Against Football Quotes

“What would happen if some invisible gas leak in the school cafeteria caused diminished brain activity in students? Can we safely assume district officials would evacuate the school until further notice? That parents would be up in arms? That media and lawyers would descend in droves to collect statements from the innocent victims? Can we assume that the community would not gather together en masse on Friday nights to eat hot dogs and watch the gas leak?”
― Steve Almond, Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto

“What does it mean that the most popular and unifying form of entertainment in America circa 2014 features giant muscled men, mostly African-American, engaged in a sport that causes many of them to suffer brain damage? What does it mean that our society has transmuted the intuitive physical joys of childhood—run, leap, throw, tackle—into a corporatized form of simulated combat? That a collision sport has become the leading signifier of our institutions of higher learning, and the undisputed champ of our colossal Athletic Industrial Complex?”
― Steve Almond, Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto

“At what point do we admit that the NFL’s true economic function is to channel our desire for athletic heroism into an engine of nihilistic greed?”
― Steve Almond, Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto

“This, of course, is the big dance of capitalism: how to keep morality from gumming up the gears of profit, how to convince people to make bad decisions without seeing them as bad.”
― Steve Almond, Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto

“Three years ago, researchers at Purdue University began monitoring every hit sustained by two high school teams. The goal was to study the effect of concussions. But when researchers administered cognitive tests to players who had never been concussed, hoping to set up a control group, they discovered that these teens showed diminished brain function as well. As the season wore on, their cognitive abilities plummeted. In some cases, brain activity in the frontal lobes—the region responsible for reasoning—nearly disappeared by season’s end. "You have the classic stereotype of the dumb jock and I think the real issue is that’s not how they start out," explained Thomas Talavage, one of the professors of the study. "We actually create that individual.”
― Steve Almond, Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto

“A study commissioned by the NFL Players Association determined that recently retired pros (ages thirty to forty-nine) are nineteen times more likely to suffer from brain-trauma-related illness than—what's the right word here?—noncombatants.”
― Steve Almond, Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto

“I'm going to get hammered away for asking these questions. Fine. Hammer away. But don't pretend that's the same as answering.”
― Steve Almond, Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto

“You take a stand because it’s the right thing to do, not because it’s effective. I”
― Steve Almond, Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto