What’s more offensive, the name ‘Redskins,’ or a sport where a few rich white landowners have a draft to buy players to work the field? —GS Elevator Gossip, Twitter
This Sunday, many of us will gather to watch what is arguably the single most important public event in the United States: the Super Bowl. It transcends the sport, a national ritual that engages both the nonfan as well as those who have spent the previous five months following the games. We watch for the commercials, the shiny creations of today’s advertising multinationals; the spectacle of celebrities and jet fighter flybys; and the halftime show, that weird grafting of Hollywood and Las Vegas onto the darkened stadium. And, perhaps, we watch the game itself, with the hope that something amazing happens—with a favorable outcome for your team, or wager. We eat and we drink; we gather with friends and family.
Soviet-style athletics
This year I’m not buying it; the transaction fee the NFL is asking me to pay has become too high. This critique could apply to any professional sport, for they have all become highly monetized expressions of Soviet-style athletics. But the NFL is the largest and most successful version of this model in America.
As a professional sport, football has overtaken the slow pastoral of baseball to become America’s game: a multi-billion dollar enterprise, a grand spectacle pitting two opposing platoons of players engaged in hand-to-hand combat. At its best, it offers the drama that supremely talented young men deliver: speed, violence, and chance.
Let’s start from the outside. The NFL exists as a tax-exempt organization in which all but three teams play their home games in publicly funded stadiums. This means that although all teams pay taxes on their revenues, taxpayers in all but three of those communities are subsidizing a private, for-profit enterprise for the privilege of hosting their games. This ‘privilege’ refers to such things as civic pride, the “big leagues” in a community instead of schools, libraries, and roads. Otherwise, the teams would pack up and move to a better deal offered elsewhere by another municipality.
A health crisis on its hands
For me, however, the main reason I can no longer watch the sport I played and grew up with is the dissonance between what happens on the field and its effects on the people who play on it. It’s no secret that the NFL has a health crisis on its hands. The damage inflicted by the game that was once thought to be only in joints and tissue has been found to destroy minds as well. So in addition to balky, arthritic joints, replacement knees and hips, we are now aware of neural trauma, personality disorders, dementia, and suicide, not as isolated events but as occupational hazards.
For a long time the NFL has either denied or minimized this knowledge. It has even considered extending the season by two games, provoking outrage from the very players whose careers average three years. For the experience of watching the game with this awareness there can be no innocence; there is no virgin territory for the viewer who’s paying attention. The disconnect that exists between the spectacle on the field and the toll it takes on the human beings who play it and their families is too great for me to ignore any longer. I’ll see the commercials later online.
Mario Cardenas played football in high school and college. He is a resident of Oak Hill Road.
