||| MIDNIGHT MUTTERINGS by JACKIE BATES |||
I’m not expecting to make any converts with this post. I might be preaching to a tiny choir, but otherwise, I’m whistling into the wind. Not that I can whistle. I can’t. Maybe a tiny squeak through my teeth, but no real whistle that would call a dog or make any sort of tune that you could recognize.
But here goes anyway: I have never understood football. I don’t mean just the rules of the game, though it’s true that I don’t know the rules. I just don’t understand the attraction. I just never thought it was particularly fun to sit in the cold and watch two groups of men spend several hours trying to hurt each other, sometimes badly, very occasionally–fatally. I also don’t particularly like to watch the people I’m with drink a lot of beer and I don’t like hot dogs. Watching on television wasn’t much better for me, when I used to try to like that. It was warmer and the food was better and the ads sometimes amusing, but I don’t know; it just wasn’t my thing.
My first year in New York City, when I was barely twenty one years old, I had a very nice boyfriend who told me confidentially that he had the fastest legs at Yale. I didn’t admit I hadn’t realized Yale had a football team, or that I was surprised that it had his proudest accomplishment to date. Decades later we ran into each other again in a different state and other circumstances. By then he was Professor of Medicine at a different Ivy League school and an accomplished surgeon and researcher. While he seemed content in his profession, I’m not sure it gave him the rush that college football had done.
I liked basketball, both in person and on TV, and I think I might have liked baseball if I had seen more games, but football—I just couldn’t get interested. Then somewhere along the way, I did begin to appreciate that professional sports gave a few Black men at least a chance at making a decent living in a racist world, of becoming famous and respected. That gave me some understanding and appreciation of football. That is, until it became clear that the injuries sustained by those same men, gave them, in addition to ruined knees, the chance to not recognize their children. Which is what can happen after enough traumatic brain injuries from a few years of training and playing football. I heard recently that most NFL football players aren’t in the game long enough to get long-term medical insurance for long-term injuries sustained in those few years. I can’t be the only one who thinks that the cost of those life long injuries cannot be equated only to lack of medical insurance.
The best thing I can say about football is that people like it, are devoted, obsessed by it. And there’s something magical (or bizarre) about the physiological phenomena that occur in a crowd of like-minded people in a large, noisy crowd that has been described as being like love, mildly orgasmic, that can occur at a live concert, or parade, or religious revival, or auction, or riot. Or in this case, a football game. It’s something I don’t quite trust, which is one reason I don’t like crowds, but I can understand the addiction, or at least the attraction. But again, is it worth it? Is this what we want to raise our children to worship?
Howard Bryant (sports journalist, author and commentator) is quoted as saying, “The problem with football is football. It always has been. When you play this sport, this is the price.”
Here’s the link to the interview of Bryant by Jason Johnson in the January 28, 2023 issue of Slate, following Damar Hamlin’s cardiac arrest on the football field. You can read it or listen to the Podcast here.
In his interview, Howard Bryant discusses not only safety (which, ironically, was the name of Hamlin’s position in that near-fatal game) but the racial, economic, social and cultural issues of professional sports, the NFL in particular.
