I recently lent a friend a memoir by the late Pat Conroy, about his last year of playing college basketball for The Citadel, a military college in South Carolina. My Losing Season vacillates from Conroy’s irrepressible ardor for the sport to scenes of ugly confrontations between father and son.
He begins by waxing poetic about his passion for the game, asserting that, “I have loved nothing on this earth as I did the sport of basketball. I loved to break up a full-court press as much as anyone who has ever lived and played the game, . . . in the shades of Spanish moss, beneath the roiled heat and sunshine of Dixie.” But then the underbelly appears: “Basketball provided a legitimate physical outlet for all the violence and rage and sadness I later brought to the writing table. The game kept me from facing the ruined boy who played basketball instead of killing his father.”
I have been thinking a great deal about these passages lately, and about my own relationship with a sports world increasingly on tenuous moral ground. It started with the deep conflict I have in my own heart about my teenage son’s desire to play quarterback for his high school football team. It has deepened dramatically following the critical injury to Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin during a Monday Night Football game in early January.
Sports have been the central part of my work and leisure for two decades, but that’s not the only reason I watch. For many members of my family, sports are the sole focus of conversation. If we’re not talking about football, we’re probably not talking. The result is that I’ve felt a lifelong pressure to follow the game as assiduously as possible so that I can communicate with my in-laws. Therefore, my son has been raised watching football, too, and now he wants to play it.
I understand why. Friends and coaches tell him he has a good arm, so he receives positive reinforcement at a difficult time in life. Also, let’s not mince words: For all of its problems, the game is damn entertaining. It is the perfect sport for television, as the pace of play and spasms of excitement require commercial breaks. The NFL might be the last show on television in which people willingly sit through commercials.
It is morally difficult to watch this sport, regardless of its entertainment value.
This has only made its brand rise exponentially in our digital age. But that’s not the main reason for its popularity. Professional football is three hours of highly commodified violence, perfect for an American raised on the violence of our news, schools, politics, movies, and music. The NFL fits hand in glove with the United States.
Yet, while it’s remarkable for the viewer, what about the athlete? This also requires a complicated analysis. A typical NFL player makes a fortune. However, a typical NFL career lasts only three-and-a-half years, guaranteed contracts are lacking, and the sport takes an unimaginable physical toll on players, who often suffer for the rest of their lives.
Brain injuries from repeated blows to the head are another part of it. They can lead to debilitating conditions such as early-onset dementia and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. As three-time Pro Bowler and activist Michael Bennett wrote in his autobiography that I co-authored, Things That Make White People Uncomfortable, “One of my friends, who just retired from the NFL, told me he’s been having violent outbursts. Not in the sense of hurting people, but he’ll be enraged for no reason and doesn’t know why it’s happening, which is scarier than knowing. He wonders if it’s CTE, because his college had no concussion tests, or if he has a pain addiction, or if he is just lost. He just doesn’t know. It reminds me of a story I once heard, about a former player whose wife found him running again and again into the garage door because he missed the pain.”
It is morally difficult to watch this sport, regardless of its entertainment value. And yet on Sundays, I am glued to the television, and I have a son who insists on playing, come hell or high water. His passion for the game mirrors Conroy’s love of basketball, and I like to think I’m a more supportive father than Conroy’s father was. But being so encouraging has a price. I can’t stand in the way of his desire to play. He will learn through experience whether this sport is for him. Yet I stay up nights worrying about the cost.