Not Ready for Some Football

Rob Gronkowski goes down for the year with torn ACL & MCL
Call me genius, if you insist, for choosing this year to be the first in the last 30 where I chose to skip the Super Bowl. It was by all accounts one of the worst Super Bowls ever, but prescience had nothing to do with my decision to honor Super Sunday in other ways. Though I should note that my decision wasn’t an easy one—surely not as easy as it is for those folks who yearly make a big ado out of proclaiming their indifference to the game even though they were never fans in the first place (a bit like atheists giving the old “Bah humbug” to Christmas…no one really expects you to care, folks). The match-up looked like a beauty on paper, “one for the ages” according to  Huffington Post headline writers...and who should know better than those canny connoisseurs of celebrity nipples. In addition to a nice competitive balance between Seahawks and Broncos, it also had that essential ingredient of any game that didn’t feature my team--it had a team for me to root against.
As I’ve previously demonstrated in this space, I really care about football. I think it’s a great game. It’s where the primitive meets the ultra-modern, the physical meets the cerebral, the brutish meets the elegant. It’s where strategy, teamwork, and physical skill converge and must be maximized to the fullest for ultimate success. In that way, it’s like the military…and like the military, too, in that it’s as much a meritocracy as any ego-driven human enterprise can be. I also like its socialistic element, though that’s little appreciated by the mass of NFL fans. Each team in the league has a set dollar amount it can spend on talent…a cap. So success is not due to which team has the most money to spend, but which spends its money the wisest.
But NFL culture has some pretty odious aspects, and throughout 2013 the rising stench of it all really started to get to me.
To begin with, of course, there’s the physical mayhem. It’s not just the accumulating evidence of brain damage from concussions…though I don’t deny for a moment the seriousness of that particular issue. But concussions, like black lung disease, are not enough to kill a powerful industry. Young men who see few opportunities for themselves outside of coal mines or off football fields are going to make choices in favor of those jobs regardless of threats to their personal safety…always have, always will. (Oh, who am I kidding? It's not always an economic imperative with these kids…some of them really like the risk. What I don't get is how folks who are risk averse themselves don't understand that there are others in the species who aren't wired like them at all…how else would they have bridges to cross. By the same token, there are those in the species who are just selfish and don't get that there are others who really care for the well being of others. Alas, a topic for another post…)

We can pass worker protection laws; they can join unions. What we shouldn’t do is turn this into one of those hypocritical moral imperatives Americans are prone to, where parents, coaches, team owners and players themselves are alternately damned and shamed for taking part in football. Coal miners are generally spared such self-righteous attacks, as are folks who go into other high-risk occupations…the military, oil rigs, Cirque du Soleil. On this particular Super Bowl Sunday, the great actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman died of a drug overdose, joining a legion of entertainers who’ve died early and gruesomely (or managed to screw their lives up in other ways). Yet the preaching that arose from the purveyors of public opinion was all about a new heroin epidemic. Not a discouraging word was heard sternly warning parents about the dangers of letting their kids to go into theater, music, or film.
Nonetheless, injury is a real plague on the NFL, affecting all body parts at all times, not just the brain. And it really just gets plain depressing to watch talented young men in the prime of their lives going down with hideous breaks, tears and bruises week after week. You would think that after watching football for as long as I have, I would’ve become accustomed to the brutality by now, but not so. As the 2013 season progressed, I found myself more often than not sitting and watching in dread rather than enjoyment, knowing that literally any minute some physically imposing specimen could go down with a crippling injury. It’s possible that I had this change in perspective because I watched almost the entire season in a cast from a torn Achilles tendon (a typically damaging NFL injury).
If so, I’d like to wish an Achilles tear on all NFL fans…or at least a hamstring pull. They are without doubt the most ignorant and cold-blooded fans in all sports…and I don’t even want to hear about soccer hooligans, who at least have the excuse of alcohol to explain their loutishness. I probably spend more time reading fan comments on sports blogs than I should, surely more than I will in the future. Sitting in front of their computers in the comfort of their homes, they are uninhibited in calling out players for being soft or calling them--in that misnomer supreme--injury prone.Imagine, players putting themselves at risk for your televised entertainment having the temerity…and dare I say…delicacy to be injury prone! What’s more, there’s the fans collective brazenness in calling for the player’s head after an injury. One day the fan base is lusting for their team to draft or sign a stud player, and a broken bone later they can’t wait to cut him and save on the cap space (demanding it, as if the guy’s salary is coming out of their bank account).
The fan base is served by a media that is equally deplorable. I don’t know what’s worse about football coverage—the willingness to cover up important stories over a long period of time (like the danger of concussions) or their saturation of totally inane stories in any week between games. Football writers have way too much time on their hands, which is the only way to explain their obsession over recent years with the career of a bona fide third-string quarterback, the wisdom of time-outs to freeze the kicker, the appropriateness of touchdown celebrations, or any one call in any week of games decided by hundreds if not thousands of calls with possible ramifications weeks down the line.
As if the paid football media aren’t bad enough, there are always the dilettantes who wander in from outside media--usually at playoff time--to stick their noses in a sport they know little about. For instance, leading up to the match-ups that would determine the Super Bowl contender, a regular MSNBC political (ho-ho) contributor by the lone name Touré, positively observed that at least one of the Super Bowl quarterbacks would be black. Of course, the Super Bowl has featured more black quarterbacks than it has black punters or black field goal kickers, but not only would such a fact sink below the Touré football IQ, it fails to rise to his outrage threshold. If some blonde bimbo on Fox had observed that at least there would be one white quarterback in the Super Bowl, the moral indignation would scorch The Meadowlands in dead winter.
And there's another thing--the manufactured racism that seems to adhere to the NFL like loose turf on cleats on a semi-regular basis. It’s an unfortunate reality that the recruiting and drafting of NFL players bears an unseemly similarity to a slave auction. I dare you to watch the underwear parade in this documentary, and not have uncomfortable thoughts of 12 Years a Slave. Yet, the NFL is arguably one of the most color-blind institutions in America. The racial stuff is usually introduced by outsiders like Rush Limbaugh. Even the most recent racial explosion over Seattle player Richard Sherman’s post-game rant was all ginned up by outsiders with political axes to grind. If Sherman had screamed that Michael Crabtree was a faggot, no one on the political right would’ve been accusing him of being a thug, and surely no one on the political left would’ve been defending him by waving around his college transcripts from Stanford. In fact, it’s safe to say that if Richard Sherman had slurred Michael Crabtree in just that way, the entire national dialog would’ve been completely flipped.
It’s fairer to say that the NFL is far more prone to these faux racial scandals than its players are prone to injury. Whereas players cannot avoid getting injured by doing their jobs, the NFL can do a much better job avoiding accusations of racism by advancing racial equality as fervently as it advances militarism during half-time shows.
Anyway, that’s the lowdown on why I chose to tune out the big game and watch Gone with the Wind instead ( D’oh! ) Whether I can maintain the boycott through next season remains to be seen. Probably depends on Gronk coming back.