Against Football

by Steve Almond

  The reality was more muddled. Tillman was an unusually thoughtful athlete in search of a deeper purpose. He had signed up to fight terrorism. Like thousands of other soldiers, he wound up in Iraq instead, where he quickly grew disillusioned. In his private journal, he fretted that he would be “called upon to take part in something I see no clear purpose for … I believe we have little or no justification other than our imperial whim.” He hated the crass effort to market him as a jock G.I. Joe and confided to a friend that he feared if he were killed the Army would parade his body in the street.

  By 2004, Tillman had been redeployed to Afghanistan. That April, he was killed in what military officials described as a firefight near the Pakistan border. He was awarded the Silver Star, a medal reserved for soldiers who exhibit “gallantry in action against an enemy of the United States.” ESPN broadcast his memorial service live. His former team, the Phoenix Cardinals, erected a Pat Tillman Freedom Plaza outside its stadium. Even in death, Tillman’s identity was being carefully constructed. He became a square-jawed alpha martyr to the cause of freedom.

  In fact, according to the Army’s own subsequent investigation, Tillman had been killed by his own side, shot three times by comrades who, in the bedlam of an ill-advised mission, mistook him for an enemy fighter. The last soldier to see him alive was instructed not to reveal how Tillman had been killed. His uniform and body armor were burned, as was the notebook in which he recorded his thoughts about his tour in Afghanistan. An officer who knew Tillman had been a victim of friendly fire warned President Bush not to mention him. Military officials actually ordered members of his platoon to lie to his family during the memorial, and waited weeks to tell them the truth.

  The irony is that Tillman—had he lived, had his journal not been torched—might well have become the most famous critic of the War on Terror. According to his mother, he had arranged a meeting with Noam Chomsky, one of the few public intellectuals to question American militarism and intervention.

  Here’s how Tillman’s father put it:

  They blew up their poster boy.

  It’s easy enough to see the duplicity of the military in these machinations. But suppose Pat Tillman had survived, returned to play in the NFL, and wound up with brain damage at age fifty. Would we fans see him as a victim of friendly fire? Would we acknowledge our role in his demise? Or would we construct our own personal cover-ups?

  And what to make of the strange case of Rashard Mendenhall? NFL fans will remember Mendenhall as a former All-Pro running back for the Pittsburgh Steelers who abruptly left the game at age twenty-six. He, too, passed up on a multimillion dollar contract. But they’re not about to erect a Rashard Mendenhall Freedom Plaza outside Heinz Stadium. He’s more likely to be written off as a quitter, or a heretic.

  Why? Because he refused to follow the code of conduct that governs how a football player, particularly an African-American one, should behave. When the military killed Osama Bin Laden in 2011, Mendenhall was the only player in the league to publicly question the cheering mobs. “What kind of person celebrates death?” he tweeted. “I believe in God. I believe we’re ALL his children. And I believe HE is the ONE and ONLY judge.”

  That same year, Mendenhall again infuriated fans and pundits by voicing support for his fellow running back, Adrian Peterson, who had compared the NFL to “modern-day slavery.” Peterson was trying to make a simple point: owners reaped billions of dollars on the backs of their players, yet refused to share financial information with them. He quickly apologized for the comments. But Mendenhall was again, to quote his Internet critics, “uppity.”

  “[Peterson] is correct in his analogy of this game,” he tweeted. “Anyone with knowledge of the slave trade and the NFL could say that these two parallel each other.”

  Mendenhall played football for seventeen years. He knew the rules: shut up and play the game and collect your dough. But he knew he was being used, and used up. So he committed the ultimate sin: he deserted.

