The Sporting Life:
The Public Professor’s
Saturday Sports Column
My, oh my, there are so many things that are wrong with football. Where to begin?
For starters, it’s a huge waste of time. All of those lovely Autumn Sundays simply ruined, washed down the pipe as I whittle away the hours watching grown men in plastic armor slam into each other over and over and over again. The Sunday sun, hanging brightly in the blue skies of September and October, does not wash warmly across my face. The brown, windswept leaves of November do not crunch happily beneath my feet on Sundays. And the joyous holiday spirit of December is not shared with loved ones on Sundays, when it is instead scrooged into the pale glow of the television screen.
Yes, for starters, football impoverishes my life. But wait. It’s worse than that.
I am entertained by this sport despite knowing that it ravages my fellow human beings. The men who play the game fall victim to serious disabilities at an alarming rate. Recent attention has been paid to the severe brain damage that afflicts some former players. From the team I follow, the Pittsburgh Steelers, Mike Webster and Justin Strzelczyk are just two examples of players whose lives were tragically short and mired in the erratic, confounding, dangerous, and self-destructive behavior that has marred the post-NFL days of men afflicted with serious brain damage resulting from years of tackle football. They are but two of many. And beyond closed head injuries, there are also the more traditional and mundane matters of broken bones and mangled joints. Staring at a gathering of former NFL players is often like walking through a hospital ward; men, looking old before their time, and few of them ever becoming very old, are haggard and beaten, bent and broken, their limping, misshapen bodies a testament to the physical toll the game has taken.
I sit comfortably in my middle class home, watching games and taking immense pleasure in massive collisions, knowing that they are contributing to the degradation of the human beings involved. What a sad excuse for a person I am.
And after we have paused to acknowledge the effects of this game on the men who play it, we must also consider the effect it has on society. But first, let’s start with an ancient society, the Roman Republic. The elite Romans who had the money, owned the slaves, and ran the government, also competed with each other for political offices. But since elections were open to all citizens, they needed a good strategy for gaining the votes of the poorer citizens. During the second century B.C.E. they came up with the strategy of Panem et Circenses: Bread and Circuses.
In 123 BCE, a populist politician named Gaius Gracchus (say that 10 times fast) began the great giveaway, doling out free wheat to poor Romans; basically, he was buying votes. It was a controversial practice that his rivals criticized, but it didn’t go away. In fact, later on the emperors took over and practice and standardized it; when people have bread to eat, they are less inclined to call for a revolution.
After plying the poor with free food, next the elites placated them with free entertainment: the Circuses. They had begun as ludi, state-sponsored sporting events that were part of religious festivals dating back to the 4th century BCE. Lu featured horse races, animal displays, and mock hunts. Much later, gladiatorial competitions would be added to the mix. The politicians who sponsored the games often made extravagant expenditures out of their own pocket to enhance the experience for spectators, a form of early political campaigning. Just as the free bread won votes and minimized unrest, the free games bought votes and distracted voters from the important issues of the day.
So in ancient Rome, Bread and Circuses weren’t just a roundabout way of securing votes from the poor. They also had the effect of discouraging poor people from getting all riled up about their shitty quality of life and demanding that their politicians do something to improve their opportunities and conditions. Instead, just enough food and the spectacle of big time entertainment defused their anger about serious issues, and redirected their interest toward unimportant and shallow affairs. And here we are today, living in a nation where the modern social welfare system means no one need starve, and where big time spectator sports come across your television screen for free; like actually free, I don’t have cable.
If I am to be The Public Professor, I cannot ignore these things and pretend that I am unaware. A game I love to watch is a waste of my time, and what’s worse, it seriously injures many of the men who play it, and in some ways it also injures the society we live in by distracting us from what’s important. What if every football fan spent all that time and energy studying and following politics? Imagine that: informed voters!
Yet despite it all, I’m not going to stop watching. I do love the game. The power, grace, the speed, the violence: it makes for great theater. I sit, I watch, and I am entertained to an extraordinary degree. I won’t stick my head in the sand and pretend I don’t know. But I will hope no one gets hurt. I’ll encourage my fellow Americans to pay attention to their republic. And on Sundays I’ll pray for rain; it turns those autumn leaves soggy, and muddy fields make it even more entertaining when the gladiators take the field.
You can also find me every Saturday at Meet the Matts.