American Football Reflects the United States’ Barbaric History
Football is Also a Story of Black Excellence and Black Resilience
I shift my weight from one foot to the other, and I swirl my Miller Highlife around in the bottle. The beer’s not cold enough. I’d been appalled earlier upon learning that our hosts don’t recycle, and I pitied the innocent orca, or whatever, that would one day wind up with this bottle in its belly.
This is Texas. There are no laws here I don’t think except those which restrict the right to choose, and the right to vote, and which encourage White men to amass arsenals of military-grade weapons; as if AR-15s might be sufficient defense against America’s inevitable brownward demographic shifts. A familiar anger needles into my chest, and I reflexively dab my forehead with the little towel I’ve been carrying around for the purpose, as if I can somehow wipe away the intergenerational trauma White supremacy has stamped into every Black psyche.
“How could it possibly be this hot on Memorial Day weekend?” I think to myself.
This is Texas.
The heat is less uncomfortable though than feeling, as I do, like I’m intruding on this group of men. The guys who are polite enough to pretend they care that I’m standing here outside the garage with them. Guys who had all belonged to the same fraternity during college. Guys who were all part of the wedding party. Guys to whom I’d never spoken before today.
“This is Texas. There are no laws here I don’t think except those which restrict the right to choose, and the right to vote, and which encourage White men to amass amass arsenals of military-grade weapons”
But it’s not exactly their shared history that’s making me feel so awkward. All of these dudes seem Blacker than me. That’s the issue. They’re all former college athletes. They were all born and raised in the South. They’re part of a culture with which I have practically no experience, and of which I’m decidedly not a part, despite the color of my skin. I’m on the outside.
The men I met on that far-too-hot afternoon in Texas are full-fledged members of the Black, male, athlete culture. I’m sure there are many such cultures around the globe. I’m talking here though about the uniquely American version. It’s a way of being that fuses jock culture, traditional/religious values, and Southern regional culture with a variant of hip-hop culture and fashion. It’s all topped with a generous helping of relentless, quick-witted ribbing.
It’s also one of the few remaining justifications for football — a game which should eventually go extinct for the same reasons ancient Rome-style gladiatorial contests went extinct. It’s just too barbaric.
There’s a veritable laundry list of reasons to revile football. Football the game, and even more so, football the industry. The “football industrial complex,” let’s call it, has bungled, egregiously, issues related to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), domestic violence, and the Black Lives Matter movement, just to name a few issues.
Everyone knows about Colin Kaepernick, Tyreek Hill, and Aaron Hernandez. More often overlooked is the extent to which the NFL places America’s deeply flawed (pronounced, “racist”) socioeconomic legacy into stark relief.
The NFL is a Libertarian Dystopia
If American football culture has a Southern flavor to it (and it does), then it also packs a seriously unpleasant aftertaste. I love football — it’s the only sport I ever watch on television. For many years, I spent several hours on NFL Sundays watching one group of mostly Black men run headlong into another group of mostly Black men and I couldn’t see NFL for what it is: a well-oiled system characterized by asymmetric bargaining power, forged in a legacy of institutional racism, and fused together by under-regulated capitalism.
First, the obvious thing: Race
NFL athletes are overwhelmingly people of color while the ultra-rich NFL owners who buy and sell them, and the less rich NFL coaches who drive them, are almost exclusively White. One is hard-pressed to be thoughtful about that scenario and escape the plantation analogy. (Remember that awful aftertaste I mentioned earlier?)
Second, and less obviously: the NFL is a terrible place to work
NFL stars make what sounds like a lot of money. But the majority of players certainly do not. Given the amount of time NFL athletes spend developing and maintaining their athletic prowess, and given how few human beings alive are capable of achieving that prowess, and given how much time NFL athletes spend away from their families, and given how much NFL owners profit from athletes’ talent and likenesses, and given the inevitable health issues NFL athletes face after their generally short careers, NFL athletes are all grossly underpaid.
To the extent that NFL players are able to negotiate favorable contracts, those contracts are generally inferior to those of NBA players. NFL contracts, even for star players, are less lucrative on average than those of their NBA counterparts. While NBA players enjoy guaranteed contracts, the terms of NFL contracts are typically guaranteed only for one year. After the expiration of those one-year periods, teams are generally able to change the contracts’ terms. There is practically zero job security for NFL players.
