Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Play Football!

                             Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Play Football!

                          “Cowboys ain't easy to love and they're harder to hold,”

                                                   Waylon Jennings

                            

There are many outpourings from insiders in the football field declaring the insanities of the game, and trying to get us to reconsider this brutal game as a viable sport for our children, I am joining this team of dissenters.

Concussion is a recent movie based on the 2009 GQ exposé Game Brain by Jeanne Marie Laskas, and starring Will Smith as Dr. Bennet Omalu, a Nigerian forensic pathologist who fought against efforts by the NFL to suppress his research on the brain damage suffered by professional football players. Between 1996 and 2001 the NFL reported 900 concussions.

The NFL’s retaliation to the film, was to go out and hire 6 “concussion experts” who say there’s not enough evidence to warrant us shutting down Little League football for youth.

                             

Currently, an active player in the NFL, has written a book anonymously, decrying the sport as a vicious, exploitive, mentally and physically dangerous racket in which players are treated as expendable cogs in a great corporate billion dollar machinery that has its tendrils into every aspect of our culture, from business, to politics, and even religion.

The player describes feeling that concussions, ways of dealing with injuries, the frequency and level of severity of injuries, rampant use of painkillers, and off-the-field scandals all take a back seat to on-field performance. Incidents of Domestic Violence, drug offences, and other outrageous behaviors are concealed and minimized.

                                  

On players' reactions to the video of Ray Rice assaulting his then-fiancée and the sensitivity training imposed by the league

“[The training was led by] a guy who was underqualified to speak about the subject he was speaking about, and a handful of guys, frankly all the guys on the team, sitting in their chairs, on their phone, joking around. I don't think a single thing touched any man in that room, except for me, because I was listening the entire time for this book.”

Everything from concussions, CTE [chronic traumatic encephalopathy], brain damage, surgeries, sprains, internal/external contusions, and early onset of arthritis, the quality of life and the damage playing the game does is immense and unwarranted. Former football players are also more likely to suffer, and die, from neurodegenerative disease. We supposedly live in a civilized society, yet we are endorsing a game that is equivalent to the Roman gladiator games or feeding Christians to the lions!

                            

The game also implicitly endorses the objectifying of women, as scantily clad, subservient, cheerleaders who are there on the sidelines cheering the men and crowd onto greater and greater frenzies of violence. Alcohol and football have been permanently paired and encoded into our subconscious like movies and popcorn.

                                       

                                               Common Sense

We live in an age where the dumbing down factor has reached exponential degradation, this is paired with the unquestioning numbness of tradition which is a state of mind in which people will not question an American tradition as fundamental and basic to our values as apple pie and football. And then there are people like myself……

If one takes the time to simply consider the laws of physics and biology you will see that putting on a minor amount of plastic and padding and running head first into other people that are running head first toward you is not healthy!

                            

I doubt there is anyone who has played the game of football who has not sustained a fairly significant injury, this should tell us something! Every game played has time outs to take injured players off the field, yet we have become inured to this fact and see it as “normal,” which belies how abnormal it all is!

                               

                                             Personal Experience

I grew up in a very violent, unpredictable, and abusive environment. I internalized rage and emotional volatility that I had no idea what to do with. I’ll never forget my high school football coach who divided all the players trying out into two lines and had us face each other 5 yards apart. He said; “I want you to run full speed into each other, and see who can run over the other!!” I literally thought I had died and gone to heaven!

What I felt in that moment was a license to kill, I took all my bottled rage and channeled it, lazar like, into whomever lay in my path, and the more I raged, the more strokes, praise and popularity I received, it was a steep learning/reinforcement curve for me, and I excelled.

Because I was comparatively smaller than others, I had to become quick, mean, and deceptive in how I played, so I found ways to hit hard, precise and with minimum damage to myself, while inflicting maximum damage to my opponents.

It was a game of war, and the playing field was a battlefield of tactical strikes and strategy. But however skilled I was, the law of averages catches up to you, and it wasn’t long before injuries ensued. First there were sprains and strains, aches and pains of wear and tear, but as I got older and the skill level, size and intensity of the game increased, so did the severity of injury. So I got several concussions, in the game it’s called getting your bell rung, and it was seen as a moment of pride and initiation to have ringing in your ears, seeing lights, and staggering a little after a hard hit.

I also had my nose broken several times, and then there was that fateful day when someone, (my own team mate vying for my starting position, his name was Mitch Pleis, and he went on to play QB for Stanford), had a late hit on me, spearing me with his helmet in my lower back. This is equivalent, in physics to taking a sledge hammer and hitting someone in their lower back. This changed me and my body forever, but true to the insane values and psychology of the game, I played with the pain.

 

                               

Going into college, the game becomes even more insane, bigger, stronger, faster, meaner players with higher skill sets and more unresolved rage. I played up into my junior year in college until I broke my collar bone and was unable to continue, even though I tried like hell to rejuvenate myself back onto the field.

                                       What We Want For Our Children

                                

It is undeniable that I benefited a great deal from playing football; learning discipline, team work, goal setting/ accomplishment, persistence, athleticism, competition, overcoming challenge, etc. the list is long and very true. However, the costs and risks of the game far outweigh the benefits. There are so many options for children to channel their energy in healthy and safer ways than football.

It is time for us to acknowledge our blood lust in respect to this game, and to see it for what it is. What people see on the outside of football with all the pomp, pageantry, ceremony, images of courage and the American way, are superficial facades that conceal what is behind the scenes in the locker rooms, board rooms, bed rooms, court rooms, bars, and medical clinics that tell a very different story of the brutality and collateral casualties of this most primitive and primal violence.