You might think this is rather quaint — you know, what with the world drowning in a toxic flood, burning in a global fire pit or hurtling toward a nuclear winter — but many of us are agonizing about whether we can ethically reconcile aiding and abetting the manly sport of football.
You don’t have to subscribe to the New England Journal of Medicine to know that chronic traumatic encephalopathy — a hideous degenerative brain disease — is a significant risk for professional and even college football players.
The helmet industry doesn’t seem to be making any progress. Sports Illustrated is full of mind-curdling exposes about CTE. George Will is writing thoughtful — if mostly unreadable — essays on the subject. It’s gotten so bad that at our fantasy football draft last week, the argument over our culpability as fans was more animated than the debate over whether David Johnson or Le’Veon Bell should be taken first. Not that I care; both were gone when it was my turn for a first round pick, and I was happy to take Julio Jones.
Luckily, my father has always been an expert on matters of ethical gravity. So I turned to him for guidance.
Yes, it’s true that Lou Gelfand passed away several years ago, but I’ve pretty much always known what he would say
Yes, it’s true that Lou Gelfand passed away several years ago, but I’ve pretty much always known what he would say, so I was able to have a conversation with him anyway. And, besides, he was usually right, even though I never gave him the satisfaction of admitting it.
“Dad,” I say, “you know that I really enjoy playing fantasy football, but lately I’ve been wondering: am I part of the greedy, nihilistic, sadistic and morally corrupt machine that is depriving athletes of their cerebral future?”
“Of course you are,” the old man says.
“But it gives me such pleasure,” I say. “And, after all, they’d be playing football even if I didn’t drive up the TV ratings.”
“Tell that to the Nuremberg jury,” the old man says. I can feel the dagger slipping inside me, deeper and deeper, but I can’t back down. Why deprive him of the satisfaction of seeing me squirm?
“But I don’t actually buy tickets to games,” I say. “I don’t purchase officially licensed jerseys. And it’s not as if…”
“All sins,” he says, “are created equal”
“Not as if what?” the old man says. (He is faster than me, even in death.) “Not as if you were the one guilty of helmet to helmet hits? Not as if you were inspiring an entire generation of impressionable kids who are willing to damage their brains for the million-to-one shot at glory and wealth?”
The old man shakes his head in disgust.
“Come on,” I say, “so it’s a guilty pleasure. I don’t drink, I’m innocent of six of the seven deadly sins, I vote yes on all the bond issues.”
But the old man waves me off as if I were a mildly irritating fly.
“All sins,” he says, “are created equal.”
Now, you and I know this is absurd. Reasonable people believe there’s a scale of misdeeds. Even the Catholic Church lets its congregants get away with a few mumbled Hail Marys for the little stuff. But the old man was never so forgiving. He not only doesn’t believe in guilty pleasures; he doesn’t even believe in pleasure. Unless you count the satisfaction he derived from initiating litigation, like the famous Gelfand v. Kaplan lawsuit regarding the volume of his neighbor’s air-conditioning unit. The old man lost, but it was good practice for the biggest of all his lawsuits, in which he sued the state of Minnesota for revoking his driver’s license. (Lost that one, too, but if there’s any final reward he’s driving on St. Peter Street right now, and not the one in downtown St. Paul.)
Of course, I was never going to convince my dad of anything. Although a non-believer, even if he could never bring himself to say the A word (take your pick: agnostic; atheist; absolution), he had an almost Presbyterian disdain for mortal pleasures.
Yes, most of us believe that sins come in various sizes. Not the old man. Back in the 60s, he worked for a large packaged-goods corporation. He took the job very seriously, which is only natural, because he took everything seriously. So…one day he’s going into the local corner grocery store to pick up some aspirin for my mom when he notices that the grocer has a stack of unsold Sunday papers on the counter. The store is about to close, and the old man, wise to this particular act of petty theft, sees that the grocer is clipping out the coupons so he can send them in for redemption.
Mind you, the poor grocer…is probably making five or 10 bucks a week off this mini-scam
Ironically, my dad believes that this is an act for which there can be no redemption. My dad can cite statistics showing the tens of thousands of dollars that companies like his employer lose each year because of those 10- and 20-cent coupons for grocery items that have not actually been purchased.
Mind you, the poor grocer — a guy who probably works 80 hours a week just to grind out a living — is probably making five or 10 bucks a week off this mini-scam. Maybe it’s how he’s paying for his kid’s orthodontia. No matter. The old man reports the grocer to the IRS. An investigation follows. The grocer is slapped with a huge fine. He loses his store. Dies a broken man.
I know, I know. How could my dad do that? Simple: all sins are created equal. There are no small sins; there are only small sinners.
In the face of such impressive turpitude, I am backed into a corner. And then I read George Will’s column, which compares watching football to bear-baiting. This was a spectacle particularly popular in England until the 19th Century. Bears were tied to stakes and then vicious dogs were unleashed for the entertainment of the blood-thirsty spectators.
The comparison seems a bit harsh — after all, football players are highly paid and, arguably, sort of know what they’re getting into — but it’s also true that if we didn’t watch football games, there wouldn’t be any brain injuries. Presumably, in fact, people would discover the educational satisfaction of watching C-SPAN.
I think Will was gilding the lily, however, when he quoted British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay as saying that bear baiting was banned not because of the pain inflicted in bears, but because it gave pleasure to Puritans. How very droll. And yes, I had to check Wikipedia to find out who this Babington Macaulay guy was. No need for you to feel ignorance — an emotion which, my dad would have assured you, is decidedly not bliss.
Anyway, Will concludes (finally) that “there are degrading enjoyments (and) football is becoming one.”
As a guy who once lost $300 betting on the Vikings to win a Super Bowl, I can tell you that football began to degrade me back in the 70s
As a guy who once lost $300 betting on the Vikings to win a Super Bowl, I can tell you that football began to degrade me back in the 70s. But I can also tell you — and my father — that my preoccupation with fantasy football is actually a humanitarian boon to the brave men of the gridiron. Remember when we used to see all those commercials for videos depicting the most gruesome, barbaric football hits? For $9.99 you could buy a 60-minute video, replete with shots of guys flying through the air to cause real-time brain damage — and, just to sweeten the deal, lots of slo-mo shots accompanied by the Nutcracker Suite. OK, so it wasn’t the Boston Philharmonic, but it was still entertaining and we laughed like crazy because, well, we didn’t know any better. “We” not including my old man.
Which, I suppose, is the point. Today we know better. But, as it happens, when was the last time you saw an ad for one of those barbaric videos? No irony intended, but you can’t remember, right? Because these days, you could probably buy one of those videos for five cents at an estate sale.
And that’s because these days, it’s not really the NFL that’s insanely popular — it’s fantasy football that’s all the rage. I believe that if he were alive today, even Babington Macaulay himself would have his own fantasy football team. Maybe the “football” would be as in soccer, but the point obtains. (And, yes, fantasy soccer is huge in England.)
No, we fantasy football folks just want to see our players score. Maybe that doesn’t make us humanitarians, let alone football purists, but we just don’t care about moving the pile or form tackling or even the point spread. Hard hits? Passe. Pretty soon, as the concussed old farts on TV used to say, they’ll be putting tutus on the quarterbacks. Fine with me. For that matter, they can put one on Julio, too. Might even improve his footwork.