  Over my career, because of my interests in dance, art and literature, my very calm demeanor, and my apparent lack of interest in sporting events on my Twitter page, people in the sporting world have sometimes questioned whether or not I love the game of football. I’ve always been a professional. But I am not an entertainer. I never have been. Playing that role was never easy for me. The box deemed for professional athletes is a very small box. My wings spread a lot further than the acceptable athletic stereotypes and conformity was never a strong point of mine … So when they ask me why I want to leave the NFL at the age of 26, I tell them that I’ve greatly enjoyed my time, but I no longer wish to put my body at risk for the sake of entertainment.

  Another way of putting it would be that he insisted on being judged by the content of his character.

  Maybe it makes sense to think of football players as human sacrifices. Maybe that’s what we’re up to. That would certainly help explain why so many athletes and fans place their faith in Jesus Christ. He was a human sacrifice, too.

  For two thousand years, Christians have looked upon the ravaged body of Christ as proof of his devotion to a greater cause. This image was obsessively represented in art (take a look at Rembrandt’s Passion Series), in religious pageants, and upon the crucifixes that signified the place of worship in the home. Maybe it makes sense to think of television as the new domestic altar, around which we congregate to view images of young men bloodied and broken in service to that highest American cause: victory.

  After all, sacrificial rituals don’t have to involve throwing virgins into volcanoes or cutting the hearts out of warriors on the tops of temples. They can take subtler forms. Christian polemicists such as Tertullian considered the gladiators of Rome to be human sacrifices. Pagans took a more contemporary view. To them, the crucial difference was between certain death and the risk of death. The thrill of the arena resided in seeing how a man would behave in the face of danger.

  Doesn’t that sound like football?

  Maybe the modern sacrificial impulse is a natural response to the stark Darwinist pressures of capitalism, the arena in which all of us, like it or not, must now compete. Maybe football represents the illusion of order imposed upon our chaotic aggression. Maybe watching games isn’t just an evasion but a way of managing our panic about resource depletion, climate change, plague, the looming prospect that the serpent within our souls will doom the human experiment.

  This would help explain our obsession with imagined dystopias that feature sacrificial sport, from Rollerball to The Hunger Games. Maybe this is why we spend more and more of our time consuming sacrificial entertainments, programs in which the central allure is watching people damage each other and themselves.

  Cultures don’t practice human sacrifice simply out of cruelty, after all. Enacting these rituals creates a powerful bond among the sacrificing community. Maybe football has become the only spiritual adhesive strong enough to unite Americans, a modern temple in which neighbors join together during Sunday services to slake fierce and ancient longings once served by the Church.

  Let me be clear about this: I believe our insatiable appetite for football is symptomatic of our imperial decadence, of our quiet desperation for shared dramas in an age of social and psychic atomization, for animal physicality in an era of digital abstraction, for binary thought in an age of moral fragmentation.

  But I also believe that watching football indoctrinates Americans, that it actually causes us to be more bellicose and tolerant of cruelty, less empathic, less willing and able to engage with the struggles of an examined life.

  Let me nominate myself as a prime example. I was opposed to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and troubled by the nationalist wrath that erupted from every cultural portal in the weeks and months after the terrorist attacks of 2001. I wrote a few articles to this effect, and did a lot of grumbling.

  What I didn’t do was enact my values, protest, pursue my version of social justice, though I had plenty of time to do so. Instead, I spent
countless hours tracking the Oakland Raiders and making my pathetic Sunday pilgrimages to the Good Times Emporium to watch the team’s baroque implosions.

  Let’s compare this to what my father was up to in his early thirties. He organized students against the Vietnam War and was arrested for blocking the entrance to a nearby military base, actions that cost him dearly in his academic career. He supported and participated in the back-to-the-land movement. He worked on a book about communal living. And he did all this while working and helping to raise three small sons.

  And yet, for all this, it’s also true that my dad watched football and other sports, and that his ideals, like the rest of the Republic’s, got somewhat sidetracked by the games. His fandom marked the beginning of my own. Those games drew me closer to my dad, but they also led me to see aggression as a form of pride rather than a symptom of grief.

