Letter to a Sports Writer
A letter to Sean Gregory of Time Magazine on his recent, timely, and courageous article entitled, “Is It Unethical to Watch Football With Your Kids?”
Sean-
The most accurate line in your piece is this one: “On Super Bowl Sunday, in what may be America’s foremost annual display of mass hypocrisy, around 100 million people will tune in.” As a former college player at the Division One level and the son of an NFL player just diagnosed with stage 4 CTE, I offer a few thoughts.
There is not much to take issue with in your article, save one part. “My friend injects a dose of parental skepticism. ‘I know my son loves football,’ he says. ‘I can’t imagine him watching less over time. I don’t think he has to or needs to. The players are adults who’ve chosen to take on serious risks. And in the end, the sport is not going to go away.’”
This statement about taking on risks is an often-repeated mantra I hear from fans who want to keep watching and consuming despite what they all now know. I’ve even heard it directed to me a few times over the past couple of days. Let me attempt to unwrap and dismantle this fallacy just a bit.
First, the statement may be true for the current generation of players. They are going in with eyes wide open, and they know the recent and current medical science. It’s why people like Andrew Luck, Rob Gronkowski, and Luke Kuechly — to name just a few — retired young. They are intelligent, well-informed, and they and those close to them — unlike the fans who continue to consume the product — actually have something at stake.
So I might agree that the current generation of players “are adults who’ve chosen to take on serious risks,” but this doesn’t apply to the older generation of players who built the league into what it is now, and who played for meager salaries before free agency and collective bargaining made the league minimum salary ten times what the best players made in 1975.
And anyway, so what? Taken to its logical conclusion, it would be acceptable to your friend to watch two armies engage in a firefight and see multiple soldiers get killed, wounded, or maimed or police officers suffer the same fate in a gun battle with criminals because the soldiers and the police officers “are adults who’ve chosen to take on serious risks.” Does that make your viewing and entertainment any more ethical? Or is it okay because NFL players are “making a ton of money?” If so, that mental crutch does not apply to the players of past generations, who got no pension or health insurance and who had to work jobs in the off-season to make ends meet. Indeed, there’s a litany of these crutch phrases people toss around without much consideration or deep thought on the issue. They toss them out as casually as one might drop an empty beer can into the garbage can, and with about as much intellectual reflection.
But your friend’s statement is totally misapplied to the older generation of players who had no idea repetitive head trauma and concussions could have permanent and life-altering results. The “risks” back then were serious physical injury; blowing out a knee, breaking an arm, dislocating a finger or an ankle, or worse. But nobody ever thought these men would literally end up losing their minds and suffering the consequences therefrom.
Add in the fact that the NFL covered up and attempted to shout-down the emerging medical science on head trauma for many years (see League of Denial ) — much like Big Tobacco did for decades — and you simply cannot say that the older generation of players “chose what they chose” or knew what they were getting into. That’s an absurd and disingenuous argument, but people like your friend who continue to consume the game — despite what they now know — cling to such arguments in order to legitimize and rationalize their continued consumption.
As unreservedly plainspoken as it might sound, I would have more respect for these people if they would be honest, stop trotting out these trite and vapid crutch points, and simply admit the truth; they’re going to keep on watching because they like it and they simply don’t care. Because when you dismantle and sweep away their excuses, that’s the cold-blooded, honest truth.
Glen Hines is the author of the Anthology Trilogy of books — Document, Cloudbreak, and Crossroads — and Bring in the Gladiators, Observations From a Former College Football Player Who Was Never Able to Become a Fan, all available at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. His writing has also been featured in Sports Illustrated, Task & Purpose, the Human Development Project, and elsewhere.
