Against Football

by Steve Almond

  But it turns out Sean’s fandom is far more organic than mine. He grew up in semi-rural West Virginia, football country. He was a natural from early on, a kid with that rare combination of size, speed, and agility. Virtually everyone in his life expected him to become a football player, especially his father. When I asked him why he quit, he told me this story:

  When he was about eleven years old, his team played a rival with the best running back in the league. It was Sean’s role, as the star of the defense, to contain the kid. On one play, Sean met the running back just as he was about to burst through a gap. The running back lowered his head, in the same instinctual way Darryl Stingley had, and their helmets collided at full speed. The kid fell and lay motionless.

  The kid’s coaches, and later his parents, ran onto the field. Smelling salts didn’t revive him. Eventually, an ambulance appeared. Sean was convinced he’d killed the boy. He began to cry. But what Sean remembered most vividly was how, right after the tackle, his teammates kept slapping his helmet, as if he’d just done the most heroic thing ever, which, in a purely football sense, he had. He also recalled trying to walk away from his teammates, because he didn’t want them to see that he was crying. Even three decades later, recounting this episode shook up Sean.

  The running back did not wind up paralyzed. That’s not the point of the story. It was the tremendous anguish Sean felt over his power to harm another boy, and to be revered for this power. A burden heavy enough to make him walk away—despite his love of the game and his natural gifts.

  Because of his size, Sean has spent the rest of his life having to tell people he doesn’t play football. And even though he’s now a respected digital archivist at M.I.T., with a beautiful wife and two children, there’s still some core part of him that wishes he had played, that knows he squandered a shot at greatness. Football remains the unrequited love of his life.

  And now here I was—his designated football buddy!—suggesting that even being a fan of the game was wrong. Don’t we turn to football precisely to escape such complexities, to watch the miracle of supreme bodies at play, to pretend, however briefly, that life is just a fearless game?

  Still, I can’t help thinking about something else Sean told me, which was how, in the hours and days after he delivered his big hit, he kept asking the same question of his coaches: “I didn’t do anything wrong, did I?”

  5

  “GET MONEY!” ON THREE

  I was on an airplane watching television, which is not a statement that would have made sense even ten years ago, but there you go. Thank you, America. Among the suite of channels was the NFL Network, which I predict will soon be the world’s most popular cable channel and will spawn a second and third channel, if it hasn’t already. I wasn’t supposed to be watching football, but they were showing the NFL Combine, where the league gathers top college prospects to put them through their paces. I couldn’t resist.

  The drill I happened to see was for defensive backs. They had to backpedal then whirl around and catch a ball fired at them at about 200 mph. Afterward, a gentleman named Peter Giunta, the secondary coach for the New York Giants, called the prospects together to give them an inspirational speech. Giunta was bald and intense. His rhetorical style fell somewhere between General Patton and Tony Soprano. “It is a privilege to play in the National Football League,” he began. “It is not your right … You have to do the right things, not only on the field but off the field. They’ve done security checks on you, background checks. I don’t wanna read about you in the papers. We live in a great country. We all have the power of choice.”

  He continued on this theme for several minutes. Then he called upon Bradley Roby, a projected first-rounder from Ohio State, to lead a final cheer. The players huddled up. “We all know why we’re here,” Roby barked. “ ‘Get money!’ on three.”

  One, two, three. Get Money!

  It is always refreshing when people are honest in this way. And it is particularly refreshing when it comes from the NFL, because there is so much horseshit swirling around regarding the economic forces that drive the game.

  The most persistent myth about the NFL is that, because of its revenue sharing system, it is somehow socialist. To quote the writer Chuck Klosterman: “The reason the NFL is so dominant is because the NFL is basically Marxist.”

  Klosterman has written a lot of intelligent analysis of the NFL over the years. This is not a prime example.

  As noted, NFL owners in large cities agreed to divide TV proceeds equally back in 1962, in part to create competitive balance on the field. That is not Marxism. It is, at best, a canny form of market manipulation. But the history is far more problematic. In fact, Pete Rozelle had signed a TV contract in 1960 on behalf of the entire league—a deal struck down by a federal court as a violation of antitrust law. Rozelle went to Washington, and lawmakers obediently passed the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, which allowed the NFL and other leagues to circumvent those pesky antitrust rules and to sell TV rights, collectively, to the highest bidder. The law essentially made the NFL a legal monopoly.

  But just as a thought experiment, let’s pretend the NFL really were Marxist. Here’s what that would mean. First, there would be no private ownership, and therefore no team owners. The teams, though they would represent different cities, would belong to the State. Employees would be paid according to the Marxist edict: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. A top quarterback such as Peyton Manning would not be paid $18 million every season. He would be paid based on his needs, let’s say $100,000 per year. The worker who laundered his jock strap, or the custodian who mopped the floors of his locker room might be paid just as much as Peyton Manning—perhaps more if they had greater needs, say, a lot of children or sick parents. Star athletes could still ostensibly earn huge sums in endorsement deals from private industry, though the league would have to decide whether these payments violated its Marxist tenets. Commissioner Goodell would not receive a compensation package of $42.2 million, as he did in 2012, nor would his deputies earn millions.

