Against Football (16 page)

Football has been a boon for the military. But the military has been a boon for football, too. Over the past dozen years, as Americans have sought a distraction from the moral incoherence of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the game itself has served as a loyal and dramatically satisfying proxy.

After all, the wars initiated by the Bush administration—scrubbed of any actual carnage by military censors—wound up looking less like warfare on television than some early-generation Atari game, or shapeless documentary. The disingenuous political justifications for the Iraq war, in particular, and the abject incompetence of both occupations, left many Americans with a kind of unrequited combat zeal. We wanted to cheer for the troops, but could find little authentic reason to. Football provided a morally acceptable and gratifying outlet for these patriotic energies, a clearly defined contest of will, a side to root for and against, a clear result, with no unsightly corpses.

Which is why the recent revelation that football can and does cause brain damage has cast such a long shadow.

The struggle playing out in living rooms across the country is that of a civilian leisure class that has created, for its own entertainment, a caste of warriors too big and strong and fast to play a child's game without grievously injuring one another. The very rules that govern our perceptions of them might well be applied to soldiers: Those who exhibit impulsive savagery on the field are heroes. Those who do so off the field are classified as criminals.

The civilian and the fan participate in the same system. We off-load the mortal burdens of combat, mostly to young men from the underclass, whom we send off to battle with hosannas and largely ignore when they return home disfigured in body or mind.

It is a paradoxical dynamic. After all, part of what it means to be a football fan is that we have a sophisticated appreciation for the game, and a deep respect for the players who compete at the highest level. The most rabid fans recognize, in a way others don't, the miraculous gifts of courage and grace that athletes summon in the face of danger. You would think that such reverence would make us more concerned about the fate of such men.

But it turns out that our adulation for football players (for all athletes, really) is highly conditional. As soon as they no longer excel on the field, they become expendable. It is this same mindset that allows us, as a nation, to go to war under false pretenses and suffer so little distress at the resulting human ruin.

No single episode speaks to this culture of collusion more pointedly than the life and death of Pat Tillman, an idealistic NFL star who enlisted in the Army following the terrorist attacks of 2001. The military turned Tillman into a recruiting tool, while the sports media canonized him as a soldier saint who had forsaken a lucrative contract to serve his country. Here at last was a figure who embodied the psychic kinship between football and war. And though few paused to wonder why he was the only player to enlist in the “War on Terror,” no one doubted that he had taken manly virtue to the max.

The reality was more muddled. Tillman was an unusually thoughtful athlete in search of a deeper purpose. He had signed up to fight terrorism. Like thousands of other soldiers, he wound up in Iraq instead, where he quickly grew disillusioned. In his private journal, he fretted that he would be “called upon to take part in something I see no clear purpose for … I believe we have little or no justification other than our imperial whim.” He hated the crass effort to market him as a jock G.I. Joe and confided to a friend that he feared if he were killed the Army would parade his body in the street.

By 2004, Tillman had been redeployed to Afghanistan. That April, he was killed in what military officials described as a firefight near the Pakistan border. He was awarded the Silver Star, a medal reserved for soldiers who exhibit “gallantry in action against an enemy of the United States.” ESPN broadcast his memorial service live. His former team, the Phoenix Cardinals, erected a Pat Tillman Freedom Plaza outside its stadium. Even in death, Tillman's identity was
being carefully constructed. He became a square-jawed alpha martyr to the cause of freedom.

In fact, according to the Army's own subsequent investigation, Tillman had been killed by his own side, shot three times by comrades who, in the bedlam of an ill-advised mission, mistook him for an enemy fighter. The last soldier to see him alive was instructed not to reveal how Tillman had been killed. His uniform and body armor were burned, as was the notebook in which he recorded his thoughts about his tour in Afghanistan. An officer who knew Tillman had been a victim of friendly fire warned President Bush not to mention him. Military officials actually ordered members of his platoon to lie to his family during the memorial, and waited weeks to tell them the truth.

The irony is that Tillman—had he lived, had his journal not been torched—might well have become the most famous critic of the War on Terror. According to his mother, he had arranged a meeting with Noam Chomsky, one of the few public intellectuals to question American militarism and intervention.

Here's how Tillman's father put it:

They blew up their poster boy.

It's easy enough to see the duplicity of the military in these machinations. But suppose Pat Tillman had survived, returned to play in the NFL, and wound up with brain damage at age fifty. Would we fans see him as a victim of friendly fire? Would we acknowledge our role in his demise? Or would we construct our own personal cover-ups?

And what to make of the strange case of Rashard Mendenhall? NFL fans will remember Mendenhall as a former All-Pro running back for the Pittsburgh Steelers who abruptly left the game at age twenty-six. He, too, passed up on a multimillion dollar contract. But they're not about to erect a Rashard Mendenhall Freedom Plaza outside Heinz Stadium. He's more likely to be written off as a quitter, or a heretic.