  One of the most disturbing memories of my childhood is a vicious brawl I had with my older brother Dave, which took place in our TV room. At some point, my dad came into the room. He didn’t break things up. As I remember it, he urged me on. He knew that Dave bullied me a lot and I think he liked seeing me stand up for myself. He was proud of me afterward, but I wept in humiliation. And I’m still struggling with all this shit years later. I still have to fight the impulse to watch clips of the Raiders’ glory days on YouTube—or worse, old boxing matches.

  But sometimes I look around at the prevailing landscape and I think: we’re all hopped up on the same bad brew of rage and fear and grievance. We’re ready to shoot each other in traffic. We’re treating the provision of health care to poor people as some kind of conspiracy. We’ve forgotten that we once fought a War on Poverty. Maybe D.H. Lawrence was right. Maybe the essential American soul is “hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.”

  And then there are other times, when I remember the symptoms associated with CTE—loss of memory, problems focusing, mood swings, impaired judgment—and lean toward a slightly more hopeful conclusion.

  Maybe our entire Republic is concussed.

  10

  BILL SIMMONS DRAWS THE LINE

  I have no right to tell anyone what to do, especially when it comes to football. I’ve supported the game for four decades. No overnight conversion is going to undo that. But I do have a right, like all Americans, to speak about what I see.

  Still, it’s worth asking why I’ve written this manifesto now, as opposed to, say, a decade ago when it would have been genuinely subversive. I’ve wondered the same thing myself.

  Partly it’s because, though I enjoy watching the game more than ever, I don’t enjoy the way it makes me feel afterward, as if a part of me is still hiding from feelings I’d be better off to face, as well as wasting my precious dwindling years on a selfish trifle. I’ve got three kids of my own and a tired wife who needs more help around the house, and a world in need of activism not voyeurism.

  All this makes for good PR, of course. But the main reason, I think, has to do with my ma.

  Seven years ago, on a sunny day in July, while vacationing with the family in Lake Tahoe, my mother was hit by a truck. This happened while she was walking to the grocery store to buy ketchup for one or another of her picky grandchildren. The driver didn’t see her. His pickup knocked her to the ground.

  Her injuries seemed minor initially. She wanted to get right up and keep walking which, fortunately, she was not allowed to do. She wound up in the hospital with internal bleeding and a hairline fracture of her pelvic bone, among other injuries. I mention this because it was really the first time I had seen my mother profoundly incapacitated, her nimble mind blurred by anesthesia.

  The following summer, she was diagnosed with cancer, for which she received chemotherapy and underwent the first of two major surgeries. She complained of “chemo brain.” But like a lot of intelligent, ambitious people, she managed to conceal the more distressing symptoms. She continued to work as a psychoanalyst. She exercised. She traveled. She published a highly praised book on maternal ambivalence. And we, her loved ones, did our best to attribute her lapses to the general wear and tear one might expect to see in a seventy-five-year-old survivor of multiple cancers.

  Then, two summers ago, she began to show more pronounced signs of cognitive decline. In July, she fell on her way to her office to see a patient, and tumbled into a state of delirium. She wound up at an intensive care unit at Stanford Hospital. My wife had just given birth to our third child, but my brothers worried that Mom might be dying and my father admitted he could use some help.

  By the time I arrived, my mother’s condition had deteriorated. She swung between benign confusion and extreme disorientation. Often, she had no idea where she was and virtually no short-term memory. At one point, she asked where her mother had gone. She insisted she was in the midst of an awful dream and stared in bewilderment at the IVs taped to her arms. Her face was deeply bruised from the fall. She could not feed herself. When doctors asked her basic questions (“Do you know what year it is, Dr. Almond?”) she looked at them imploringly.

  A nice young doctor sat my dad and me on a bench and told us that the official diagnosis—by which he really meant his best guess—was a progressive dementia that had been masked for years. In the space of a week, she had gone from a high-functioning professional to an invalid who needed around-the-clock monitoring.