NFL players are represented by a union, certainly, just like NBA players are. Still, one has to question the efficacy of the NFL players’ union at the bargaining table given that the 1,696 NFL players share 48 percent of the league’s yearly revenue while the league’s 32 owners share 52 percent of the revenue. That’s a raw deal even for the precious few NFL stars who garner lucrative contracts. Especially since the players are the only parties to these contracts whose physical wellbeing hangs in the balance, and especially since football generates more profit than any other professional sport in the United States.
Third: the NFL’s anti-worker environment is a deliberate policy choice
We don’t have to look far to see that the NFL’s system of revenue distribution isn’t inevitable. NBA players’ proportion of league revenue fluctuates, between 49 percent and 51 percent from one collective bargaining agreement to the next with the overarching goal being to ensure equal power distribution between players and owners. As a bonus, NBA players don’t have to risk their lives every day when they lace up and go to work.
In the NFL, underpaid athletes risk their long-term and short-term physical health with practically zero job security. It’s a Libertarian’s paradise, and a terrible place to be a professional athlete.
But it’s not all bad.
NFL Players are Paradigms of Black Excellence.
Time and again, the “shut up and dribble” crowd admonishes the NFL’s “overpaid thugs” to be “grateful” that America “gave” them the opportunity to play a “game” for a living. These lazy claims fail to recognize that the excellence demanded of NFL athletes is universes beyond anything those armchair quarterbacks could ever hope to achieve, in anything they’ve ever done, in any aspect of their lives.
Over the course of four years, I transformed from a Montclair State University graduate into an attorney who’d graduated from Georgetown Law and passed the New York state bar exam. It’s one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. It was a process characterized far more by relentless boredom and routine failures than by dramatic successes. That process taught me that among the greatest assets successful people have is mental resilience— the capacity to fail repeatedly, endure boredom, shake it all off, and then go back for more.
“Time and again, the “shut up and dribble” crowd admonishes the NFL’s “overpaid thugs” to be “grateful” that America “gave” them the opportunity play a “game” for a living”
The mental and academic rigors of my educational experience are peanuts compared to the mental toughness required to perform at the NFL level. I’m awed, yes, every NFL Sunday when I watch super athletes perform physical feats of which just a small minority of human beings are capable. Far more impressive though is pro football players’ mental tenacity. Out of all talented athletes, just a handful are able to marshal the mental fortitude required to play at the NFL level, let alone succeed in that environment.
The “shut up and dribble” narrative is born of White Supremacist backlash, not substantive ideas.
NFL Players’ Culture is Paradigmatic Black Resilience
The football industrial complex is linked inextricably, like everything else American, to the United States’ unresolved legacy of chattel slavery and racism. History exists, despite widespread attempts to erase it, and our present is the inevitable outcome of that history.
American history is in large part a tale of wealthy White men buying and selling, to and from other wealthy White men, the bodies and the labor of disempowered Black and brown people (and their poor, White compatriots).
Much has changed since 1865 of course for all American workers, including professional athletes. Star NFL athletes may earn tens of millions of dollars over the course of their careers. Their enslaved ancestors of course spent their entire lives toiling without anything like just compensation.
That sounds like a tremendous upgrade, and it is. Still, the value of that upgrade diminishes once one considers the disparity in outcomes (both financial and physical) that exists among members of the overwhelmingly White NFL owner and coaching classes versus members of the mostly Black and brown NFL athlete class. From that perspective, modern football very much reflects the United States’ racist, anti-worker roots.
Negro spirituals evolved among enslaved Black folks to be coping mechanisms, structures for storytelling, and sometimes, instruments of rebellion. They were part of a covert system for preserving dignity, and expressing unique identity, in defiance of White enslavers whose hegemony depended on extinguishing the light of humanity burning within each enslaved individual.
Like their historical antecedents, the Black men with whom I’m standing here tonight have spent their lives navigating environments designed to keep them subservient. American culture demands, sometimes explicitly but always implicitly, that they recognize their position below Whiteness in the social hierarchy, and that they behave accordingly. The football industrial complex regards men like them as chattel. Millions of fans demand men like them be grateful for their opportunity to entertain White America, and otherwise, just “shut up and dribble.”
Yet these men resist. They might not don’t throw up as many Black power fists as I do, or write as many scathing essays. They transmit their stories, and they broadcast their distinctiveness, and they express their experience in a torrent of dialogue, and through love and a vibrant camaraderie. Like a perfect piece of music.
I’ll never be fully part of these guys’ culture. I can’t be Black in precisely the same way they are. But our common experience is that of being Black in America, and of expressing that experience in a way that’s authentic, practical, beautiful.
Negro Spirituals.