  In fact, one of the most fascinating questions that arises from a truly Marxist NFL would be the question of what to do with the staggering profits, which would no longer be divvied up by a cabal of geriatric magnates or funneled to a pack of vainglorious athletes. We can safely assume that its operating costs would be a fraction of the nearly $10 billion the NFL is projected to earn this season. The balance—$9.5 billion?—would be available for redistribution to societal needs such as early education, medical and renewable energy research, intervention for at-risk populations. Fans would be in the strange position of justifying their support of pro football by pointing to all these good works.

  A Marxist NFL, in which salaries were no longer grossly inflated by our blessed free market, might spur other felicitous outcomes as well. Players could choose to join clubs in the cities or states where they actually grew up. With obscene economic incentives removed, players and fans might experience the sport as a purer form of meritocracy. As with the NCAA basketball tournament, competition would hinge on team and regional pride rather than individual earning power. There would be no more parasitic entourages or predatory agents. And almost certainly, athletes would make more sensible decisions regarding their own health.

  Do I realize this will never ever happen? That lawyers would descend from their penthouse aeries to sue the bejesus out of all parties? That the players themselves would flee the NFL in droves to join for-profit leagues, or form their own? That Rush Limbaugh’s head would explode as he tried to process the concept of a “socially-conscious blood sport.”

  Yes. Which is my point.

  The NFL is the opposite of Marxist. It is the epitome of crony capitalism, a corporate oligarchy that has absorbed or crushed all potential competitors, that routinely extorts municipal and state governments, and openly flouts its tax obligations while remaining, in the words of The Atlantic’s Gregg Easterbrook, “walled off behind a moat of antitru
st exemptions.”

  The league’s players are among the most specialized employees on earth. Every aspect of their job performance is filmed, analyzed, measured, and submitted to public scrutiny. Minute differences in efficiency translate into mindboggling pay discrepancies. It is this ruthless workplace that compels so many players to play through pain, shoot up steroids, etc.

  Much is made of the communal virtues imparted by football: sportsmanship, teamwork, self-sacrifice. But a genuine Marxist would note that these qualities are placed in the service of contests whose outcomes are irrelevant to the fate of the worker. Football is the ultimate bourgeois indulgence. Its civic function is to distract the proletariat from the aims of the revolution and to serve as a means of indoctrination into thought systems that are individualistic and materialist.

  Think about it, folks. Last season, the Minnesota Vikings paid a man named Jared Allen more than a million dollars per game to maul opposing quarterbacks. The “market”—meaning us, the fans—has determined that Allen’s value is roughly $18.5 million per year. The State of Minnesota pays an elementary school teacher an average of $38,000 per year. Paramedics make $42,000; cops, $28,000. That makes one quarterback mauler worth 474 elementary school teachers. Or 440 paramedics. Or 661 police officers.

  Let us pause in astonishment and torment.

  The closer you look, the worse it gets. Consider that in 2013, lawmakers in Minnesota voted to allot $506 million in taxpayer money to the Vikings to help them build a new stadium—despite facing a $1.1 billion state budget deficit. They did this because Vikings ownership had made noises about relocating the team, a tactic routinely used against politicians who live in terror of losing a franchise. The new stadium increased the value of the team by an estimated $200 million. The owners, who are multi-millionaires, pay $13 million per year to use the stadium, which sounds like a lot until you consider that they earn hundreds of millions in TV revenues, ticket sales, concessions, and parking. This helps explain why teachers and social workers get paid what they do in Minnesota.

  Here’s the totally nutso part: the Vikings’ ownership actually underperformed. Based on research done by Judith Grant Long, a professor of urban planning at Harvard, taxpayers provide 70 percent of the capital cost of NFL stadiums, as well as footing the bill for “power, sewer services, other infrastructure, and stadium improvements.”

  The perfect example: Seven of every ten dollars spent to build CenturyLink Field in Seattle came from the taxpayers of Washington State, $390 million total. The owner, Paul Allen, pays the state $1 million per year in “rent” and collects most of the $200 million generated. If you are wondering how to become, like Allen, one of the richest humans on earth, negotiating such a lease would be a good start.

  In New Orleans, taxpayers have bankrolled roughly a billion dollars to build then renovate the Superdome, which we are now supposed to call the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. Guess who gets nearly all the revenues generated by Saints games played in this building? If you guessed all those hard-working stiffs who paid a billion dollars, you would be wrong. If you guessed billionaire owner Tom Benson, you would be right. He also receives $6 million per annum from the state as an “inducement payment” to keep him from moving the team.

  That’s the same amount Cowboys owner Jerry Jones would pay each year in property taxes to Arlington, Texas, where his fancy new stadium is located. Except that Jones doesn’t pay property taxes because, like many of his fellow plutocrats, he’s cut a sweetheart deal with the local authorities.

  In the old days, NFL owners were rich men who accepted the risk of losing money as the cost of doing business. Thanks to the popularity of the game, the NFL and its owners—with the collusion of politicians—have created what amounts to a risk-free business environment. According to Long’s data, a dozen teams received more public money than they needed to build their facilities. Rather than going into debt, they turned a profit.