Why? Because he refused to follow the code of conduct that governs how a football player, particularly an African-American one, should behave. When the military killed Osama Bin Laden in 2011, Mendenhall was the only player in the league to publicly question the cheering mobs. “What kind of person celebrates death?” he tweeted. “I believe in God. I believe we're ALL his children. And I believe HE is the ONE and ONLY judge.”

That same year, Mendenhall again infuriated fans and pundits by voicing support for his fellow running back, Adrian Peterson, who had compared the NFL to “modern-day slavery.” Peterson was trying to make a simple point: owners reaped billions of dollars on the backs of their players, yet refused to share financial information with them. He quickly apologized for the comments. But Mendenhall was again, to quote his Internet critics, “uppity.”

“[Peterson] is correct in his analogy of this game,” he tweeted. “Anyone with knowledge of the slave trade and the NFL could say that these two parallel each other.”

Mendenhall played football for seventeen years. He knew the rules: shut up and play the game and collect your dough.
But he knew he was being used, and used up. So he committed the ultimate sin: he deserted.

Another way of putting it would be that he insisted on being judged by the content of his character.

Maybe it makes sense to think of football players as human sacrifices. Maybe that's what we're up to. That would certainly help explain why so many athletes and fans place their faith in Jesus Christ. He was a human sacrifice, too.

For two thousand years, Christians have looked upon the ravaged body of Christ as proof of his devotion to a greater cause. This image was obsessively represented in art (take a
look at Rembrandt's
Passion Series
), in religious pageants, and upon the crucifixes that signified the place of worship in the home. Maybe it makes sense to think of television as the new domestic altar, around which we congregate to view images of young men bloodied and broken in service to that highest American cause: victory.

After all, sacrificial rituals don't have to involve throwing virgins into volcanoes or cutting the hearts out of warriors on the tops of temples. They can take subtler forms. Christian polemicists such as Tertullian considered the gladiators of Rome to be human sacrifices. Pagans took a more contemporary view. To them, the crucial difference was between certain death and the risk of death. The thrill of the arena resided in seeing how a man would behave in the face of danger.

Doesn't that sound like football?

Maybe the modern sacrificial impulse is a natural response to the stark Darwinist pressures of capitalism, the arena in which all of us, like it or not, must now compete. Maybe football represents the illusion of order imposed upon our chaotic aggression. Maybe watching games isn't just an evasion but a way of managing our panic about resource depletion, climate change, plague, the looming prospect that the serpent within our souls will doom the human experiment.

This would help explain our obsession with imagined dystopias that feature sacrificial sport, from
Rollerball
to
The Hunger Games.
Maybe this is why we spend more and more of our time consuming sacrificial entertainments, programs
in which the central allure is watching people damage each other and themselves.

Cultures don't practice human sacrifice simply out of cruelty, after all. Enacting these rituals creates a powerful bond among the sacrificing community. Maybe football has become the only spiritual adhesive strong enough to unite Americans, a modern temple in which neighbors join together during Sunday services to slake fierce and ancient longings once served by the Church.

Let me be clear about this: I believe our insatiable appetite for football is symptomatic of our imperial decadence, of our quiet desperation for shared dramas in an age of social and psychic atomization, for animal physicality in an era of digital abstraction, for binary thought in an age of moral fragmentation.

But I also believe that watching football indoctrinates Americans, that it actually
causes
us to be more bellicose and tolerant of cruelty, less empathic, less willing and able to engage with the struggles of an examined life.

Let me nominate myself as a prime example. I was opposed to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and troubled by the nationalist wrath that erupted from every cultural portal in the weeks and months after the terrorist attacks of 2001. I wrote a few articles to this effect, and did a lot of grumbling.

What I didn't do was enact my values, protest, pursue my version of social justice, though I had plenty of time to do so.
Instead, I spent countless hours tracking the Oakland Raiders and making my pathetic Sunday pilgrimages to the Good Times Emporium to watch the team's baroque implosions.

Let's compare this to what my father was up to in
his
early thirties. He organized students against the Vietnam War and was arrested for blocking the entrance to a nearby military base, actions that cost him dearly in his academic career. He supported and participated in the back-to-the-land movement. He worked on a book about communal living. And he did all this while working and helping to raise three small sons.

And yet, for all this, it's also true that my dad watched football and other sports, and that his ideals, like the rest of the Republic's, got somewhat sidetracked by the games. His fandom marked the beginning of my own. Those games drew me closer to my dad, but they also led me to see aggression as a form of pride rather than a symptom of grief.