Against Football by Steve Almond, Etc
Erin gave me this book, having seen Steve Almond's talk at UMass. Almond has written for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and regularly appears on a National Public Radio show. He resigned his position as professor at Boston College to protest Condoleeza Rice's speaking appearance at the school. So that puts him on the map for me: Cantankerous Liberal. He has probably heard that label before. It probably gives him a tingle.
With Against Football, Steve Almond makes a testy yet conflicted argument against the sport of football. Moreso, he rails against those that profit from it so hugely. Almond has even called for people to boycott the Super Bowl. I'm for it, tho I feel a similar conflict.
Till this year, 2008 was the last Super Bowl that I watched. I've skipped them because the games rarely match the hype, and the halftime spectacles only oppress me. For instance, this latest Super Bowl, 2016.
I can't specify when I turned into a fogie but the name Coldplay has managed to propel little recognition for me. I know they exist and are popular. I didn't realize that group members were completely faceless. While goddamn fireworks kept exploding with martial authority the group comes on to elevated fake excitement. As much as the lead singer jumps around with every shtick in the book, and the invited claque that surrounded the stage pretends to be skyjacked by rock gods, the performance could not have been blander.
I gave up on The Super Bowl before Beyoncé danced on the political rampart, but I heard tell. I remain leery of political statements dressed like that, pop music and pretty, but I'll grant it was a statement, one not from Cheetos(r). I imagine the NFL allowed it as a sop to their constitutional delegates.
And I just don't ever want to hear a discussion about which commercial is the best. Can't talk, got this hook in my mouth… The game itself seems so incidental to the marketing monstrosity that surrounds it. Graceful plays? Not too many. We saw savage hits a-plenty. The game wasn't so much sport as goaded animosity.
So Steve Almond's book concerns the attractions of football versus the heartless plutocracy of the NFL and its barbaric game. The attractions consist of the athleticism displayed in games, the Manichean battles between your good team against their evil one, the sense of community that watching the games gives. As much as Almond deplores the violence, the racism, the sexism, and the greed inherent, yes inherent, in the sport, the game nonetheless attracts him.
To watch football, we ignore, forget, don't care that life-changing injuries occur regularly. To watch football, we support the egregious diversion of tax dollars from public services to rich and greedy owners. To watch football, we consent to the racism and sexism that has always gone with the game.
Almond notes the gladiatorial nature of football. All sports require the athlete to give up something physically but football's demands go beyond aches and pains. To play football gives you an outrageously high chance of developing Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). Other physical traumas regularly occur. And then we have the painkillers and performance enhancers that inevitably diminish a player's life. The lives of football players average twenty years shorter than the life expectancy of other men. How is OSHA not involved?
Bill Belichick, and I am sure many other coaches, have described players who are “quick to heal”. Simple bullshit. The phrase really means willing to risk further injury. It gives a tantalizing image of players floating above the physical world. We know they don't do that but we ignore the collateral damage that occurs in “playing” the game. It is that mindlessness that stirs Almond to write this book. Only recently have former football plyers begun saying they wouldn't let their children play the game.
Beyond that, if Almond even needed to go beyond that, he decries the capitalism gone awry of the NFL. Municipalities push tax money towards rich team owners for stadiums that profit almost entirely the owners. The opposite of socialism, this is welfare for the One Percent.
And as intellectually astute as Almond is about all this, he admits that the game still draws him. The rivalries, the spectacle, the military mechanics, and of course the seeming physical impossibilities that occur all pull him in. I admit the same.
Then, too, the lurid appeal of the violence. I once saw Earl Campbell break thru the line and take on a defensive back. Campbell probably outweighed the db by fifty pounds and was driving full speed. The collision resembled a bull goring a matador: the db fell and Campbell drove on. I don't love such collisions and yet it amazes me to witness.
Football features such crazy machismo. Hitting a quarterback blindside proves your toughness? And the one cheering the person who made the hit somehow proves his toughness?
Football presents a perfect demonstration of Reaganomic trickle down. Teams get tax concessions, use public funds to pay for stadiums, the profits for which go to the owners, and the voting public can't seem to change that. Almond notes what I didn't know, that the NFL somehow exists as a non-profit (not the individual teams, tho). When did we consent to this, and why?
My thesis here is the unexamined. Or maybe how we can so easily separate our moral point blank from such viciousness as conveyed by the NFL Industrial Complex. We are co-conspirators to all of this, a fact we conveniently ignore.
Erin got a second book by Almond that fits in here. Titled Letters From People Who Hate Me, it works as an addenda to Against Football. It shows the complaining public taking issue without thought.
Letters consists of emails from outraged readers of The Boston Globe and of Salon.com in reaction to pieces published by Almond. The level of discourse, accent on coarse, of these critics can only be described as reprehensible. The thoughtless exaggeration, the blind reckoning of insult, the contemptuously debased sexual sneer of these angry people, is familiar and disheartening. It is the same sad conservative anger that Donald Trump has saddled onto, enraged talking points of the coming immolation.
“What's the matter… upset that she [Condoleeza Rice] has bigger balls than you?” snarls one correspondent, Almond deflates the intended insult by accepting it in his reply: “But I want you to consider how it would feel if you were the one whose balls were smaller than our female Secretary of State.” Elsewhere, Almond is taken to task for having a large vagina, which he turns around in a similar way. The wretched implication of the purported insult is obvious. The lowly cast of these aspersions is thoughtless and sad.
Almond cannot help eventually making thoughtful replies to the uncontested rage of these people. They only know that their anger exists, no how or why. The initial essays that inspired these rants, included in the book, state their cases in reasonable dialectic. The responses represent the half mind, involved only in the telling reply not the embrace of a new or, really, any idea. Sad and unexamined.