  One night, as I tried to explain to her for perhaps the tenth time that she could not go home yet, she looked at me in a panic. “Something terrible is happening to me,” she said, and began to weep inconsolably.

  It was a moment of appalling lucidity. She could see, if only for a few drowning seconds, the true nature of her circumstance.

  The next morning, I brought her a picture of her grandson Judah. I thought it might jog her memory, or at least cheer her up. She looked at the photo and began sobbing again.

  “What’s the matter?” I said.

  “I’m going to miss everyone,” she said.

  The doctors talk about the brain as a mystery. What I realized in those sorrowful days is how holy the brain is. It is a temple that houses our fragile selfhood. We think, therefore we are. But if we cannot think, no matter how vigorous the body, we vanish.

  As it turned out, my mom’s brain had fooled the docs. Her episode was an acute dementia, apparently triggered in part by medication. Once home, she made a dramatic recovery. She still struggles a bit with short-term memory, and has opted to cut back on her work schedule. Other than that, she’s more or less her old self. What we saw was, in effect, a sneak preview of a horror film we’re all hoping will never come back to town.

  But no one can come face-to-face with dementia and look at football in the same way. At least, I couldn’t.

  One thing that never ceases to amaze me about America is how much we trumpet our freedom of speech and, at the same time, how little use we make of it, how obedient we are to public consensus. As a population, we generally agree to regard that which is popular as worthy and that which is convenient as necessary. And we shy from even the most obvious statements of truth if they puncture our prevailing myths. Statements such as, America’s economic system incentivizes greed. Or, Smart phones are making people stupider. Or, It is immoral to watch a sport that causes brain damage.

  Can you recall a single public figure who has ever condemned football? A major politician? A religious leader? A celebrity of any kind? The most prominent ones are probably Buzz Bissinger and Malcolm Gladwell. Back in 2012, the two of them teamed up to debate the merits of college football against two former players. At the outset of the debate, 16 percent of the audience was in favor of banning the sport in college. Afterward, that figure stood at 53 percent. Gladwell also had the guts to deliver a speech at the University of Pennsylvania a couple of years ago calling for students to boycott football at their school, though he was careful to note that he has no objection to those paid to play professionally.

  There is, of course, an entire industry whose ostensible job is to report an
d comment on the world of sports. But with a few exceptions—most notably, PBS’s Frontline series and the investigative reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru—the world of sports “journalism” serves as a promotional division of the Athletic Industrial Complex.

  If, like me, you are a fan of sports talk radio, you can tune in at any time of the day or night and hear an articulate and passionate discussion of the scandal du jour. Or you can just turn on your TV. The most popular radio shows are now (somewhat amazingly, considering the visuals) televised. In fact, sports punditry is the industry’s unrivaled growth sector, a universe of cheaply produced bombast that mimics the dominant form over on the cable “news” networks. Hosts earn their salaries going after almost any form of hypocrisy that might excite their audience: selfish players, incompetent coaches, meddlesome owners.

  What sports pundits almost never do is speak about the inherent morality of watching sports, in particular football. They never ask us fans to consider our own complicity in the weekly parade of outrages. Because we fans, by definition at this point, are the victims. We’re the ones forever betrayed, ripped off, taken for granted.

  One of my favorite sports pundits is Bill Simmons. In fact, he’s so good at what he does that it feels unfair to call him a pundit. He captures the joy and agony of fandom in self-effacing prose. He studies our games and offers generous insights. Simmons gets that sports are absurd and, at the same time, deeply meaningful. In the past few years, he’s become a TV star and launched a website, Grantland.com, dedicated to the idea that it’s possible to write intelligently about sports without being pretentious.

  A couple of years ago, Simmons wrote a fascinating column about the bounty scandal mentioned above, in which the defensive coordinator of the New Orleans Saints, Gregg Williams, was caught offering players money for injuring opponents. Here’s how that piece concludes: