Football craze hides its dark side
In two days, the New England Patriots will play the Denver Broncos, and the Arizona Cardinals will face the Carolina Panthers for the right to play in the Super Bowl. Once again, an insane amount of Americans will gather around their television sets to participate in the weekly ritual of watching Sunday afternoon football.
It’s a little funny sometimes, the fact that a sport scientifically linked to brain damage remains undoubtedly the most popular and highest-rated of the four major American sports.
We are too quick to forget and ignore, and all it takes is something as simple as another spectacular Aaron Rodgers Hail Mary or Blair Walsh brutally missing a chip shot to lose a playoff game. Moments like these are what make sports great and keep us tuning in for game after game.
That’s not the problem. The problem is the strange hypocrisy that watching football presents: we know that there is a link between the sport and brain disease, yet we still come out in droves to drive up ratings and buy tickets, jerseys and other merchandise, supporting a league that has been unbelievably incompetent in addressing a potentially life-threatening issue.
Last September, a Boston University study found that 131 of 165 brains of deceased football players contained chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease. And while the general public has become somewhat more vigilant in the harm of playing football since such studies have been released, the overall response has been underwhelming.
Take, for example, the movie Concussion, starring Will Smith as Dr. Bennet Omalu, the Nigerian doctor who first discovered CTE when he conducted an autopsy on Pittsburgh Steelers’ star Mike Webster. The film had all the makings of a potential game changer in terms of changing public perception: a megastar playing the main role, a made-for-Hollywood plot in the incredible journey of Omalu and the takedown of a big corporation in the NFL. Trailers for the movie were everywhere, even airing during football games.
It turns out the film was far from a blockbuster. In its opening weekend, Concussion only finished seventh in box office returns, accruing just $11 million and finishing behind movies like Daddy’s Home, a comedy with a 30 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip – yes, even Alvin and the Chipmunks. More people paid to watch a movie about animated rodents than the NFL ignoring a degenerative brain disease in its sport.
Why is that? Do we just simply not care? Perhaps football has been too deeply embedded in American culture that it will take much more than a movie or scientific studies to reverse its popularity.
The Bengals-Steelers playoff game a couple of weeks ago serves as proof. The Steelers won a narrow, thrilling, violent contest that featured $145,000 worth of fines for several altercations and unsportsmanlike conduct penalties, most notably Bengals linebacker Vontaze Burfict leveling a dangerous hit to the head of a defenseless receiver in the Steelers’ Antonio Brown, which knocked Brown unconscious and concussed him. Yet, we kept watching because it was a close game in the playoffs, fully aware that Brown could have very well suffered brain damage as a direct result of that hit.
Sports Illustrated columnist Richard Deitsch penned this perfect reaction to the game: “It was equal parts compelling, dirty, unwatchable, violence-filled, magnificent … and you could not take your eyes off the screen … I felt both enthralled and guilty at the same time as I watched the carnage in front of me. I wanted to look away. I could not look away.”
I like football as a form of entertainment because it is exciting and intense, as any sport should be. But I watch it with a grain of salt. Instead of “oohing and aahing” at a big hit like I used to, I wince and wonder if that hit will have lasting ramifications on that player’s long-term health.
Smith, a well-known Eagles fan, feels the same way after portraying Dr. Omalu in Concussion.
“I haven’t seen a whole game,” he said to Yahoo!. “It’s really stressful now. It definitely created a conflict for me. It’s still beautiful, it’s still America’s favorite game. That doesn’t change at all. It just has another side, that once you see and once you know and once you understand, you can’t not see.”
That is the quandary I face whenever I watch a football game. I know I am supporting an industry that has repeatedly denied and tried to cover up its link to traumatic, life-altering brain disease. Yet, as the hypocrisy goes, I can’t turn away. So when the Patriots and Broncos kick off on Sunday at noon — Brady vs. Manning, anyone? — and when USC football opens its season this fall in a primetime matchup against reigning national champion Alabama in Arlington, I will be watching, along with everyone else.
Eric He is a freshman majoring in print and digital journalism. His column, “Grinding Gears,” runs Fridays.