Why do people still play football?
Back in 2010, I wrote the first piece of my writing that anyone besides my parents or friends ever read. It was a piece for the sports section of my high school newspaper, called “Is Football Worth the Cost?” Two months later, I wrote a follow-up called “The Price of a Concussion”—which opened with a brief desciption of the massive, concussion-inducing hit Atlanta Falcons cornerback Dunta Robinson had put on Eagles wide receiver DeSean Jackson. Almost ten years later, I still watch football. And, at all levels, players still play it. Why?
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Last night, on Thursday Night Football, Cleveland Browns defensive end Myles Garrett ripped the helmet off Mason Rudolph’s head. In the midst of an extended fight involving several different players, he swung that helmet at the head of the Steelers quarterback, and the entire world fucking exploded.
This is not a piece about the helmet-slam, which was utterly abhorrent. Garrett’s been suspended for the rest of the season, as he should have. If he’d connected with the harder part of the helmet, Rudolph could have been paralyzed.
…you know, like former Steeler Ryan Shazier was when he speared an opponent with a tackle and catastrophically injured his spine.
This is not a piece about Garrett. It’s about football, and the ridiculous notion that its violence should or even can be handwaved as “consensual.”
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This tweet is from ESPN’s Pablo Torre, who followed up with another that clarified the facetiousness of that statement:
Football is a violent sport. It causes brain damage. That, at this point, is basically indisputible. It causes brain damage on hits like the one on Dionte Johnson, and on routine “subconcussive” hits that linemen undergo on every play. It turns minds into pudding.
So why do people still play football?
In 2018, Dr. Rachel Allison of Mississippi State University wrote a piece for The Society Pages, titled “Assessing the Patterns: Race, Class, and Opportunities in American Football.” It’s long and comprehensive, but I’ll cite the conclusion here, because it comes close to answering that question—and, in doing so, lays bare the absurd idea of “consensual” violence.
“While we cannot definitively explain our findings, it is likely that player development and selection in football are shaped by both race and social class background. Places with more resources tend to have more opportunities and better facilities for sport. As we show, such places increase the likelihood of white men developing their athletic skills and making it to the top echelons of football. In contrast, socioeconomic disadvantage presents fewer and lower-quality opportunities and facilities to black men. Yet socioeconomic disadvantage also limits the number and quality of opportunities for education and employment. A lack of opportunities in these areas, combined with persistent racial bias and discrimination, may make certain sports, such as football, seem like the most likely pathway to upward mobility for some black men.
“By implication, if black NFL players are disproportionately from poor and working class families and disadvantaged hometowns, the financial necessity of participation in the NFL is higher for black than white players. Recent debates in football over head injury protocols and protests of racial injustice, among other issues, cannot and should not be separate from consideration of the groups of players who have the most at stake.”
The idea of “consensual violence”—taken up by the many who took Pablo’s tweet (and others like it) seriously—isn’t just short-sighted, but incredibly self-serving. Because when violence is your way of escaping a worse kind of violence—i.e., economic violence often by way of race, the violence of being unable to provide for a family, or find health care, or receive even a semblance of a real education—how the fuck can someone look at that and say “but hey, they consented.”
No—the sheer concept of “consensual violence” exists for one reason. It makes us, fans who can’t quit this goddamn sport, feel better about ourselves. Because, if we take the shortest viable sightline, the narrowest view in the room, we can tell ourselves, “hey, it’s ok that this sport turns players’ brains to pudding. I shouldn’t feel bad about enjoying this.”
“I’m above that.”
We should know better than that. Especially by now.
Myles Garrett’s violence created a flashpoint for that mindset—it evoked the reaction that it did because, in a game where multiple players were taken off the field with more damage to their skulls and brains than Mason Rudolph received from Garrett’s helmet-slam, it revealed just how transparent that line of thinking really was. It revealed complicity and, in doing so, a wash of cognitive dissonance from everyone from nameless twitter eggs to Adam fucking Schefter himself. It revealed the sheer absurdity of football, starkly and plainly, and people just couldn’t handle that.
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At the end of 2010, as the fall of my freshman year turned into winter, the sports editor at my high school newspaper moved. Because of those two articles, I was promoted. I spent a year-and-a-half editing that section, then two more years as Editor-in-Chief before going to college to study writing. Writing about football—about its absurdity and violence—is where the earliest dregs of my writing career began. It’s something that, through a chain of interlocked and interlinking choices, I’ve parlayed into a degree, into stories and novels, into articles and blogs like this one. Even though I never played a snap in anything beyond a backyard game, I cannot separate who I am—who I’ve been for almost the entirety of my life—from the sport of football. Some of my earliest memories revolve around the Reid-McNabb Eagles, and the evening of February 4, 2018 was one of the happiest of my life. It’s part of me. One I often don’t like, at moments like these. One of those impossible contradictions that make up who we are.
I don’t know if it’s possible to grow up in America—at least, in certain places or with certain backgrounds—without being affected in some way by the specter of the nation’s favorite sport. That’s not an excuse, but it’s also not a justification—just like pretending that the kind of violence that goes on in an average football game can all be waved away with some vague, ultimately capitalistic notion of “consent.”
Again, even if we don’t do better, we should know.
Sunset Over Ithaca 