violent collisions. It’s like watching a combination of traffic court and videos of actual crashes.
Most evidence points to the futility of my arguments. Attendance at Badger games was down a little last year, but that almost certainly had more to do with a disappointing performance from the team than with any widespread concern about the health of the players. And the NFL is more profitable than ever.
But now it seems that every season has its moment of sanity. The most recent and notable was the retirement of star quarterback Andrew Luck from the Indianapolis Colts. With plenty of money in the bank, the 29-year-old decided that it was time to end a career that included one documented concussion, a lacerated kidney, busted ribs, and an entire missed season due to injury before things got really serious.
To make it all more ugly, some Colts fans booed him off the field in his final game after they learned that he would soon announce his retirement. The fans always hated it when the Christians ran away from the lions.
But Luck is the latest in a series of high-profile players who have decided that all the pain and risk to their future health just isn’t worth it. Wisconsin’s own Chris Borland gave up a lucrative NFL career after only one season and since has become an articulate spokesperson for sanity in the game. And Rob Gronkowski, the star tight end for the New England Patriots, who caught the winning touchdown pass in last season’s Super Bowl, called it quits in March. He went through nine surgeries in his career and it took him several sleepless weeks to recover from a hit he took in his final game.
Luck, Borland and Gronkowski are white guys, but it has long seemed to me that in Madison and other college towns, at some point, there would be a turning away from football given that they are audiences of disproportionately affluent white folks that are watching teams of disproportionately poor black guys crush one another for their entertainment. I don’t know. That just seems kind of unseemly to me, but for whatever reason our social justice-focused community hasn’t yet focused on this particular obvious case of social injustice.
In a town where the prevailing political mood couldn’t stomach so much as a stone tablet listing the names of Confederate soldiers who died at Camp Randall, nobody seems to care that virtually uncompensated young black and white men are sustaining life-long injuries for their entertainment at the very same spot.
I suppose the whole thing is just so intoxicating. There’s so much money flowing around to the coaches and athletic department officials, the television and radio stations, the food and beverage vendors, the local bars, restaurants and hotels… everyone but the players who put their brains, bones and internal organs on the line to produce all this in the first place. And I’ll admit that the show itself — the band marching into the stadium, the half-time show, “Jump Around,” the red clad crowd amid the fall colors and a crisp autumn sky — is beguiling. I used to enjoy it.
But at some point we need to ask ourselves if we can stomach the reality of what we’re all coming to see or if we want to pretend that it’s all just part of the game. As more Chris Borlands and Andrew Lucks bring our attention to the pure brutality of the game, will we start to turn away from it or demand fundamental changes that make it safer?
For now, at least, there’s little evidence to suggest that that is happening.
