I Don’t Know What
Could Make Me Stop
Watching The NFL
Most of my life, I am a person with morals, a soul, and a concern for my fellow human beings, but in discrete, three-hour chunks, I am Timmy Football Fan, voracious consumer of the glorious gridiron game.
More and more, though, I find myself regretting my deep attachment to the sport. This morning, after the release of the grotesque Ray Rice elevator assault video, I finally asked myself a question I do not want to answer: What would it take for me to stop watching football?
Janay Rice deeply regrets being punched. She deeply regrets being put on a stage next to her abuser and made to answer clueless questions. She deeply regrets being a marginalized black woman in a country that largely ignores abuses committed toward them. She deeply regrets being coerced into attending a meeting with her abuser and his employers who would all really regret if she didn’t play ball and allow this nasty business to slip out of the American consciousness. She deeply regrets not offering more words of encouragement to her loving, football-playing husband. She deeply regrets the initial two-game suspension for Ray that eventually led to all of this.
The NFL is an awful league with which I openly engage. It finds new and disgusting ways, almost on a weekly basis, to make me ashamed that I love its product so. Football itself — the tactical game — is and will always be beautiful coordinated mayhem. It satisfies both the cerebral and the animalistic inside me. It equally makes me self-guilt-trip whenever some egregious act of inhumanity or stupidity makes its regular appointment, but nothing so far has been so bad as to make me swear off NFL football.
- Silverman: Ray Rice and the NFL’s meat grinder
Ray Rice’s punch doesn’t top the list of the heinous things an active player has done, but I hesitate to start assigning shades of gray to crimes and which act of awful is worse than another. The team’s and league’s handling of the mess — if handling means making it extra fusterclucky — also isn’t my first dabble with corporate sports public relations crappiness. Still, I have yet to be deterred from watching despite knowing the NFL profits from human misery (and has been equally passionate in dispensing disassociating spin).
What would it take? I truly don’t know.
Brain trauma may have helped fuel the monster inside Jovan Belcher, one that he fought with until it defeated him and took another life with him. With the possibility that the Kansas City Chiefs are not 100 percent liability-free in the case, I still found myself sweating whether or not to pick up their high-upside tight end, Travis Kelce, for my fantasy team.
A Raiders starter going AWOL the day before the Super Bowl due to mental illness? That made for compelling scandal peddling. Screw his well-being; how does his sudden absence affect his teammates? Tell me what’s going through your mind right now, Coach.
That aforementioned fantasy team contains no players from the Washington football team about whose terrible team name I have expressed my disgust in multiple print pieces. My other two fantasy teams, though, do have players from that team. One certainly cannot let scruples get in the way of his or her pretend frachise that has a small amount of money invested in it.
Rae Carruth and Ray Lewis? Hardly budged my conscience. Hell, Mike Vick taught me a lesson in watching someone I greatly admired become someone I wished dead, and then he became someone who redeemed himself, and has me today defending his current self against those who will never relent.
The quiet condoning of steroids for years, and the complete opposite attitude toward players using non-performance-enhancing recreational drugs. The Vikings boat party. Other domestic abusers. Guns. More guns. And then even more guns. The list goes on and on and on.
None of any of that has been painful enough to bleed out my want for the game. I keep watching because I don’t want to stop watching.
What sucks is that I am one of hundreds of millions thirsty for the exact thing the league quenches. The league knows that. The league also does not care about any of my softness that gets in the way of hard dollars rolling in.
Football is wonderful. The NFL is awful.
It’s awful that nothing about the Rice revelations will really change anything by next Sunday. That I share rooting interests with people that defend domestic abusers like Rice. That the NFL profits from bloodlust and pain. That large men collide at aggressive speeds with little to no immediate concern for their future, because if there were some concern, there might not be a future in the league.
Still, even all of it added up doesn’t create the proverbial bomb that would make me quit the sport … and I don’t want to try to imagine what could. Then I would just be dabbling in the macabre, some sort of twisted mental game of Chicken to find out what would make me swerve. I don’t want to toxically mix that with my entertainment preference to where it becomes the antithesis of enjoyment. My mind simply can’t go there.
Truly, the only thing that eases my fear of the initial question, of finally coming to terms with getting rid of something I enjoy so very much, is that I have no answer. The game of football is not a man punching out his fiancée on camera. It’s not racist or homophobic. It isn’t drug abuse or fighting bouncers or reckless driving. It’s not covering up detrimental behavior and lying to the public. Individual men are those things, and those men also happen to create wonderful, satisfying football.
So, to go against the neologism, I hate the player without hating the game. What is awful, though, is that the game is seemingly controlled by the very worst manipulators and exploiters. Beyond fearing that my enjoyment of football could ever be doused, I lament the part the NFL will play in its drowning. I don’t know if I will ever be fully driven away, but I already deeply regret the incident that would cause it before it’s even happened.