  Let’s take another big step backward.

  Okay, so taxpayers have funded 70 percent of the construction costs of the stadiums in which NFL teams play, for which they receive a return of pennies on the dollar. But consider the economic impact if taxpayers were to receive 70 percent of the profits generated by those facilities: that is, a proportion equal to our investment. Given that the NFL is projected to earn in the neighborhood of $10 billion this season, that amounts to $7 billion from TV, tickets, parking, etc. (Again: no stadiums means no games.) Think about how much social good $7 billion would do in cities such as Detroit and Cleveland and St. Louis, where bright new stadiums rise above crumbling schools, closed factories, and condemned homes.

  Or let’s say, more conservatively, that cities demanded a 50 percent share of the profits as rent. Or simply demanded that the owners remit to the taxpayers the sum required to build and maintain these stadia. This would still represent hundreds of millions of dollars.

  This is not some socialist “redistribution of wealth” scheme. It’s not charity. That’s Fox News math. This is asking an immensely profitable business to pay investors (taxpayers) our rightful dividend.

  The traditional line put forward by boosters is that a sports franchise generates prestige and jobs and economic growth for a particular city. It would be more accurate to characterize teams as parasites on the local economy. They suck money from local tax bases then send the gigantic profits generated by these expenditures back to the league office for disbursement to the owners.

  Think about how insane our cultural priorities are that we’re allowing so much money to be siphoned from the public till and funneled directly into the private koi ponds of the nation’s wealthiest families. That arrangement isn’t even capitalist. It’s feudal.

  Please try to imagine, if you would, what other industry could perpetrate such financial chicanery and still be considered a model corporate citizen? Think about this the next time the NFL ballyhoos one of its PR charity giveaways.

  This is not a matter of politics, by the way. Conservatives who rail against government debt and liberals who lament the decline of social services should be equally outraged. Better yet: they should recognize that their loyalty to the NFL is what makes this ongoing confidence game possible. We are the ones who give the league its tremendous leverage over politicians. We shouldn’t be surprised that it uses this leverage. That’s what capitalists do.

  A relevant memory: A few years ago I traveled down to Miami, where I worked as a reporter during the early nineties. A friend was driving me around downtown when I noticed what looked like a large-scale demolition project.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  My friend shook his head. “They’re tearing down the arena,” he said.

  “The Miami Arena?” I said.

  The arena had just gone up when I moved to town fifteen years earlier, as a home for the NBA’s newest franchise, the Miami Heat. It had been built with public money, naturally. But that was okay, because the arena was going to be the savior of an impoverished area known as Overtown.

  Now the building was being razed, a pink elephant that had cost taxpayers more than $50 million. It had diverted precious funds and political will from legitimate plans to economically develop Overtown, where, according to the most recent census figures, the per capita annual income is less than $15,000, and half of all children are living in poverty. Now, county officials were spending $210 million in public money on a new bayside arena for the Heat.

  During my time in Miami, I had spoken briefly with one of the few dissenting voices, a county commissioner named Katy Sorenson, whose reaction to the Miami Arena plan I have never forgotten. Here is what she said:

  The real quality-of-life issues are jobs and job training and child care for people seeking job training. It’s schools and health care and parks. It’s about making sure people feel safe … Those are the things that will really make this a great county. Not an arena. This is about a bunch of spoiled, overfed, overpaid corporate giants who are having an arena built by taxp
ayers so that a bunch of spoiled, overfed, overpaid athletes can have a place to play.

  And now there sat the Miami Arena, floating in a vast landscape of concrete and blight, as the demolition crews did their taxpayer-funded work. All I could think was: this is the story of modern America under the influence of sports. The carnival comes to town and everyone gets drunk on the spectacle and empties their pockets and by morning the carnies are gone and what you thought was an enchanted kingdom full of prizes is just a muddy field on the edge of town.

  But that’s not quite right, because fans form long-term relationships with their teams. The Browns started playing in Cleveland in 1945, for instance. They won eight championships in their first two decades and earned a zealous following. This did not stop owner Art Modell from announcing, in the middle of the 1995 season, that he was moving the team to Baltimore (itself abandoned by the Colts a dozen years earlier). Modell inked this deal the day before voters approved a plan that had been put on the ballot at his request to revamp Cleveland Municipal Stadium for $175 million. During the Browns’ final home game, fans set fires in the stands, heaved rows of empty seats onto the field, and tore bathroom sinks from the walls.

  But Modell was merely following the rules of the modern NFL cartel. By moving to a new city desperate for football he secured a brand new stadium worth $220 million—with taxpayers picking up $200 million of that tab—where the newly minted Baltimore Ravens could play, rent-free, for thirty seasons, with Modell keeping every cent from tickets, parking, naming rights, concessions, and the sale of 108 luxury boxes and 7,500 club seats. Modell used the proceeds from personal seat licenses—fans who pay for the right to buy tickets—to build a $15 million training facility and cover his moving and legal fees. (Spurned Cleveland fans filed more than one hundred lawsuits against him.) Within a few years, his team—purchased in 1961 for $3.9 million and valued at $163 million before departing Cleveland—was worth $600 million.